The best chess player ever

I completely agree.

Fischer was the most talented in the world.He he had a good psychoterapist to deal with emotions and paranoia and to keep him playing and acess to the more modern anad techinical way of training that kasparov had, he  would be the best one.As he stopped earlier in his career, the most shinning carrer is lasker's and Kasparov's career.As Lasker really had not strong opponents and Kasparov was the one more far from the second placed player (Carlses is the second more distant from the second bests) He was the best of all time.Fischer would have been if he had a different life after his primer and Carlsen, Caruana ands Nakamura, as very focused players in their training, using engines to train and being youngs have a small chance of being even better thanKasparov in their carrer in the long standing.Also, there have a lot of goods opponents to learn with more money and glomours acess and more good tournments to play against the prodiges and the strong "oldies" that are form Kasps generation (Short, Polgar, Topalov, Krammik...).

Even other young super GM's can surpreend in the neext 5-10 yeras...

In 1975 Karpov would have spanked Fischer like a baby. And Fischer clearly knew it.

After all, he hadn't played competitivly in three years. And Anatoly was just beast. Can you really blame Fischer for running away?

If anyone isn't lazy enough than just type away nonsense maybe we can analyze some of their games. Say how do they fair against the KID? against a fairly strong player of their time? and maybe we can have Houdini rate their play. It might be interesting...

They already did that. Computer said Capablanca was the best, because he made th fewest blunders.

Of course, nobody liked that answer, and began a giant rant forum on chess.com explaining why the computer was wrong. Is up to 318 posts ATM, and still growing.

Well Capablanca It is! Just accept the fact folks! Thanks varelse1

But still very little people think of lasker, if you think of great people, people usually mention Capablanca or Morphy (or even Alekhin).

Yes its true it could be that they just dont know so much about chess, or it could be that people who mention Lasker just want to sound smart and knowledgeable because no1 else ever thinks of him.

yes he was a great player, but all people tend to forget him, no matter how long the ruled. Yes ofc he talked at chess as a fight and it all sounds cool. but to be honest fighting stuff doesnt fit, yes he was a figher on the board, but somehow all "Fighting talk seemed really fake"

no for me its not the quantity, for me its the quality.. for me fischer will always be the one.

Anyway Fischer didnt need a psychotherapist.

Stop reminding meh! =(  Thanks to him I may as well play 2.g4?? instead of 2.f4??  No use shooting the messenger, it was always unsound, he just really drove home the point.  Philidor thought it was a forced draw with best play but Fischer proved otherwise. 

Also, Rubinstein was the greatest due to his unmatched endgame technique.  In before "But he was never world champion!" Carlsen proves that the greatest player and world champion could be mutually exclusive (proving a flaw in the ranking system perhaps?)  Yes, I know Carlsen will be champ someday. 

boby fisher as he played without todays technology at higher level

what about adams he is good and also anand and carlson

No, please it is definitely Steinitz. All those players are extremely well, but none is as good as Steinitz was. He has the longest serie of wins (25) and has won a match from  Blackburn, who supposed to be the second best player in the world, with 7-0, see:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1007477.

Better than Fisher accomplished and much better then Kasparov did.

Of course, can you say that he did not have very good opponents, but how can you recognize the best chess player in the world and in history, than by the fact that there did not seem to be other good chess players?

It is an interesting question who is the best chess player of all time. Any answer seems very subjective since players of different ages either could not possibly play against each other or if they were contemporaries they may have peaked at a different time. The ELO system can only compare players who play against each other but meaningless when it comes to players of different ages.

However with engines an interesting new possibility came about: you can analyze the games of past masters move by move and measure the evaluation difference between the moves they actually made and the value of the 'optimal' move. Of course you can debate the choice of the engine, the depth of the analysis, the selection of the games to be analyzed etc. but you have to admit that this method can produce meaningful results and guarantees a certain level of objectivity.

