Who Is The Greatest Chess Player That Has Ever Lived ???

https://www.chess.com/member/highflyingknowledge Is correct 

Ok guys and gals, this is my first post here (but hopefully not the last...).

How about we call this issue a draw, shall we? Or unsolved (like chess itself 😉), eh?

Personally i rank Bobby Fischer as the greatest, but as always and as have been shown here, cases can be made both for and against ranking people that way. So i don't think this issue is going to be reaching any conclusive (=constructive) ending any time soon.

p.s. thank you for bearing through this modest beginning of mine 😀.

Alkhin

This is a quite old post but, I've come with an informed opinion, and personally I put Morphy as the utmost talented player to have ever lived, although if he at his peak went against Magnus he would probably lose, I put him at the top. Because in his era he had access to the same info as his peers (basically nothing) and was easily 200-300 points ahead of the best of the best, which would be like if Magnus was 3100 while Fabiano was 2800. I don't really know if given the current info and a year to study he would end up at 3100 elo but he would definitely become a world champion contender.

Thanks again for all of the posts.

 The reality is that like many sports, The game improves systematically because the next person has the benefit of all the advances before him
That is why swimmers continue to break world records.

And why Carlsen is the best ( for now)

Thanks for the posts ( ie: most of them  lol ).

Carlsen is the best, and others maybe more talented, but the greatest? That's easy, Fischer. 

The greatest person who was a chess player?

Benjamin Franklin?

Albert Einstein?

     Napoleon?

Plausible. He did bathe the world in blood, but on the plus side (at least from my point of view) he did sell the Louisiana Purchase.

     Not to mention he brought the French Revolution's ideal of equality and liberty to western Germany, Italy and Spain. Even though he was defeated monarchs in those areas could never get rid of the people's demands for equality under the law, religious freedom, free universal public education, democratic elections (or at least a constitutional monarchy) and so on. And when he ran Spain his government granted these rights to all Spanish colonials, sparking civic struggles in South America that became independence movements throughout the continent.

     Remember that many of the wars he fought were initiated by the other European powers that wished to get rid of everything the French revolution started and return to absolutism. The changes he wrought in military science were the world-wide standard for 100 years--until technological advances in weaponry made all old systems obsolete.

     He freed the French academies of science (he was a member--elected before he became a politician because of the groundbreaking archeological work he supervised during his expedition to Egypt), architecture, art, music and literature from government control and gave them financial stability and independence.

     He wrote a legal code and established a judicial system that serves as a model (or has continued to be used in former French colonies including Louisiana) for a great % of the world--certainly more than the English legal system used in the US.

     A reasonable amount of positive accomplishments for someone whose career as a politician and statesman lasted about fifteen years.

Sultan chad Jobava , nf5 may as well be called the jobava knight square.

Thanks for the posts and the info.

   ---   Interesting.

Napoleon is a cheater,  he cheated against one of the earliest chess engines its chess.com games 1-7 or something Napoleon against automaton. its really hard to tell since EVERY single player has a + and a big - but I think Tal is the #1,2 Nakamura, 3, Daniel naroditsky 

     The famous Mechanical Turk that Napoleon played in 1809 was not a chess engine. It was a large elaborate machine which had a statue of a Turk move the pieces. The secret of the machine was that there was a man inside. The owner of the machine found a professional chess player willing to take a percentage of the substantial sums the "amazing thinking machine" made in exchange for spending hours at a time uncomfortably crammed inside the device, and remaining anonymous.

     Napoleon was interested to see if it really was a mechanical device so he broke the rules by moving first (the Turk always had white) to see if it could respond. It did. Then he made an illegal move to see if the machine would know what he did. The Turk put the piece back and waited for Napoleon to move. This time Napoleon tried to see if the Turk would notice that he made two legal moves simultaneously. The Turk just knocked all the pieces off the board.

     Satisfied that this wasn't actually an unthinking machine but rather just a trick, Napoleon played a game vs the Turk and resigned after 18 moves, hardly surprising as the hidden operator was a strong enough player to have given Philidor a good battle while the Emperor was a notoriously wild player.

morphy.