Morphy the Terrible

I don't of Morphy as any sort of immutable chess god, I think he was the best player in his time and we don't know how well he would do today.

But I really hate it when people criticism him for his openings, smyslovfan.

It's not because opening theory at the time was bad either, it's because his opponents were jokes, and Morphy played whatever he wanted! I see this in so many games, people see a move and assume that since Morphy played it he thought it was the best move. Like the OP, do you really think Morphy didn't consider Bxe6? He knew his opponent was a joke, like most of his opponents, and played a flashier/quicker move that he saw was fine.

Look at this game. Normally, when people see this game, they think "Aha, Morphy sucked." But to think that Morphy actually thought this was a good opening was a joke. He just knew he could play whatever he wanted. I entered this into my list of memorized Morphy games as "Morphy plays garbage opening and shows off."

No

Xman, Morphy wasn't Lasker, he strove to play the best chess regardless of his opponent. 

You're right, Morphy was the best player in the world from around 1850 until he gave up chess. I disagree strongly with those who think chess hasn't progressed much since 1850, or just as bad, think that only the openings have changed since 1850 and it would only take a couple months to catch up with today's best players. 

Both are wrong.

Morphy did make many losing moves that weren't caught by his opponents. This isn't because Morphy was giving his opponents a chance, or he was bored. He made mistakes. If his opponents had punished him for his mistakes, he would have improved. The first player capable of doing that was Steinitz, and Morphy refused to play him.

We'll never know how good Morphy could have been. The historical Morphy was well ahead of his peers and would be master strength (~2350) today. But any master today would take one look at Morphy's games, go into closed positions and try to beat him. Grandmasters could challenge him directly in open and semi-open games and still expect to win.

It would take a strong player to beat Morphy, but Morphy had real weaknesses that could be exploited that have absolutely nothing to do with opening theory.

You're right, I explained that wrong, I agree with much of what you've said smyslov fan.

Let me try to summarize my post with this statement that perhaps we can agree on. Morphy played bad openings because he could and no one punished him. If strong players had been around to challenge him to play better, then he would stop playing dubious openings, recognizing the openings were dubious by either study or punishment by opponent. If you can agree with me on that, perhaps we can also agree that had he been challenged more, he would have been more precise with his attacks such as in the OPs game, going for Bxe6 instead of the Rxe6 which he thought was fine and looked nicer.

What I  disagree with is people claiming that his opening, middlegame, or endgame chess was the best chess he could have ever played when he simply never studied like modern chess players do and never had the competition that would drive him to study or improve.

Thirdly, I hope we can also agree that had Morphy had opponents strong enough to punish his mistakes, he would quickly, quickly, learn his errors and be ready and willing to improve in his opening, middlegame, and endgame by what he learned from these strong opponents. His learning ability and focus would allow him to learn from the errors that he definitely had and improve his chess for the next time he faced those strong opponents.

I don't care whether Morphy was 2000 or 2500, I just think these things are true about him and respect him for that.

Xman, do you agree that we can only judge Morphy's chess based on the moves he actually made?

By the way. Until just this last week some bozo who hated Morphy had hacked into Chess.com's Morphy Games and put in a bunch of games that were not the famous Morphy but someone else. It has now been fixed but be careful where you get all of those "bad" games. There are a lot of people who will do anything to slander someone else even falsify games. 

It is hard to think of other available information, but, when information is limited, it is a good idea to be aware of that limitation and not be too confident about what would happen a couple months after Morphy climbed out of the DeLorean.

With regard to openings, my own guess is that Morphy tried to show that his superiority did not lie in opening knowledge and, sometimes, deliberately imitated the opening play of others. Also, I suspect that, at times, he may have allowed himsel to be influenced by the temptation to play flashy crowd-pleasing stuff.

At the time, chess learning as we know it was in its infancy.  I'm no Morphy expert, but I find it more plausible that there was just very little knowledge of openings in general.  Chess books weren't being printed far and wide.  What he would have learned, he would have done from periodicals, which I imagine were less robust in America than they were in France at the time.  The rules as we know them weren't even finalized until about 100-150 years before Morphy.  On other threads, people talk about Fischer going it alone, but I think Morphy was even lonelier, with fewer giants of chess to look back on for lessons.  Morphy played like we do in our chess childhood because humanity was a child at chess in his time.  But he was a brilliant child who contributed lessons that we still go through as beginners.

Guys, I think you're missing something important about mid-nineteenth century chess.  Before tournaments, before titles, before ratings, before clocks, stronger players gave material odds in order to give the weaker player a sporting chance.  In the off-hand and blindfold games are where you see Morphy play all the gambits that people seem to think he preferred.  But if you look at his official games (from the 1857 NYCC and in his matches) you find very few gambits when the contest was still in doubt (to Morphy).  A Boden-Kieseritsky Gambit vs Lichtenhein (who he had beaten in the first game with black in 19 moves and was later to beat in a match at Knight odds), a couple a King's Gambits against Lowenthal, who he had beaten several times, all the way back to 1850 when Paul was not yet 13, no gambits against Harrwitz, who had showed in three previous games that Morphy could not just blow him off the board, and one against Andersen--an Evan's Gambit which Morphy lost in 72 moves, after which Morphy said something to the effect that Andersen had proven what Morphy had suspected for some time, that white did not have enough for the pawn.  If Morphy truly believed that gambits were the best lines, he would have played them against the best--he didn't.  And if he thought the Evan's was unsound, I'm sure he knew that the Philidor line was unsound, too, but he's doing the honorable thing at the time, giving a weaker player a chance to get in the game.  That was the chess of the day, and why I feel it is foolish to compare games played for entertainment with games played later, under what we would now call professional conditions.  And back in those days, a player like Karpov or Carlsen wouldn't have games published, regardless of the precision, because the public then (as now) wanted sacrifices--brilliancies--so everybody "played to the gallery."  And don't forget one critical fact--Morphy did NOT retire in 1859--he retired in 1852, when he gave away his chess sets (except one) and all his books--he claimed they couldn't teach him anything.  From 1852 to 1857 he played almost no chess, and no games against anybody who could challenge him.  From age 14 to 20 he was retired.  He came out of retirement in 1857, played all that would play him for two years, then retired again, because there was something going on in the US that was a bit more important than chess.  To sacrifice those critical years and to still reach the heights he did--I won't say he was the strongest player ever, and I won't say he was the best player, but I will say I think he was the most talented player of all time.  To go as far as he did with such little effort--yeah, I think he was the most talented ever.

