Could you beat Morphy if he gave you knight odds?

He wasn't actually blindfolded in the literal sense...he usually sat in a chair facing a wall with no chess board in front of him. If he was playing a "blindfold" simul, his opponents would be in another room with boards and pieces, and he wouldplay all the games in his head ! And usually win.

leiph18: "With your rating I think you should try playing blindfold, you may surprise yourself!"

   Every once in awhile, I recall playing chess while in a dream. The board and all the pieces are not abstract but exactly as I would see them while awake with opened eyes. No e4 or h7 or any such...the real board and real pieces.

   Could I do this while awake? I don't know. Maybe with a lot of practice. But I've never been interested in memorizing or visualizing at chess. I like to calculate. And that is plenty to deal with, all by itself. 

can you beat a dead horse

A sadonecroequiphiliac is someone with a perverse compulsion to beat dead horses.

greenfreeze wrote:

can you beat a dead horse

No

Morphy whooped that ass though.

What about pushing daisies?

Great question.

Based on GM Larry Kaufman who says he's around 2400 and the break-even point for N-odds is about 1800 with his students, I'd say that me, at 1840, would lose to Morphy and that feels right for me at the gut level: I'd give him a good game but would fail.

I don't have time to go through all the answers here to see if I'm duplicating an answer, but GM Larry Kaufman, famous for the study published long ago in USCF's Chess Life Magazine that proved the Q-R-B-N-P values are 9.75-5-3.25-3.25-1 and a Bishop Pair is a 0.5 P advantage (

https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-evaluation-of-material-imbalances-by-im-larry-kaufman

), made an interesting observation about Knight Odds that is at the bottom of this quora comment below that is from 2015 (

https://www.quora.com/In-chess-what-is-the-relationship-between-rating-difference-ELO-and-the-handicap-needed-for-an-even-game):

John Fernandez, 2133 FIDE

Answered Oct 11, 2015

There was a recent match between the computer Komodo and GM Petr Neuman, where the GM got 2-pawn odds. Human won with 4 points out of 6 games (+3 =2 -1). In the ChessBase article (Komodo 9 odds matches against GMs) there was a table showing various odds:

GM Larry Kaufman, though, points out an important thing about these Elo estimates:

[T]he Elo equivalent of a given handicap degrades as you go down the scale. A knight seems to be worth around a thousand points when the "weak" player is around IM level, but it drops as you go down. For example, I'm about 2400 and I've played tons of knight odds games with students, and I would put the break-even point (for untimed but reasonably quick games) with me at around 1800, so maybe a 600 value at this level. An 1800 can probably give knight odds to a 1400, a 1400 to an 1100, an 1100 to a 900, etc. This is pretty obviously the way it must work, because the weaker the players are, the more likely the weaker one is to blunder a piece or more. When you get down to the level of the average 8 year old player, knight odds is just a slight edge, maybe 50 points or so.

LOL

@MickinMD, thanks for sharing that info! I vaguely remember seeing it before, but had forgotten the details. Kaufman's comments make sense to me, and is in general agreement with what was said three years ago. An 1800 may not be able to beat Morphy at Knight odds in a match, but a 2000 should be able to.

Did someone say he had a shoe fetish? I might stand a chance. But otherwise, he'd destroy me.

More importantly, Germany 1 - 1 Sweden and lots of time left!

comfortably so.

We may be comfortably numb, but we play chess, not baseball. We not only can see what pitch is being thrown, we can judge whether the reaction was good with near absolute certainty.

we no fking mystical genius.

I would lose to stcokfish at knight odds because I am not a very comfortable positional player. I would give myself a high chance of winning, a medium chance of drawing and a low chance of losing given rook odds. I would give myself a 98% chance of winning given queen odds. 

Yes. If you are about 1600, you can beat Morphy every day.