What would be the rating of a top chess player in the late 1800s today

I played through it. Thanks. I do wish you had a way to use a viewer...I'm kinda lazy.  I think one person was accurate in saying that the one thing that Morphy had in abundance was tenacity.

I guess his tenacity helped him clobber his opponents

You guys are incredible.  Morphy?  Morphy?  You really believe in your heart, that Morphy could beat a present day 2400?  Any chess.com with a blitz rating above 1600 would easily give Morphy a serious challenge.  Morphy was the best player at a time everyone was an amatuer.  It's very dishonest to say Morphy could beat me with knight odds.  I bet Nakamura can't even beat me if he were to be a knight down.  You guys...

You must be really good. I'm sure Nakamura would crush me with queen odds.

I even think Naka could give Morphy a serious challenge.

My assertion that Morphy could give him Knight odds was called dishonest.  I guess that makes your Rook odds assertion criminal.

James Thompson had the same atttude... no one in the world could give him a knight.

Morphy rarely took over 5-minutes over a move. Look how he played. Better than any chess.com blitz player, most definetly.

That's not at all accurate- see Post #41.

Hard for me to see the post numbers as they are white in my white background ... can I change that ?  

All I know to do is to change your background. Until then you have to highlight the number with the cursor.

I wish the same would happen for some of the comments here.

He's either trolling (badly) or it's the result of the combination of an astonishing level or arrogance and ignorance.

Yeah I guess I have been severely underestimating them. I just though that they were only good tactically, not positionally. I find it hard to believe that someone like Morphy could beat a master if he played an opening that they didn't play back then like the Sicilian.

I can't see Anderssen being stronger than 2300 to be honest. Morphy was much stronger, but without access to any of today's materials, I can't see him becoming stronger than IM. Steinitz was revolutionary and would probably drag today's players out of opening theory early in the game. He seems like a likely GM.

However, Lasker, arguably the 19th century 's strongest player, just may well be 2700 strength in today's terms. He was truly universal with a wonderful understanding of psychology. Give him a database and he will have the best opening preparation of all time.

I find it hard to believe that people spend time wondering about such stuff 

Check out this article:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/132380754/Chess-Player-Analysis-by-Rybka-3-14ply

He used Rybka to evaluate lots of historical games. Towards the bottom is a list of ratings ranges; Steinitz, etc. are in the 2400s. The two best played games ever were Tal-Benko 1958 and Kasparov Deep Blue game 1. Capablanca made the least blunders. Anand is the best tactically. Lots of other good stuff, but very complicated.

Morphy was the pinnacle of Romanticism, and at the same time, it's death knell.  Great Romanticists such as Tschigorin, Tarrarch and Spielmann came later than Morphy (and benefited from him), but the more scientific approach had already shown itself to be superior. By Romanticist, I don't mean the misconstrued idea of willy-nilly attackers and clueless defenders, but players who saw chess first of all as an artform the highest expression of which was the combination. Reading Morphy's own words, one can see that what he considered the drudgery and endless shifting of pieces that closed games entailed deeply offended his aesthetic sense.  Morphy, and most Romanticists up to his time were dabblers in chess and felt that allowing chess to occupy and dominate one's time was somehow morally wrong and socially reprehensible.   Morphy only played what we might call serious chess for a bit over a year, when he has still quite young and with little practical experience against world-class players.

While Steinitz would postulate that combinations are only effective when one has gained certain advantages based on certain principals, Morphy, on the other hand, had no such developed principals and relied on intuition and creativity.  In fact, part of Steinitz' ideas were only possible because Morphy's intuition demonstrated the possibilities.  To compare even these two men (who were contemporaries) seems odd. To compare them against the same objective standard seems odder.  It seems that the measure doesn't so much indicate that Morphy himself was inferior to Steinitz, but that Romantic Chess is inferior to Scientific Chess. This is even more true when trying to compare players of old with players today.

I very much agree with the word "universal" to describe Lasker. He seemed equally at home in any kind of position. He could attack brilliantly. He could defend as tenaciously as anyone in history. He could play tidy-looking Tarrasch style chess. He could play strange chess in bizzare positions with material imbalances and weird pawn structures. Etc. Hans Kmoch one joked that Morphy perfected the combinative style, Steinitz the positional style, Tarrasch the methodical style, Capablanca the machine-like style, and Lasker perfected the styleless style.

JMB2010 wrote:

I can't see Anderssen being stronger than 2300 to be honest. Morphy was much stronger, but without access to any of today's materials, I can't see him becoming stronger than IM. Steinitz was revolutionary and would probably drag today's players out of opening theory early in the game. He seems like a likely GM.

However, Lasker, arguably the 19th century 's strongest player, just may well be 2700 strength in today's terms. He was truly universal with a wonderful understanding of psychology. Give him a database and he will have the best opening preparation of all time.

How much do you want to bet?  Because Nakamura would probably be willing to give you knight odds all day for the right stakes.

wha