Disgusting Video

Ok, thought I had been banned lol

IIRC Karjakin was not even in the top 10 (or just barely) when he won the candidates. Gelfand was of course something like #15.

So sure, there's some luck involved when they went away from candidates matches and started playing a candidates tournament.

But still, Naka's audience is largely non-players. To say "I could have been world champ if it weren't for Carlsen*" is hugely misleading. The addendum is " *and about 10 other people"

Kasparov, Anand, Kramnik, Topolov, Aronian, Svidler, Caruana, So, Ivanchuk, Grischuk.

All of those people either have a plus score against him or were / are clearly better players. They also span a few decades of activity... so at which time exactly was Naka a serious world champ contender? Maybe you and I understand he wasn't, but his viewers probably don't.

llama I'm sorry to inform you Hikaru does stuff like this just for the laughs

Fischer has longevity issues, so he's hard to rate. His story is arguably the most compelling from a human drama perspective. Really amazing life, I think anyone will agree. But how to compare his chess legacy with other greats is debatable.

Carlsen hasn't retired yet, so it makes sense to me to put Kasparov ahead of him for now. Let Carlsen get 5+ title defenses and ~100 rating points ahead of #2 before we can cement him as clearly ahead of Kasparov.

Ok so you're saying Naka introduced chess to about 10 people... and then those people introduced chess to tons of new fans and made places like chess.com a lot of money.

Ok, so we agree

xQc > Naka

No one was laughing.

And when people disparage him in chat he bans them... even if they're subscribers... which actually happened during this very stream.

He's a prideful person... which isn't necessarily bad, but when I call him out on it he can't hide behind "it was just for laughs."

True I guess. Similar to the Ben Finegold incident... sometimes it's not funny.

I mean, it's not like you don't have a point... but I'm going to argue my side of it somewhat forcefully like that... you don't have to agree with me so fast

I side with the twitch chat 

What is Naka's "huge" impact on chess? Who has he brought to the game that xQc (et al) hasn't?

And look, I get it. He's one of the best chess players in all of human history. Put him up against past champs like, I don't know, Lasker, and he'll win thanks to the time period he was born in (and his own genius and hard work of course).

So he gets on his platform and uses the most favorable criteria possible to rank himself as high as possible... fine. That's perfectly reasonable.

But at the same time it's reasonable for me to come back and say, wait, that was some biased BS... here's the counter argument for why he's just a "theorist," or not even on the list at all.

"what is naka's huge impact on chess?"

flexing that when he was 10 years old he wasn't so good, only around 2200.

Haha yeah

I was interested in his opening ranking stuff, so I've seen a few hours of his videos... and yeah, he flexes like that a lot.

I will say that his videos (his and Levy's commentary) helped me to decide to exclude the grunfeld from my repertoire. So that gets a thumbs up from me.

There were certain move orders where I was allowing it... but now instead of that I decided to play a Nimzo / QID.

interesting, my opening principle is "stock up on theory in theoryless openings" which influenced me to switch from the Grunfeld to the Budapest, and recently I've been exploring the Czech Benoni.

This might be true. TBH I don't really follow his channel and have no idea who his target audience is.

I don't know why people dislike admitting this.

It doesn't mean they don't deserve fame, or aren't talented people... but as you said, this is the oldest trick in the book, and it works. It's worked for thousands of years. It's worked since time immemorial.

But suddenly it's not PC to point it out, so we have to pretend it doesn't exist? Why? I'm not saying they're bad people. I'm saying they leverage what every advertiser has leveraged since the stone age lol.

Picking an obscure opening, or little used sideline, then studying the heck out of it, can give you pretty good results, it's true.

...

To be honest, the list can't be taken seriously in my opinion. For instance Alekhine is rated in a second tier just below Capablanca and he is the one who defeated him, so at the very least he should be in the same tier. Carpov is in the second (undisputed number 1) tier, and Polgar is above some of the world champions  (don't get me wrong, I actually agree that she should be in the God tier, as she is the woman who has proven that girls could be on the same super GM level if they put their mind to it , even being in the top 10 and is a great ambassador of the game), but then more people deserve to be in that same tier.

Apart from that, I believe that instead of putting Nakamura on the list, some other great players of the past deserve it more, at least for the time being. Miguel Najdorf, Reshevsky and Gligoric (yes I know I am being a bit subjective for the last name but all of them were in the top 10 for decades even). Someone might think it is even too early for Caruana to be on the list, but his mentioning is justified as he is consistently over 2800 and had an even WC match with someone like Carlsen. Nakamura probably shouldn't be on the list with all due respect.