Fischer's own thoughts on GMs competing across history.

I recently came across a collection of Fischer quotes that was compiled into an article in the first issue of Chessworld magazine. It covers "the ten greatest masters in history", detailing Fischer's thoughts on each of them. But what really struck me was his comment on Paul Morphy:

A popularly held theory about Paul Morphy is that if he returned to the chess world today and played our best contemporary players, he would come out the loser. Nothing is further from the truth. In a set match, Morphy would beat anybody alive today.

He goes on to talk about Morphy being the best-read player of his time. He believes Morphy to perhaps be the most accurate player who ever lived. He made moves in minutes without blundering, while his opponents would often take hours.

In a way, it almost feels as if Fischer is talking about himself. We discuss Fischer a lot in these forums and quite often it comes down to him vs modern players. As Naka said, "Fischer would most certainly lose to all of us". It would seem Fischer held his predecessors in much higher regard than Naka does. But Fischer himself believed the past still had a fighting chance with the future. I think it's safe to say that no one has ever been as obsessed with chess as Fischer was. And thankfully his obsession lent him true ingenuity. His own praise of Morphy's ingenuity seems to have reflected heavily on his game.

Anyway I thought it would be interesting to let the grandmaster weigh in on his own strength as a chess player in modern times. If a 29-year-old Fischer were here, I think he'd say he had a fighting chance of taking down the chess greats of today. After all, he, like Morphy, was inventive. And getting today's GM's off the books early on would give him a good advantage.

And here's the article if anyone wants to read through it: http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/fischer4.html

Thank you for bringing up this topic.    Many like to rightfully think we have all kinds of advantages over past chess players, ie; more accurate openings as a result of more games being hotly contested and run thru computer analysis, as well as more definite facts about all kinds of positions, including gambits and endings that have been churned thru computer analysis and tested against the highest grandmasters in practice.

I disagree when you said at end "And getting today's GM's off the books early on would give him a good advantage."    Fischer was known for studying in detail certain openings and springing them on opponents, ie; Exchange variation of the Ruy Lopez.    That after losing to Fischer in what had been considered a decent line, now all of a sudden people were thinking were untenable !     So, rather than get topnotch players out of their opening book early, I believe Fischer would hunker down and study all recent top level games and find flaws or sharp variations to spring on his opponents.    That is more his style.    He was a firm believer in his own resources and powers of innovation.  He would gladly enter positions that had chances for both sides, ie; poison pawn variation of the Najdorf Sicilian.    Who in today's world would engage Fischer in such combat ?

many strong players have made similar lists.  and I'm specifically thinking of kasparov.  what I don't remember is where kaspy agreed or disagreed with fischer's assesments.

kaspy versus fischer is so repetitive that I barely want to mention it  but I do think we should give WCC's lots of respect when they make these lists.

it would be interesting to see if anyone after kaspy did the same thing.

kramnik? carlsen? anand??

does anybody know?

I don't remember the exact source but I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Carlsen said that his dream game would be against Fischer in his prime.
Now, this is stretching my memory a bit more but I think that he also said he would give himself the better chances.

Nakamura's somewhat cocky comments about former world champions have been refuted before. Just remember the Ultimate Blitz Challenge in Saint Louis, where he ended up with a negative score against Kasparov even though Naka himself won the event, and the fact that Kasparov ended in 3th place, not 4th.
The funny thing is that prior to the start of the event Nakamura was interviewed by Maurice Ashley, and he said that it would be interesting to see how Garry would fare against the young guard, implying that "not so good" was to be expected.

Chess is highly complex and has great depth, and thus, it evolves through time like science does. So it's not that Nakamura's comments are without their reasoning, it may just be that the difference in the playing strength of players from different time is not as large as it may seem.
That being said, it may not be such a small gap as Fischer thought. Although very controversial for measuring the absolute playing strength of a chess player, the CAPS system developed here on chess.com is quite telling, and it revealed that Morphy is far from being the most accurate player to ever lived, already by Fischer's time.

By the way that Fischer article is pure gold.

If Nakamuras generation of chess players was as strong as he implied, Anand could not possibly have stayed as successful as he was for so long.

Instead, even when he must have already been past his prime biologically due to age, he was able to compete with the younger generation at the very top for an amzingly long time.

He only seemed visibly weaker than Carlsen, which is about the same as he appeared to when compared to Kasparov.

