morphy vs james thompson - Chess Forums - Page 2

trigs · 2010-06-16T06:22:42-07:00

recently came across the following text about paul morphy: "How good a chessplayer was Paul Morphy? Let’s look at a match he played against James Thompson, a man thought to be one of the top dozen Am

orangehonda

Jun 16, 2010

0

#21

trigs wrote:

i've read that thompson was considered in the top 10 of american players at the time.

I don't mean to insult the guy. Remember that the world over there were no professional players, and America was anything but a center of chess at the time. So how strong were America's top 10 in ~1850 ? How many of us could even name 3 :)

In my opinion Thompson would easily be under what today's standards would be an expert, I'm guessing around 1800.

Or to look at it a different way, lets say Morphy was low to mid GM strength. Morphy scored 71% in a knight odds match. Using the rating's statistics, 71% puts him at +160 to Thompson. Additionally, knight odds gives an 1800 player +600 (via Kaufman's analysis) So 1800+600+160 should roughly = Morphy and we get 2560, not an unreasonable estimate.

While if Morphy had been facing a weak expert we have 2000+160+ ~700 = ~2860 which is way too high of an estimate for Morphy... so actually, at least using this method, I wasn't too far off I'm even more convinced that Thompson would be a weak "A" player (USCF) by today's standards.

trigs

Jun 17, 2010

0

#22

not to mention that morphy did seem to be well ahead of pretty much everyone at the time.

buddy3

Jun 17, 2010

0

#23

I will check Batgirl out. thx