Your favorite Russian player of all time

Mine would definitely be between Tal and Alehkine.

Too hard to choose one...

Mine is Natalia Pogonina

Karpov is boring, you hate Spassky's personality (though I've heard nothing but fine things about him), Alekhine's games are "too heavy".  I suppose the only chess player you like it yourself.

lol that was the worst troll atempt ever. I won´t even bother to give you an answer.

Tal was Latvian, not Russian. Nimzowitsch was also born in Riga. But since that was part of the Russian empire at the time of his birth, it's possible to include him.

not to mention there are so many great russian player from the past, we probably admired their combinations but never saw their games. I mean ofc everyone knows the nice combinations of Chigorin, but what about guys lilienthal (if he was russian) or levenfish or Ragozin.

It's not a troll attempt.  You'd get better if you'd lay aside your misconceptions of world champions and actually study their games.

Furthermore, you may be having an influence on beginner chess players such as children.  They'll use any excuse to not study, so they'll see your "criticism" of Alekhine and adopt it as their own position without thinking, just to get out of doing some hard work.

Hopefully they'll have some coach though that will say "where did you hear that nonsense" and the child will say somebody on chess.com.  Do you really want to be the person the coach refers to when he says "don't listen to fools on the internet"?

I dont really see the logic in what you just said.

Good choice :)

@Smyslovfan: didn't know that. Looking at his familyname I thought that he would be Russian. I thought that -witsch implies that his ancestors belonged to the Russian nobility.

I'm stunned no one has said Kasparov yet.

An interesting question would be who is your favorite non-world champion Russian player of all time?

Mine would be Nezhmetdinov.  He could potentially have been as famous as Tal had he been allowed to travel internationally.

-ov is the more common ending for Russian nobles, for example Sokolov, Romanov, and so on. The -witsch ending doesn't exist in Russian. There's no "w" in Russian. This is why "Nimzovich" is the proper transliteration from Cyrrilic. But Nimzowitsch was German-Jewish. There were quite a few Germans living in Russia from the time of Peter the Great. But that's going a bit far afield.

Nezhmetdinov's fame is based on his wins. Ever take a look at his losses?  

Kasparov may not be included because he was born in Baku. He's ethnically and politically Russian though, and people seem to lump all former Soviets together as Russians. Nezhmetdinov, for instance, was a Tatar from Kazakhstan.

Too many to chose just one......Chigorin and Spassky, both played the King's Gambit like gods among mortals, and their games have this mysterious quality I can't quite put my finger on.

I am aware of the ethic differences, but for the sake of a thread like this I think that including any Soviet player should be OK. 

Nezh had some horrendous losses, sure.  But since the question was "favorite" and not "best" my answer remains the same.

garry kasparov all the time!!!

@Smyslovfan: -witsch is showing my background. That is the Dutch version of -vich.

http://heraldry.sca.org/paul/zgrammar.html explains more about the -vich. As always on the internet: is this information reliable? I think so.

Search in the document for Most of us are familar with patronymics which end in "-vich." and you know the source of my thoughts. :-)

There were since the crusades a lot of Germans in the Baltic, but that is even further off-topic. :-)

Do you consider someone born in Moscow in '36 a Russian?

karpov