^That too.  Honor was a big part of the romantic period of chess, players were expected to offer up material and accept gambits.  That's why the "Immortal Game" looks like a match between two 1200-1400 players in today's terms.

Smyslov Fan. According to your reasoning here is one reason Sir Issac Newton wasn't a genius. As we know, in this day and age, anybody with a degree in physics can solve problems in calculus and mechanics better than Newton could so surely they are all as brilliant as Newton was. All chess players, however good, can see better moves only because they stand on the shoulders of the giants that came before them. By the way Smyslov was also one of those giants, and he also would have trouble against the top players today. Why don' t you badmouth him for a while?

No, Nilocra...

Just as Morphy was a genius who was the best player of his age, so Newton was a genius who was the greatest physicist of his age. 

But, just as Newton said, if today's GMs see farther, it's because they stand on the shoulders of giants. 

Today's physicists see much farther than Newton did. That is obvious. I don't know why it's not obvious that today's chess players see farther than Morphy did.

SmyslovFan. My apologies. It seems as if we are in agreement. I mistook another blog that derided Morphy because most good players today would probably beat him. When they referred to your post, I made the mistake of thinking that post was yours. 

As far as I can tell, there has not been much difficulty with the perception that chess has progressed since Morphy's day. The disagreement seems to be mainly about what would happen if Morphy somehow played in the present - a silly thing to vigorously debate, but people seem to enjoy discussing it anyway.

"Kasparov, in his monumental series My Great Predecessors, claimed the old lions were ginormous patzers in comparison to today's top players. He intimated that a current master-strength player might be able to take down a world championship contender if transported back a couple hundred years. Of course such comparisons can't be made, and a player's strength should be judged for his own time. It's not out of the realm of possibility that if we transported Morphy in his prime to our time, gave him a database and books spanning the last 50 years ..., and gave him access to a good psychiatrist, he could be kicking Topalov's, Anand's, Carlsen's, and yes, Kasparov's collected butts within a few years! And if not that, then at least playing competitively within the group." - IM Cyrus Lakdawala (2011)

If I remember correctly, it was specifically recorded that Morphy had spent some time with Staunton's book about the 1851 tournament. It strikes me as a good guess that Morphy had some exposure to writings by Philidor, Staunton, and Bilguer. Of course, that wasn't anything like the sort of thing that is readily available today.

By modern standards the "Immortal Game" is very odd.  Nevertheless, no present day player under 1400 (or, to be precise, even a lot stronger than 1400) would ever think up the creative plan or find the clever tactics in the "Immortal Game".

Any 1400 player that believes they would have the slightest chance against Keiseritsky, Morphy, Andersen, Staunton, St. Amant, La Bourdonnais and those other old players (if they had a time machine to arrange a match) is simply deluded.  Those players of old had enormous tactical ability and raw chess vision.  They lacked the knowledge that comes with a century or three of progress, but even without that they were still objectively stronger than most modern day amateurs.

Where did anyone call "someone who is not new to the game and proved many times he can play at a certain level" an amateur ?  

Who did you have in mind?

kindaspongy

Paul's uncle Ernest was strong enough to be Eugene Rousseau's second during the match for the American championship in 1845 (Paul never played EM at odds).  His father also played and the Morphy family was wealthy, so I think it's safe to say that any books that were worth reading were owned by the Morphys or by Rousseau and that Paul had access to them, even if he didn't own them outright himself.  I feel the same about periodicals; if they were worth reading, they found their way to New Orleans and Paul's eager eyes.  I can't prove this, can't back this up factually in any way, but considering the chess culture there I feel confident in stating that anything in chess that was worth reading at the time was read by Paul.

modestandpolite, I didn't mean to say that the 1200-1400 player would easily be able to win, only that the way chess was played in that time resembles what we today would call an amateur game.  I have no doubt that these men had a genius which would easily overpower current amateurs, and if they faced modern masters, their intelligence and vision would at least keep them in the game.  My point is that chess learning at the time was in a completely different place, and specifically, we shouldn't judge prior chess players by current standards because they introduced a host of brilliance to the game, and probably would have contributed even more if given the modern advantages available to precocious titled players.

kindaspongey, I agree that there was something available in terms of books, and yes, what was available would likely have been read by Morphy.  But he didn't have the advantage of the vast database of recorded play that has led to the books and other materials that the 20th century have given us.  Let alone it all being available for free, or at least easily downloadable from the internet.  The great human chess computer had just seen fewer games to his time, and had put in fewer hours of analysis, and had conversed about the implications of positions less than it has now.  And we hadn't yet begun collaborating with artificial intelligences and calculators.  So my response to the OP is that Morphy wasn't playing terrible chess- he was simply playing a more primitive game to which we should not condescend, given its importance to an intellectual heritage.