This study is a serious attempt to perform such an analysis:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/132380754/Chess-Player-Analysis-by-Rybka-3-14ply .

Here are some findings of the study:

What strikes me most in this study, that it can reproduce correctly the 'playing style' of players purely based on measuring the complexity of the positions (how much the value of the position changes by depth) and the difference between the best of and the second best move.

Karpov and Kramnik comes out very positional, while Kasparov a very tactical player which is much the same that you would subjectively think about them.

As to the issue of best player it is worth mentioning that Capablanca and Fischer both made very accurate moves and blundered very rarely.

Is Anand really so much more tactical than everybody else?

harryz wrote:

LoekBergman wrote:

No, please it is definitely Steinitz. All those players are extremely well, but none is as good as Steinitz was. He has the longest serie of wins (25) and has won a match from  Blackburn, who supposed to be the second best player in the world, with 7-0, see:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chesscollection?cid=1007477.

Better than Fisher accomplished and much better then Kasparov did.

Of course, can you say that he did not have very good opponents, but how can you recognize the best chess player in the world and in history, than by the fact that there did not seem to be other good chess players?

capablanca was undefeated for 8 years.

Yes. But he played relativly few games during thst period. Due largely to World War One.

In terms of actual games played, both Tal and Kramnik have surpassed JRC's record.

.

I am not really convinced by the measurement of Rybka.

Yes, I believe that the current chess players are better than the chess players at the end of the nineteenth century objectively. One of the reasons is that they have learned from the earlier masters. Another reason that there are more competitors and more events to play. People can be more focused on being a chess player and they have much better training facilities and much more information at their disposal.

In the old days was that far more difficult. Euwe for instance still had his job as mathematics teacher while being world champion chess. I think that the people who, in times that it asked far more personal sacrifice to be a chess player, succeeded in having a career in chess, were the chess diamonds of their generation. A rating of 2438 for the chess giants of the nineteenth century is realistic and not realistic at the same time.

Let's pretend that chess engines like Rybka had opening books that were restricted to the opening theory of the start of the nineteenth century, because a lot of openings that were considered good at that time are now considered bad. How would the modern masters perform? Would they have less accurate moves (like the Gruenfeld for instance, which is an opening that not existed in those days)?

Similar to combinatory motives. The double bishop sacrifice of Lasker had to be played yet. Can you expect Rybka to find it for the very first time? Anyone will say yes, but is that really true?

The measurement of Rybka will favour the current masters in many ways. That Euwe and Steinitz are number 2 and 3 on complexity is very impressive.

What surprises me most is that Tal is not considered a very tactical player.

If you read the study carefully authors emphasize that they ignored the openings of the games which they deemed to have been played according to the prevailing theory of the given age.

You can say that Rybka is not perfect. But to dismiss the results completely on this basis is far fetched.

One indirect proof of the relevancy of the study for me is that it can correctly reproduce the playing styles of players solely based on objective measurements made upon Rybka evaluations.

@watcha: I am sorry, I do not dismiss the results completely. That was not my intention, but I do think that there is a serious flaw in measuring strength of play. Current players tend to have a more than justified advantage in rating then players playing longer time ago.

I think that the best way to use those results is to compare people within cohorts, not across cohorts.

Could you still explain how Tal is perceived as a positional player? That is imo not the expected outcome. I would expect that Tal would be a tactical player. The solitairy position of Anand surprises me too.

Is it correct that there is a big correlation between complexity of play and playing style?

Nope, Paul Morphy was better, if you study Bobby fischer style he literally "stole" , well... "USED" Paul Morphy moves. And he knows it. 

This is an impossible discussion, as the game has evolved so much over the years.  The only way to figure this out once and for all would be to take everyone listed in this thread to date, catch them all up on modern opening theory and computer analysis (which would take months, if not years), then have them all play in tournaments nonstop for a year, where they play each person 8 times minimum before getting scored for the round, and then tabulate the results.  Then you could get close to figuring out who the best of all time is.

Magnus