Weakest World Champion ?

Agree

Comparing ratings between generations is completely useless. Ratings are based on the players in the pool, the amount of players in it, inflation, the way ratings are calculated, and a host of other things besides playing strength. Ratings can only differentiate between players within the same pool at exactly the same time.

But even then ratings are not a good method of judging who is the best because they don't objectively evaluate solely playing strength. Ratings are in big part based on a players consistent performance. Someone could be 2950 strength in normal play, but if he was known to have periodic terrible migraines a couple of times a year that reduced his playing strength to 2550, his rating would settle somewhere far lower than his actual strength. Similarly if someone is a really strong player, but nerves, stress, or tiredness, stop them from playing well in all of their tournaments, ratings will never accurately show their true strength.

A similar analogy would be baseball regular season records. It's often not the best team that has the best record, but a good team with a very low number of injuries that takes the top spot. That's why baseball doesn't use regular season records to determine who wins the championship. They take the teams that have been shown to be pretty good by being filtered out through the regular season process, then have them play each other to determine who's actually the best.

Similarly with chess, tournaments and rating can be used to reasonably determine who the really good players are, but you need matches to determine whos the best, since purely statistical means like ratings or records aren't good enough. Thats why Carlsen just having the top rating wasn't a good enough reason to say he was best in the world, it was when he beat Anand the world champion (and number 3 rated at the time) that he showed he really was the best.

You shouldn't have waiting so long! :D

GM Rustam Kasimdzanov.

"Thats why Carlsen just having the top rating wasn't a good enough reason to say he was best in the world"

Oh yes it is, especially when it's by such a large margin. "Purely statistical means" like ratings kind of are good enough. If Carlsen is beating players of all different styles all year, that means that he isn't just coincidentally encountering outliers (strong players that he happens to win a lot against) in order to get such good results. And a high rating indicates this, since wins, rather literally, equal a higher number.

Sure, match play is some other means of measuring strength, but given the above, ratings are extremely effective and tell most, if not all of the story about their playing strength overall. One could say, it also depends on how important the game is, that being able to adjust to the importance of a situation, win when it matters most, is a big skill. It is. Are we to say that the only important games a person plays is a few games every two years in a world championship match? For a true chess professional, every game is pretty darn important, throughout the whole year.

"Similarly if someone is a really strong player, but nerves, stress, or tiredness, stop them from playing well in all of their tournaments, ratings will never accurately show their true strength."

What is true strength? We can't deal with hypotheticals forever. We could say, well, some guy is the best at positional play, and if he was good at everything else he would be the best. Ok. But he isn't. So who cares. If you want to be a good chess player, or good at anything, you have to take your strengths and weaknesses and allow yourself to get the job done. A person who is knowledgeable about tactics but not about getting enough sleep does not seem to know much about playing a good game of chess, because knowledge merely sitting in your head doesn't produce good games on its own. A savvy player will be able to turn their knowledge into actually good play by making sure their mind can work things out over the board, when the time is ticking, etc.

Let's put it this way: If knowledge equaled a good chess player, we might as well crown a chess book as world champion. Chess books, they're wonderful, but no I don't think they're very good players. They don't even know how to play chess.

I had to give up over the board chess after meeting the requirement to be a USCF master. This was in 1973.  This was  because of a severe health problem.

However, playing correspondence chess where one has 3 days on average just to make one move was enough to overcome the severe health problem I had and I went on to do far better than just master in that type of chess.

I cannot and have not played blitz. [again because of health problems]

So what type of chess one can do will depend on many factors.

Now regarding over the board world champions--it is mainly a correlation with the number of chess players, what information is available, the opportunity to play other great players which makes the difference.

 Thus Morphy [for example] lived in a time when the population of the world was much smaller than now. Also there were very few chess books and no internet.  Thus he was weak in the sense that if he was transported [alive] to this year there would be about 3000 players who could beat him in a match.

Thus the most recent world champs [over the board] tend to be stronger than those before. Carlsen is the strongest.  The weakest world champ would probably be the very first world champ--who ever that may be. 

Why werent you awarded the title if you met the requirements ? 

He was. Accoring to the USCF website, he is as life master.

http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?10352797

(edit: I just realized the life master may be for correspondence play)

I see life member there , not life master .  

You mean I have to read ALL the words? I am offended.

(walks away sheepishly)

It wasn't that large of a margin. It was maybe a 40-50 point or so point margin at the time. Also it's really easy to look back in time and declare something after it was already proven to be so. Hindsight is not especially impressive. If Carlsen had lost his match to Anand convincingly or even by a bit, I would say Anand was simply better than him, Carlsen just happened to be more consistent, do better against weaker players, was in better health, players blundered more against him, or a host of other possible variables to get his rating advantage. However after convincingly outplaying Anand in a 1 on 1 match, there's no doubt that he's the superior player. Hence it's easy for you to say it was obvious months/years in advance of the match, when in reality it wasn't obvious at all.

And ratings are very effective at figuring out if someones in a certain category of players (the more players included the more effective it's statistical calculations are), but not effective at figuring out whos the best between 2 or 5 people in the same group. Is Topalov better than Grischuk or Aronian? Is he better than kramnik? Personally I'd say he was better or equal to Grischuk, but not as good overall as Kramnik or Aronian. I'd base this on his chess career and the matches he's played against the other players mentioned. However he holds a rating higher than any of them at the moment. So are ratings undisputed chess fact? Hardly, too many other variables go into rating to make them truly objective/perfect. However they are a good estimation, and good at separating certain skill categories of players into groups.

Strawman argument, I'm not saying the best player has read the most books or anything near to that. The better player is the one who's in the same general rating group or above of the other player, who in a one on one match of a decent number of games wins more games than he loses. If there's a generational gap like in this thread, there's no real way to tell who the better player was, but we can figure out what players accomplished more with their chess based on their lifetime chess achievements. This can then be used to argue who the better player was for fun

All these people saying Rustam and Topalov are mistaken. We are talking about world champions, not FIDE champions. They can't be the weakest champions because they weren't the champions. You gotta take out the former world champion in a one on one match, or you're just a pretender to the title. Except in the case of Karpov since the champ at the time ran away from the challenge.

So technically Steinitz and Botvinnik weren't WCCs by your definition. :P

I'm not familiar with the history of Steinitz. Did he just declare himself world champion without ever challenging whoever was world champion at the time?

He was the first official "world champion". Morphy was considered the best during the brief period in which he played, but until Steinitz there was no official championship.

Nor Karpov for that matter as he never faced Fischer for the title.... lol

Yeah. I consider Ponomariov, Khalifman et al. lesser than the other WCCs, but more so because of the mass PCA defection than the format.