Steinitz vs Morphy

I made a posting the other day in which I put a game that I transcribed from a written game score.  In the game score Black's 12 move was written 12...Nbc6 because there was a Knight on e7 that was also eying c6 and the author was trying to avoid ambiguity.  But the Knight on e7 was pinned, so I immediately decided that writing Nbc6 was unnecessary and Nc6 would have been perfectly fine. The ambiguity that the author was trying to avoid stemmed only from his own perspective and what seemed ambiguous to him wasn't really so when more closely examined.

This gets my vote for most illiterate post of the month.

DuuuuhhhhHHHhhhhh.....

Yereslov's response was: "He didn't have a title when he fought against Lasker or Zukertort?

You learn something new everyday..."

He then went on about this willful misinterpretation of pronouns for several posts. It was clear which "he" batgirl meant. Yereslov is a master troll who knows how to milk the slightest ambiguity. 

Master troll or illiterate bumpkin? You decide!

Never ascribe to malice, etc.

Steinitz was a boxer?

I have lost complete track of what we are arguing about now.

Such is the way of chess.com forum posts that exceed a few pages...

I think it's curious that you mention Steinitz "holding onto his WC title until his 50s" since he didn't win the official title until he was 49.

There was no "official" title until the formation of FIDE.

So he never held onto his title until his fifties then.

FIDE wasn't created until 1923 and had no say in the title.  Steinitz-Zuckertort was a World Championship match because they said it was, and was held in 1886, after Morphy's death, because anybody claiming to be WC while Morphy lived would be laughed out of chess.  Steinitz could claim to be WC as much as he wanted, but with Morphy alive no one would respect his claim.  Morphy hadn't played publically for over 20 years and the world still recognized him as the best.  Morphy never, in public nor in private, claimed to be WC nor gave a damn about "the title."  And while Morphy didn't claim to be WC, the world did, and looked on him as the best until he died--the world, not Morphy.

Yes. Before chess engines came into use, chess was a creative game.

I agree, the fatal hour of this ancient game is approaching. In its modern form this game will soon die a drawing death, the inevitable victory of certainty and mechanization will leave its stamp on the fate of chess

Just wondering : do you consider that Topalov was the WC in 2005 ?

This is wrong. The world views the first official world champion as Wilhelm Steinitz. There was no official title, no way to confer that title, and no method to contest the title before Steinitz. This isn't an American view, or a Russian view, books written in just about every language state clearly that Steinitz was the first official world champion. There's some dispute about when exactly he became the official world champion, but there is no dispute that he is the first, and that Kasparov was the thirteenth world champion. Yes, Steinitz created the title, yes everyone knew Morphy was the best player in the 1850s. But Morphy was never officially the world champion.

FIDE didn't create the title, they only helped to codify the way it was run. Before 1948, the title was the personal domain of the owner. That person could set up matches and play the highest bidder, or even avoid someone if he wanted to. Steinitz, to his credit, didn't really avoid anyone if they had the money to play, but Lasker avoided Rubinstein and Nimzowitsch while Alekhine avoided Capablanca. When Alekhine died while holding the title, FIDE stepped in to run a match-play tournament to determine the next champion. 

To suggest that there was no world championship because FIDE wasn't in control is just wrong. The only confusion over who actually held the world title was caused by a rift between FIDE and Kasparov. The FIDE tournaments for world champion that made champions of Kasimdzanov, Khalifman, Anand, and Topalov had little resonance with chess players. The best player in the world was Kasparov, and he didn't lose the title of World Champion until he lost a match for the title, in 2000.

The match-play champion is an unbroken line dating back to 1948. Most chess players at the time accepted that Kasparov was the legitimate world champion, and his title was lost when Kramnik defeated him in a match. Kramnik then lost his title to Anand, who has lost it to Carlsen.

The FIDE world champions from 1993-2005 won tournaments (Karpov won a consolation match), some of them quite strong tournaments. But those tournaments had no real credibity because the world champions themselves didn't even participate and because the world chess championship is traditionally decided by matches. 

We'll never know for sure whether Morphy could have beaten Steinitz if he had returned to chess in the 1870s. We do know that Steinitz was playing even better chess than Morphy ever did, and that Steinitz was the first official world champion and created a method for others to claim that title in match play.

Aren't you just a ray of sunshine?  Thanks for cheering me up!

Steinitz gave us 9. Nh3 in the two knights defence.

At the rate computers are going with the endgame tablebases, it is possible to calculate how long it will be before chess is solved. The current figure is ~225 years. 

Lasker 1922.

It was obviously not true, as we can see it today.