Who was/is the best GM of all time

Good point Pashak1989 

Алехин

Relative dominance at the time is a factor; Morphy was tactically brilliant. How good would her have been with the decision and computers??  FIsher. Kasparov. Carlsen are the 3 others. 

I don't know

Hou Yifan.

I have to promote my colleague Mikhail Botvinnik for that honour. Unlike me, he did not cheat using psychic abilities.

Capablanca is the best of all time followed by Bobby Fisher.

Without discussing Nakamura and Anand as the best players ever, I do think Rashid Nezhmetdinov is rather overrated. He qualified for a few Soviet Championships and was never anywhere close to the top, but could score this type of result, and it is difficult to think of him in discussions including players like Kasparov, Lasker etc:

i was

fabelhaft:

While he beat many of the world's top players, he was never awarded the GM title even though he won 5 Russian Championships.

Chessgames.com

Nothing like that good ole classic question to trigger off chess players. All over again. And again. And again.

right

Best?

That's either Kasparov, who was +2800 rated longer than anyone in history and dominated chess from 1985 to 2000 or Magnus Carlsen, who has been +2800 longer than any active player today and posted the highest single rating in history. 

There's plenty of room to discuss who was the "greatest", but in terms of best, when discussing humans, there's only two to consider.

Nezhmetdinov may well be the best player never to have earned a GM title, but I agree with fabelhaft that he certainly does not belong in the conversation of best ever, or even the best player of the 1960s. He was brilliant. But he forced things too much. Players such as Averbakh just played solid chess against him and waited for him to throw a piece at them. Those solid players usually beat him rather prosaically.

Players such as Tal took up the challenge and battled him on his own terms. In those games, he created several masterpieces. 

Here's one such game: