The question we asked our readers was: Who are the most intersting chess players in history, focusing on style, rather than just strength? Who do you count as your favourites? We listed a number of candidates: Paul Morphy, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Gukesh Dommaraju, R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Alireza Firouzja.
This is the list we got from the feedback of our readers:
| 01. Fischer 02. Carlsen 03. Kasparov 04. Aljechine 05. Karpov 06. Tal 07. Capablanca 08. Keres 09. Spassky 10. Polgar 11. Smyslov |
12. Rubinstein 13. Petrosian 14. Morphy 15. Lasker 16. Kramnik 17. Korchnoi 18. Botvinnik 19. Topalov 20. Shirov 21. Anderssen 22. Anand |
23. Steinitz 24. Bronstein 25. Timman 26. Nezhmetdinov 27. Ivanchuk 28. Casablanca 29. Zukertort 30. Vachier-Lagrave 31. Tartakower 32. Svidler 33. Rapport |
34. Planinc 35. Niemann 36. Miles 37. Lasker 38. Hou Yifan 39. Geller 40. Firouzja 41. Euwe 42. Chigorin 43. Boleslavsky 44. Bohatirchuk |
How does that compare with what AI thinks?
Ed Schröder, the Dutch software developer, used his program Best of Chess, which we described in an earlier report, to extract the most spectacular games from chess history, evaluating them by three features:
- King Attack
- Material Sacrifice
- Length of the game (the smaller the number of moves in a game the higher the bonus).
Ed ran his algorithms on the many million of high-quality games contained in Mega Database, and it identified the players it considered most attractive. This is the top 50 list generated by Best of Chess:
| 01. Morphy 02. Nimzowitsch 03. Anderssen 04. Reti 05. Zukertort 06. Steinitz 07. Chigorin 08. Lasker 09. Alekhine 10. Euwe 11. Tarrasch 12. Rubinstein 13. Tal |
14. Fischer 15. Shirov 16. Spassky 17. Polgar 18. Capablanca 19. Kasparov 20. Wei 21. Bronstein 22. Geller 23. Anand 24. Botvinnik 25. Van Foreest 26. Keres |
27. Erigaisi 28. Reshevsky 29. Kramnik 30. Petrosian 31. Aronian 32. Ding 33. Gukesh 34. Keymer 35. Carlsen 36. Kortschnoj 37. Svidler 38. Topalov 39. Niemann |
40. Adams |
Here’s a page that lists the results with all the individual factors that contributed to the final evaluation. Here’s an explanation on how Best of Chess conducts its evaluation. And here you can directly compare the rankings of both groups:
|
Humans |
AI |
|
01. Fischer
02. Carlsen
03. Kasparov
04. Aljechine
05. Karpov
06. Tal
07. Capablanca
08. Keres
09. Spassky
10. Polgar
11. Smyslov
12. Rubinstein
13. Petrosian
14. Morphy
15. Lasker
16. Kramnik
17. Korchnoi
18. Botvinnik
19. Topalov
20. Shirov
21. Anderssen
22. Anand
23. Steinitz
24. Bronstein
25. Timman
26. Nezhmetdinov
27. Ivanchuk
28. Casablanca
29. Zukertort
30. Vachier-Lagrave
31. Tartakower
32. Svidler
33. Rapport
34. Planinc
35. Niemann
36. Miles
37. Lasker
38. Hou Yifan
39. Geller
40. Firouzja
41. Euwe
42. Chigorin
43. Boleslavsky
44. Bohatirchuk |
01. Morphy
02. Nimzowitsch
03. Anderssen
04. Reti
05. Zukertort
06. Steinitz
07. Chigorin
08. Lasker
09. Alekhine
10. Euwe
11. Tarrasch
12. Rubinstein
13. Tal
14. Fischer
15. Shirov
16. Spassky
17. Polgar
18. Capablanca
19. Kasparov
20. Wei
21. Bronstein
22. Geller
23. Anand
24. Botvinnik
25. Van Foreest
26. Keres
27. Erigaisi
28. Reshevsky
29. Kramnik
30. Petrosian
31. Aronian
32. Ding
33. Gukesh
34. Keymer
35. Carlsen
36. Kortschnoj
37. Svidler
38. Topalov
39. Niemann
40. Adams
41. Praggnanandhaa
42. Giri
43. Firouzja
44. Gelfand |
Ed created a page with games of four top scorers. The values for each of the three criteria are quoted in the games, which you can replay it on the page. “BTW, the first Morphy game is hilarious, I did not know it,” Ed writes.
Finally, here’s an animation of a list, based solely on their ratings, that was independantly generated by Chess.com five years ago:
