Who is the greatest chess player of all time ?? Bobby Fischer ??

in my opinion philsbury was the most naturally talented player

I overstated the distance between Bolt and Owens, but the point remains the same. 

Here's a wonderful graphic depicting the distance between the various 100m Olympic champions.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/15/sports/olympics/usain-bolt-and-120-years-of-sprinting-history.html

That is a very interesting link. Thank you.   It was interesting to see that the Olympic champion from 2012 would not even have won the senior boys 100m race at my school back in the early 1970's!  Not that it is surprising.  The teenage girls at my small town swimming club would have beaten male swimmers at every event well into the 20th Century.

Does this mean anything for modern chess compared to previous eras?

Kasparov is the best chess player ever. At this point Magnus Carlsen is Tiger Woods and Garry Kasparov is Jack Nicklaus, MC may stay on top many years and be the best, or, well, let us watch games 9,10,11,12 of this match.....

Wow, so you are saying the boys at your school in the 1970s could have been Olympic champions at 100 m? Both in the 1970s and in 2012, even though athletes have been getting faster.

MOrphy - he wasn't an Irishman :)

A GM said about Fischer: Playing against him is like playing against chess itself!

Yeah. All the best players have a palpable desire to win against anyone. That sort of comment no longer makes as much sense in the computer age when anyone can fire up an engine and get a better opponent than any world champion.

I know there's a difference. That's why people can't even agree on most relevant criteria :D

I take it you like sprinters, but the analogy between chess players and athletes only holds for so long. As far as the laws of physics can tell us, 10 seconds in 1936 and 2016 represent the same amount of time. Same goes for distances. Chess ratings on the other hand are not absolutes, but more like a rubber ruler. I don't think you'll find too many people that still dispute rating inflation. The only remaining question is how much they inflated in the last 46 years. Again, you are free to believe that Korchnoi played roughly at the same strength from age 39 till age 76. You can also believe Karpov was the strongest at age 43, almost 10 years after losing the title. But both common sense and research tell us people don't reach their peak at 43 (Karpov) or 48 (Korchnoi). 

The day a chess engines becomes so strong that the best human on his best day can't even draw against it 10 out of 10 times, then we can safely say it's stronger that anybody who ever lived. That chess program/engine will be "competent" enough to issue a verdict on every chess player, past or present. Until then the jury is still out, even though some preliminary work has already been done using Rybka and Crafty. 

Yeah, only statisticians dispute the myth of rating inflation. 

Take a look at how many players were rated +2700 in 2010 and how many are rated +2700 now.  The number of +2700 players has been pretty stable for a while (35-45).

If you believe in rating inflation, chess players are getting weaker!

Here's a statistician's discussion of rating inflation. Warning, he uses math.

http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/AAAI/AAAI11/paper/view/3779

Here's a quote from the abstract:

A smooth correspondence is shown between statistical results and the century points on the Elo scale, and ratings are shown to have stayed quite constant over time. That is, there has been little or no `rating inflation'. 

And another:

https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~regan/chess/fidelity/data/IPR2600reg4yr.jpg

And another:

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-642-31866-5_20#page-1

Here's a quote from the abstract:

 Evidence that ratings have remained stable since the inception of the Elo system in the 1970’s is given in three forms: (1) by showing that the population of strong players fits a straightforward logistic-curve model without inflation, (2) by plotting players’ average error against the FIDE category of tournaments over time, and (3) by skill parameters from a model that employs computer analysis keeping a nearly constant relation to Elo rating across that time.

which statisticians? I guess not the same ones who determined that most players reach their peak at 25-30, not 43 or 48 as the current rating system would seem to indicate (for some high profile GMs at least). 

As far as your other argument... As of Nov 2016 I count 40 people in the world rated 2700 or higher (https://ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=men). In Nov 2010 there were 39 people (https://ratings.fide.com/toparc.phtml?cod=177). So I don't think you have an argument. Even if what you claimed were true, there's a difference between distribution (e.g. Gaussian, Poisson, binomial, random, etc) and maximum value. 

By the way in Nov 1970 there was only 1 player with a +2700 rating (vs 40 today), but I guess you don't like taking into account that data point.

Curious. 

I posted a follow-up with links to some sources ~45 minutes ago and you respond with this 20 minutes ago. In other words, I answered your question about my sources before you wrote this.

Kasparov, Karpov, Lasker, Fischer,  Tal

They are the best from all time.

Kaaparov dominated for so long, so for me it's him. 

It could be you were in such a rush to google links that you didn't even read my reply or give me a chance to respond.

Let's recap briefly.

I pointed out to your false analogy between running records and chess ratings. I heard crickets.

Then I pointed out to another false argument you advanced, i.e. the number of +2700 players over time. Not only this doesn't support your opinion, it actually disproves it. I would recommend the same medicine you prescribe often to others, i.e. 'do a little research', but it doesn't even take research to know that in the early 70's there was 1 +2700 rated player, in the 80's there were probably 2, in the 90's there were no more than 5, by year 2000 there were around 12, and now there are 40. Crickets again.

Then you posted a number of links in a hurry. I didn't get the chance to study all of them in depth yet, but I will make a short observation regarding the graph you copy pasted (2nd link). Why on earth showing data for players rated 2590-2610 when all world champions since Fischer were rated above 2700? No one claimed that all active players experience rating inflation. Also, no explanation is given for the 1970-1979 period, or the 2009-2013 period. In fact even the authors themselves admit they have no good explanation for the later.

In the more distant past I also pointed out to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history, which shows that computer analysis favor Fischer in all but the 15 year span category (although he is tied with Kasparov and Capablanca in the 5 and 10 year categories respectively). A more recent analysis based on computer aggregated precision scores confirms Fischer is slightly ahead of Kasparov but behind Carlsen. More crickets.

Perhaps Fischer fans aren't the only ones living in a dream world...

comparing Fischer with other chess players is hard due to his "short" career if he played at least 10 years more than would be possible. he was able to defeat karpov too but think he had to do lots of modifications in his style , like gary did, and he could not do that to lack of play after 1972. that is why he insisted on non counting draws, to get some warm up time during the match.

also think that by his behaviour ficher made aditional pressure on opponents and with his constant fight against organizers he got a hughe respect and authority between his chess opponents/coleagues that in cruical games and positions they trusted more to the fischer  than to their own mind. and maybe bobby was aware of that and is likely karpov knew that so modifications were mandatory but he did not have enough time to do so.

karpov won many tournaments too after 1975 and prove his strenght too.

kasparov career was much longer and is a petty that he did not play at least one decade more, he would be able to get title back for sure. also note that kasparov did not play against great shirov in 1998 and he had to, so who knows what it would be...

Ah, but he  most certainly was of Irish stock.  His great-grandfather was  Michael Murphy. 

Murphy had moved from Ireland to Madrid, Spain in 1753 and then onto Malaga where in custom with the local pronunciations he changed his name to Morphy.  Michael was the father of Diego who was the father of Alonzo who was the father of Paul Morphy.

kasparov taking an age to win a game against karpov rules him out for me.

3 way tie between Capa, Tal and The Fish, with The Fish winning on tie break.

not only that but kasparov laughed at fischer-spassky 1992 and then treated us to that shambles of a match against kramnik!

Thanks, Batgirl! I wasn't going to swing at that pitch.