By virtue of my time-machine I am going to gather the eight greatest chess players ever in their prime. The tournament is structured as follows:
Ranked pairings each round (like the NCAA Basketball Tournament)
You beat your opponent when you win two games, ties do not count
If you lose in your round, you’re out of the tournament
Classic chess, no blitz, etc.
Kasparov, Fischer, Carlsen and Morphy MUST be in the tournament. You can choose the other four.
Here are my eight players ranked
Garry Kasparov
Bobby Fischer
Magnus Carlsen
Paul Morphy
Antoly Karpov
Jose Capablanca
Alexander Alekhine
Emanuel Lasker
Who wins the tournament?
Round 1 winners: Kasparov, Alekhine, Carlsen, Morphy
Alekhine outlasts Fischer in their games being just a bit better in the endgame as Fischer over-attacks.
Morphy and Karpov is thought to be the match of the tournament but Morphy wins easily by trapping Karpov with “mistakes”
Round 2 winners: Kasparov, Carlsen
Morphy just cannot win against Kasparov and modern theory. Perhaps if Morphy were alive today he would have had more of a chance.
Carlsen plays more consistently than Alekhine but ultimately his stronger play when playing defense than Alekhine give Carlsen the victory
Tournament winner: Kasparov
While Carlsen looked like the stronger player, Kasparov plays for the draw when behind and goes for the throat when ahead. His strategy pays off as he is the first to two wins and brags in the press conference later how this confirms he is the greatest ever.
Using your players (as I’m lazy), I would probably expect the finals to be Kasparov v Carlsen, and I suspect Carlsen pulls it off. I think Carlsen in his prime will have more chess knowledge than Kasparov in his prime, simply due to all the chess history to come before, and all the new ways he has of studying it and learning from it.
For your round one match-ups, Fisher wins and Karpov wins. There’s way too much of an information gap between those eras for Alekhine or Morphy to have any chance of winning.
They drew in 2020. IMO if it is a tournament based on wins not points that plays to Kasparov more than Carlsen.
I think Morphy’s style is perfect for beating Karpov but that is the outlier; Morphy would be hard-pressed to beat most modern players. I also think Alekhine’s attacking style (play for the win) and positional play would be perfect against Fischer who attacks opponent’s weaknesses. That’s why I said Fischer over-attacks … he is going after weaknesses that aren’t there. But there is no way he can beat a modern player like Carlsen.
I admit Magnus v Garry is a tough one. It can go either way, but my gut tugs me towards the Norweigian. But I just don’t see Morphy pulling it out in any possible way. That I just can’t see, but I’m not anywhere close to being a master level player. Someone like @glee would have a more nuanced and informed opinion than me.
Morphy may be the greatest natural player ever. I think the big question is can that ever outweigh the memorization of lines? And of course theory - Morphy hated the Sicilian Defense which is now the closest chess could ever get to a standard defense.
Well, there’s that, but also experience. Modern chess players just have so much ability to play many many games against as hard an opponent as they wish and learn from them, analyze games post-game with the help of chess engines, that I have to think that amount of sheer practice – and not just rote memorization – would be helpful. That era of chess is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. I suspect he would absolutely do well today, be a grandmaster, but there would be many grandmasters who could regularly outplay him. Who knows? Maybe one day we can develop an AI to analyze his database of games and create a reasonable AI facsimile of his play. (Though I suspect we have a paucity of data for such a thing to ever happen.)
Give him a couple years in the modern era to bone up on knowledge and study his opponents and maybe then he gets the edge.
And don’t forget that, not only can modern chess players analyze more games than Morphy ever could, those games they’re analyzing include Morphy’s own games. They know exactly the kinds of tricks and surprises he pulls.
Back in the day a guy named Jeff Sonas attempted to calculate ELO ratings back through time, adjusted for some biases. The last update to his website seems to be 2005, but it’s interesting to look at player peaks relative to other historical figures.
Morphy doesn’t even make the cut of the top players over time.
I think you have 8 world-class players there.
However they cover over 100 years, which makes comparison jolly difficult.
As others have said, there is no doubt that computer databases have helped the modern player enormously, covering opening theory; collected games of top players and ending tablebases.
