Is Anand a better player than Fischer

weinstein

Bob or Harvey?

Fischer withdrew from competitive chess, for something like twenty years I'm thinking?  How can you have a rival, when you refuse to play?  I agree with the earlier poster, PaulGottlieb.  I could never put it into words nearly as well as he did, but his thoughts mirrored my own.  He was spot on.

Fischer.

Chess cannot be compared to science which is unlimited in scope. Chess has limitations and human players are beginning to touch those limits. Not only chess but other things like running a mile; the records get closer and closer, as less and less is gained by more and more effort. Mind enhancing drugs may improve human performance if they are discovered.

Computers which get faster and faster will improve purely due to computation speed but their games will get more and more meaningless to us; it will become an exercise in programming.

This should not surprise us as chess is a game with strict rules played on a limited board, but the arena for science is the whole universe.

The similarity I was trying to highlight was the cross generational comparison in which each contribution is based on a pre-existing body of work that the earlier participant helped to build.

As for chess' limitations, human players are nowhere near them.  Neither are computers.

Actually chess computers have gotten slower and slower (but also better and better).

My laptop houdini could beat the Deep Blue of old for example.

Yeah...it's called the "Forums."

I always wonder why people feel the need to say GM X was better than GM Y.

Fischer was a great, who would not have been great without those before him. I bet if you ask Anand he would say how much he learned from the study of Fischer's ideas and games.

What was that about: If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants?

The chess world has changed, the nature of chess itself has changed (eg. internet coverage, Houdini, Chessbase, sheer availability of knowledge - which Fischer hated incidentally), so it is pointless asking who is better. Even results as a basis is a wrong path because Fischer had his ghosts and would vanish from competition, notably after 1972.

Boy, that's a real swipe out of the blue at you, waffllemaster...

 The need you describe is a carry over from celebrity culture and has little to do with chess. It is hero worship and we all have tendency to lean in that direction.

I certainly would be totally unable in reality to distingush between one master and another as would the vast majority of players on this site. It reminds me of one ofmy favourite games as a kid: I'm the king of the castle and your the dirty rascal. Played as we climbed onto the next higher prominence.

In answer to the OP, no.

Next question?

i remember when this guy call me bobby fischer cuz my engine kept saying mate in 12 and i taught bobby was a soccer player. i say anand is better cuz i am also indian :P ?

@GlennBk

it reminds me of the style question. No one could play like Tal. Modern GM (eg. Kasparov) statements are no one can play like Tal at the elite level, defensive technique is too good. It still stands though. The intuitive, creative sacrificial games of Tal were amazing. ("Not sound? Sure -- work that out in post game analysis, but at the board with the clock ticking....") Botvinnik couldn't play that way, let alone Petrosian! They all had their strengths, their amazing creative impulses, which no others could hope to replicate.

 Excellent point.

I am losing the fool thread here. Who is a fool and who is not?

It depends on what you mean by slower. Computers are definitely faster. Engines may calculate less positions/second, I don't know, but if that's the case they're just spending more time on each position, so there not really slower.

It's so hard to compare chess players of different eras because we don't have an objective way of comparing them. It's pretty much pointless to try.

The most dominant players of all time, but not necessarily the best, were Morphy, Lasker, and Fischer (Kasparov?). This is a fact if we measure dominance by the differance in strength between the #1 and #2 players.

regarding browni3141's point: in 1972 Fischer was 2780 whilst Spassky came in at around 2690. After them were Korchnoi and Larsen at 2660!

There is always much talk in these threads of Fischer having the greatest distance ever to #2 but I think "distance to #2" is a strange way to measure greatness.

To begin with it's hard to assess the distance to #2. Why would Steinitz winning every single game he played in a period from 1873 to 1882 (including going +7 -0 =0 in a match against Chessmetrics #2) not count as a greater distance? Can it really be said to be a fact that Lasker and Fischer had a greater distance to #2?

Kasparov had year-long periods when he was 70-80 points ahead of Karpov, and World Champion. Should that count less than Fischer's being on average 50 points ahead of Spassky 1969-71, and not World Champion, to then, on one rating list before retiring, be 125 points ahead?

Is Topalov greater than Kramnik and Anand that won the classical World Championship and won matches against Topalov, just because Topalov had a greater distance to #2 on a couple of Elo lists? If Fischer had lost that match to Spassky 8.5-12.5 instead of winning it 12.5-8.5 his distance was still 125 points on that July rating list. Would he still have had the greatest distance ever to #2 even though he never won the World Championship, #2 had +7 head to head and just won a match against him?

As I see it distance on one or two rating lists can't be used to conclude much, it's results over decades that matter when discussing the greatest players ever.