The best chess player ever

i dont think that were his exact same words.

anyway even if it was a joke, ever joke has a bit of truth in it.

maybe he was split inside. on the one hand he had to be loyal to his mentor on the other hand his moral probably said you cant tell this bull.

so he made this tiny little joke so he can better live with it.

at least thats my 2 cents.

anyway that still doesnt explain your double standard fablehaft.

as smyslov so well said to someone else in another thread: you cant have it both ways

I have never said anything about people from Fischer's era being biased while others aren't, everyone is biased in some way.

I am not biased: Steinitz is the best chess player ever. Not Kasparov, not Fisher, definitely Steinitz.

LoekBergman, Steinitz is not even close to being the best. The accomplishments of many players after and before him dwarf his reputation, and his games do not compare with theirs in the slightest. Carlsen - now he is the best!

I always found Steinitz enormously underappreciated. Won every match he played for well over 30 years, scored 7-0 without draws in a match against the player ranked #2, continued to score good results when he was 60 years old, always gave title matches to the strongest possible opponents and kept winning them, scored 25 wins in a row, etc.

@fabelhaft: Yes, we agree. Moreover, his play changed chess. Everyone is indebted to Steinitz. You have chess before and chess after Steinitz. Before it was wild and adventurous, after it was much more based on sound principles.

@Agent_of_Darkness:

Chessmetrics has recalibrated the rating of Steinitz. Take a look at that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Steinitz#The_beginning_of_Steinitz.27s_reign

If you go to the section about playing strength and style then can you see that Steinitz had a bigger advantage to number 2 than Fisher. If you know that Steinitz was playing too experimental, deliberately bringing himself into troubles against other top players to prove his principles, then can you only guess how good he was. Kasparov never brought himself into danger to prove he was right. Steinitz did. If he would have gone for the best move instead, he would have won even more.

Who else than the best chess player ever is capable of playing bad moves against the other top players of his time?

haha kasparov is best!

@LoekBergman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history

At no place does Steinitz come even close to the top five! Checkout rankings made by Warriors of the Mind too! And see who has the tendency to usually play computer approved moves!

@kwankaiee: lol, you are biased. ;-)

Kasparov.  Fischer was very good but overrated. I looked at one of his more famous games and he played badly in the opening and should have had a disadvantage.

The problem with the players of long ago is that if you could put them in today's environment they would do very poorly and who knows if they could ever catch up to the worlds best players?

@ponz111: your last argument can be applied to itself. The problem with current top players is that they are the future players of long ago. How would you know that they can catch up with the next generation of top players?

To take a look at the strength of a player you can only look at his relative strength in comparison to his contemporairies and what he has brought to chess.

Yes, he isn't at all as appreciated as he deserves to be. The mentioned "Warriors of the Mind" from 1989 is maybe the best example, with this mysterious top 45:

1. Kasparov
2. Karpov
3. Fischer
4. Botvinnik 
5. Capablanca
6. Lasker
7. Korchnoi
8. Spassky
9. Smyslov
10. Petrosian
11. Morphy
12. Polugaevsky
13. Geller
14. Tal
15. Stein
16. Keres
17. Bronstein
18. Alekhine
19. Sokolov
20. Boleslavsky
21. Portisch
22. Reshevsky
23. Yusupov
24. Kholmov
25. Averbakh
26. Furman
27. Belyavsky
28. Timman
29. Larsen
30. Taimanov
31. Vaganian
32. Kotov
33. Flohr
34. Ljubojevic
35. Najdorf
36. Szabo
37. Gligoric
38. Fine
39. Huebner
40. Andersson
41. Seirawan
42. Euwe
43. Hort
44. Rubinstein
45. Mecking

Steinitz? A bit further down on the list :-)

he played badly in the opening??

I havent seen anyone refuting his openings

well anyway i stick to the GMs who voted for Fischer!!!

as Ponz said GMs got to have the knowledge.

@Agent_of_Darkness: It is all about perception. People do not call Steinitz the best player ever, because they only look at results. Although his results are actually much better then normally believed (like fabelhaft showed for instance, nobody having 25 wins in a row), my main point to say that Steinitz is the best player ever is his contribution to chess.

Matching with computer moves does not say everything. Chess style has changed over the years and one of the main reasons that Capablanca has a great result on that list is his style. You can have different points of view to define why somebody is the best chess player ever.

My point of view is that Steinitz has done most for chess developing positional chess. That is why I consider him best. I think that Kasparov is currently the most brilliant player ever, but that does not imply automatically that he is the best chess player ever and Karpov the strongest (120 tournaments won), yet not the best either imho.

Is this a serious question?? It has to be Kasparov.

I think of greatness in terms of looking at players in the context of their era.

To me, achievements (not potential) trump all. That's why I consider Fischer to be way overrated in terms of such lists. He should be in the Top 10, but probably not the Top 5 in my opinion.

I think it should be decided on the basis of who was the best swimmer. Fischer has gotta take it. I don't remember seeing any photos of other chess players under water. Tetsuo, do you have my back?

I'm not convinced that photo says anything about Fischer's swimming capacity, and anyway he was just under water 1970-72.

We should go more by the opinions of GM's, and Nigel Short said:

"Anybody who has seen Garry Kasparov by the swimming pool will know he is extremely hairy"

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1993-09-03/news/1993246095_1_garry-kasparov-chess-championship-times-chess

This can only be taken as an admission that seeing him by the swimming pool was something quite common, so he should have been swimming a lot.