Whenever Finegold argued for Morphy being #1 I didn't agree with him, but over time the argument has grown on me.
The idea that some guy playing almost exclusively 1600 or below players was as good as an IM or weak GM, yeah, that's extremely impressive. I'm not aware of anyone who can claim they've done something like that.
The top players in Morphy's time were not 1600, that's just a typical Finegoldian joke.
Also, this is an old thread resurrected by a spambot.
Finegold never said the top players were 1600. By my estimation they were more like 2000, and Morphy was something like 2400-2500.
Someone becoming 400-500 elo rating points stronger than anyone else in the world even though they only played played in their spare time for a few years is an accomplishment no other player has matched.
Hikaru
Carlson behind Kasparov Fischer and Morphy
note that these are not the strongest chess players ever, just the greatest of all time
I wonder why nobody mentioned Philidor, who laid the foundation of positional chess when everybody followed the "Italian school" of Greco, Peano, Polerio and others with their crazy (and often unfounded) sacrifices.
I also wonder why nobody mentioned Steinitz, who started to think "scientifically" about chess and pretty much invented the way we think about chess.
And to all the people belittling Morphys achievements: you can only beat the people who are there and everybody has to be seen within his time. Was Isaac Newton a lesser physicist than Einstein because he knew nothing about relativity? Was Kepler second to Newton because he knew no calculus?
Phillidor? It's because we barely have any of his games on the record, we have less than 30, all of which may be compositions and not real games. Also laying the groundwork of positional chess? If you said endgames, I would agree with you.
Greatness doesn't necessarily correlate with 'first player to do x'.
I'm not belittling Morphy's career, I am pointing out a simple truth that it's nearly impossible to compare him to modern players as things have completely changed. I'm also going to point out that Morphy has no longevity, he got to the top, but he didn't prove he could stay there. He retired from chess at a very young age.
Philidor started to recognize the value of pawns and pawn formations - not only in the endgame but throughout all phases of the game. He coined the proverb of pawns being the soul of the game (in l'Analyse du jeu des Échecs). He did this in sharp contrast to the "Modenese school" and their sacrificial attacks. Look, for instance, at the Kings Gambits Lolli variation and compare to the opening philidor invented. This shows a different view of what chess strategy is all about.
From what we know about Philidors life he played a match against Stamma where Stamma always had White and a draw counted as a win for him - he still lost the match. GM Andrew Soltis estimated that Philidor was 200 Elo points higher rated than his opponents for about 50 years. Also the near-contemporary Henry Bird opined that Philidor was the best of his time.
Regarding Morphy: of course it is difficult to compare players of different times - for the same reasons why it is difficult to compare scientists of different times, which is why I used the comparison of Newton and Einstein. Also the "longevity argument" is bogus, IMHO: Fischer is regularly named the "greatest player ever" (and similar) and he also stopped playing immediately after winning the world championship.
The core question, IMHO is: why do we need to rank players of diffferent times at all? Again, using the comparison to physicists, is there a reason why we need to compare Newton (orArchimedes) to Einstein and rank them, regardless of how we do that?
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