So I can't see much of a  difference in ability between Kasparov's generation and the current one. It would probably be the same with Fischers generation of players.

While it's certainly true that the game as such evolves and we have more accurate theory available to learn today than in earlier decades, that does not necessarily need to translate into the players performance at the board.

"Lasker ... didn't understand positional chess." - another Fischer quote from around the same time as his Morphy comments.

Extended discussions of Morphy have been written in books by GM Franco, GM Beim, GM Ward, GM Marin, GM Bo Hansen, GM McDonald, Garry Kasparov (with Dmitry Plisetsky), and GM Gormally. Anyone see any of them express the view that we should accept Fischer's conclusion about Morphy? There seems to be general agreement that Morphy was, as GM Fine put it, one of the giants of chess history, but that is a long way from saying that he was better than anyone playing today.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/who-was-the-best-world-chess-champion-in-history

"... Morphy became to millions ... the greatest chess master of all time. But if we examine Morphy's record and games critically, we cannot justify such extravaganza. And we are compelled to speak of it as the Morphy myth. ... [Of the 55 tournament and match games, few] can by any stretch be called brilliant. ... He could combine as well as anybody, but he also knew under what circumstances combinations were possible - and in that respect he was twenty years ahead of his time. ... [Morphy's] real abilities were hardly able to be tested. ... We do not see sustained masterpieces; rather flashes of genius. The titanic struggles of the kind we see today [Morphy] could not produce because he lacked the opposition. ... Anderssen could attack brilliantly but had an inadequate understanding of its positional basis. Morphy knew not only how to attack but also when - and that is why he won. ... Even if the myth has been destroyed, Morphy remains one of the giants of chess history. ..." - GM Reuben Fine

It is perhaps worthwhile to keep in mind that, in 1858, the chess world was so amazingly primitive that players still thought tournaments were a pretty neat idea.

Well I think that the current generation of elite players might be as strong as suggested by Nakamura, and that the fact that Vishy and Kramnik are able to stay at the top proves that both are indeed exceptional and unique players, world champions. But I don't see how two exceptions can nullify an argument about a general condition of two whole generations of players.

I am also unable to fathom how is it that a game can evolve through time, acquire more accurate theory to learn about, and that at the same time no proof or demonstration of this growth can be found in the games of the masters of those particular epochs where that new knowledge was grasped.
There is not an abstract, immaterial chess entity existing apart from the recorded games; what we know of the development of chess is what can we can learn precisely from the games of the different masters through time. So any improvement in chess theory is therefore mirrored in the current master chess games.
I do agree that such strength deficit might not be as big as some might assume, but it surely exists.
Imagine if we were to pit Ruy López with Spassky or Philidor with Carlsen. The disparity of strength would be evident. Close in the time gap and the strength gap will reduce as well.

Well yes indeed.

The thing is, CAPS doesn't take into consideration if it is a modern or romantic player, it doesn't consider whether it had access to opening books or what were the conditions in which they played. CAPS doesn't measure raw talent, or the upbringing of the different champions, or the public preferences.
All of that is irrelevant for CAPS, because the only thing that CAPS does is compare the moves of a player to those of a top chess engine, and throw an accuracy percentage.

CAPS reflects precisely the general improvement over time due to all of those factors, and specifically on that, it is accurate. So it might wound the sensitivity of some fans of the late champions, but that doesn't make it fair to call CAPS "unfair".

And sure, it means a lot that Fischer was very fond of Morphy's play, and of course he could become a top GM nowadays. But to say that he is the most accurate player ever to have lived is a bit of a hyperbole.

Nakamura has a huge +score vs Anand.

Well, the facts that the world's population growth yields a larger population to draw on and recent discoveries in the field of genetics that show that human evolution is proceeding at a slow but predictable rate...would necessarily lead to the predictable conclusion that chess masters are improving on average every generation.

When people compare chess players of the past with today, they often act as if they think the player won't take advantage of any of today's knowledge - as if if they're limited to past information.  Who knows what Morphy, Capablanca, Alexhine, Fischer would gain from exposure to today's knowledge?  When Fischer played Spassky in 1992, Seirawan said the remarkable thing about Bobby is that he knew where "it hurts" and he was able to refute some new stuff Spassky played not with something out of the past but something new.

It's just impractical because chess is different. Today's chess players are better the way today's athletes are better due to training, diet, funding, etc. No one holds that against past competitors, but it's still the truth that they weren't as good.