Paul Morphy's Rating>2638

You're right, I have no idea whether he would be 2600 strength, and that's my point. We have no evidence to suggest Morphy would be able to beat a 2600, just that he beat 2200s over and over. I think it's possible he would have quite a bit of trouble against someone who could calculate as well as he could.

This is in contrast to modern grandmasters who can very steamroll young players who calculate as well as they do with experience and strategy.

You may have no idea whether Morphy would be 2600 strength but I do! I see it in his games. Have you seen what he did blindfolded and at material odds?!

So beating weak players at blindfold is a strong test for 2600 level? Why could he not be 25, or 2400? You're so sure of 2600 based on wins vs noobs.

drink this

it might help with your problem

I have often wondered myself how would Morphy fare in the modern age. Would he be just an ordinary player like some ppl here would like us to believe or would he still dominate the chess world as he had done in his time?
Two extreme ends which I think we can easily remove one: since every fifth grader or so is fluent with Newton's laws, does that make every fifth grader a Newton? Surely not. By extension Morphy cannot simply be an 'ordinary player' in our age (or any age for that matter).

But how would Morphy fare? Well, there is in fact a precedent!!! A 'Morphy' did reappear across the chess world and just as suddenly disappear. I'm of course referring to the strange case of Mr. Sultan Khan from Punjab.

He doesn't read English, has no books, no formal training, doesn't play our version of chess.... he came in last in his first tournament in England. Yet within one year, with some coaching from well meaning local masters, he was playing with the best of them, able to beat Capablanca even. I don't know if Sultan Khan dominated Punjab in the same way Morphy dominated America prior to crossing the ocean, yet their chess paths are quite similar.

If Sultan Khan, just based on his chess genius, could overcome language barriers, training, theory, etc and still rank amongst the best in the world for his five active years, then surely Morphy could do the same if not better :)

Wow.

2100 at most?

Do you think people were retarded back then or something?

 

 

This is Morphy's immortal game. It's been discussed even after 150 years by Kasparov, Karpov and other GM's. Each of them providing their analysis.

 

Modern GM's might know more, but potentially they couldn't hold Morphy's jockstrap in a million years except maybe for Carlsen. It's like modern Physics graduate knows more than Newton, but we know who the GOAT is. Enough said.

You cannot compare different eras of chess and you cannot even start to compare ELO ratings.

 

An IM from today, if he travelled back in time, would obliterate all the top players  of the 19th century.

Bobby Fischer seemed to think quite highly of Morphy and he studied hundreds of his games:

http://www.chesshistory.com/winter/extra/fischer4.html

All of the claims that the big name masters of the past would only be 2200 or less is a lot of banana oil.

I think Ben Finegold's argument on this is pretty interesting, so I thought I would chime it in because I haven't seen it.

 

1: Paul Morphy played blindfold simuls against the best players in the world. Because that's what 2200 players normally do, right? Give blindfold simuls? Julian, you're a 2000 player. You give blindfold simuls all the time, right? "Oh yeah I just gave a blindfold simul last week." Yeah, see? That's normal 2000 - 2200 player behavior.

2: I'm a GM, and sometimes when I want to learn about tempo and activity I look at the games of Paul Morphy to learn about how to keep an initiative. Because normally I review the games of 2000, 21000, 2200 players to learn about chess, right?

The problem with these calculations is they assume Morphy would come to the 21st Century and use his 19th Century tools to play.  Can you imagine what he'd see in today's openings, databases, online and frequent play against high-rated players?  I don't think any of us can put a finger on it. So he still remains to be considered an all-time great.  Certainly Bobby Fischer had a greater ability to judge Morphy's ability than any of us on these boards and he said Morphy would have whipped any player of his time.

Simply false.

"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.

Your statement is by definition false, because my statement can't be false, regardless of the facts.

 

I didn't specific how many of the best players in the world. Top 10, top 100, top 1000? You literally cannot say my statement is false.

 

But I'll make it more specific for you. Sure, if you count "best in the world" as only the top 5 or 10, then I don't know of any blindfold simuls against them. But if I were top 100 in the world I would consider myself one of the best chess players in the world, and Paul Morphy played and beat the vast majority of those people in blindfold simuls.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry at such a claim. 

Morphy blindfond better any current GMs, a GM who is 2700 elo lost a piece, it was a one mover  blunder.Some of his attack were very complicated, he could calculate very accurate and precise; something Carlsen lacks, he loses or draw in winning attacks. Of course you fanboy Carlsen never played one game of Magnus but his accuracy is horrible; give Morphy same game he would win it with no problem.

You did not originally write, "one of the best chess players in the world". You wrote, "the best players in the world". If you continue, readers will soon notice whether or not you identify even one specific blindfold simul where Morphy played against the best players in the world. So far: not

There is an entire book about blindfold chess. Here are reviews:

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708233749/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review683.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20140708105442/http://www.chesscafe.com/text/review703.pdf

Morphy is not regarded as the best-ever blindfold player, and blindfold play is not seen as coinciding with ordinary over-the-board chess ability.

Wait, so this is an argument about nothing more than semantics?

 

"The best players in the world." Clearly doesn't imply that he has to play against the absolutely #2. Just a bunch of people recognized as some of the best players in the world.

 

I suppose you can make an argument that "some of the best" is not synonymous with "the best" but I don't really see it that way. If you want me to change my argument to be "Against some of the best players in the world." then fine, I concede.

 

Example: Paris 1858 blindfold simul against 8 European masters. Please correct me if they were just amateurs they pulled off the street.

In one account, Morphy's opponents were described as "eight of the best players of Paris". In view of this, it would seem to me to be misleading to write, "against some of the best players in the world", but I suppose misleading is an improvement over being simply false. By the way, I am not aware of any system that was in use for identifying European masters in 1858.