Take Morphy - who had none of this knowledge. Nevertheless his games are both classy and jolly enjoyable to play through.
Morphy was way ahead of his contemporaries, particularly when using tactics.
Now (and I mean absolutely no disrespect to him), because I (a FIDE Master) have played through Morphy’s games (and those of many other great players) I can recognise the tactics he used and see them coming.
Indeed I teach them to students.
Of course this is like scientists saying “I stand on the shoulders of giants.”
So I reckon it would take Morphy a long time to study the mass of useful modern information before he could match current world-class players. (And many of those have been studying chess since they were children…)
I hope that all made sense!
I’m going to chicken out on who would win the event.
I am certain that every entrant would need to have studied a lot of computerised information. Not only does knowing this stuff avoid mistakes, but it also saves you a great deal of time and effort.
To take one classic case - if you have the chance to exchange off into an ending and you have studied the theory of that ending … then you know whether to simplify or not.
For example, if you are a pawn down in a ‘routine’ position, then the best chance of drawing comes from knowing this list of endings (ranking from hardest to win to easiest):
opposite colour bishops
rooks
queens
knights
kings
I would add that youth, general good health* and sheer desire to practice and concentrate are also important.
Also having a back-up team to analyse openings** and prepare innovations.
*When Alekhine lost his World Title to Euwe in 1935, I believe one factor was Alekhine’s drinking. When they had a rematch in 1937, Alekhine had given up drinking … and won back the title.
**Kramnik defeated Kasparov in 2000 in London, becoming World Champion . I reckon that Kramnik was helped enormously by springing the previously unfashionable Berlin Defence to counter Kasparov’s Ruy Lopez (his main weapon as White.)
I looked this up, and it wasn’t a classical chess game. It was the Fischer Random Chess variant that was played in this game. They did also play when he was 13 in a rapid event, and Carlsen drew as white (with a better position) and lost as black.
With the much larger body of knowledge about the game to draw upon, the availability of computer programs that are far superior than human players for analyzing games / individual positions, and in general more serious devotion to the game as it relates to their livelihood — I feel confident that any of the top 50 chess players by world ranking today would completely clown any player whose prime was before 1950.
Uh, yeah, so Carlsen over Kasparov in the final. Also, no Mikhail Botvinnik, Vladimir Kramnik, or Viswanathan Anand in this bracket of yours?
Did we just reanimate Morphy and stick him into a tournament, or does 21st Century Morphy get time to research the others’ games, learn how previous generations learned to defend against his attacks?
I mean, Dr. Joyce Brothers became famous for winning a game show in 1957, because she memorized everything she could about boxing. Do we bring her back today to face off against another boxing expert, but tell Brothers she can’t learn about anything that happened in boxing after 1957?
I traveled back in time to when he was in his prime and nabbed him.
Which brings up another tournament idea but I think it is unanswerable for now: alternate universe where all of the top players were born in 1991. Who wins the tournament?
Is it possible yet to program a chess engine with a player’s style? We could program CarlsenChess, KasparovChess, TalChess, MorphyChess, etc. and have a real tourny.
Yeah, Deep Blue technology is right on the cusp of human vs computer games still being competitive in the sense that there is a small chance the human could win. Anything much after Deep Blue would smoke everyone. It might be an interesting game with one or two pawn odds with something like Stockfish 14.
So here is my variation on the theme. Perhaps the resident experts can weigh in. What if we took all of the players on the OP’s list other than Carlsen and put them in a team event against the current top-7?
So we have:
Legends Team: Kasparov, Fischer, Morphy, Karpov, Capablanca, Alekhine, and Lasker
Modern Team: Carlsen, Liren Ding, Fabiano Caruana, Levon Aronian, Ian Nepomniachtchi, Anish Giri, Alexander Grischuk
How do the Legends score if it’s a board v. board matchup (Carlsen v. Kasparov, Fischer v. Ding, etc…)? I’m not confident any of them win, but I would probably favor Karpov over Aronian (although a search shows that Aronian is actually 1-0 against Karpov with one draw). I think that’s it. Maybe we can get Tal on this team just to make it more exciting? And I agree that Anand is a much better inclusion in the field than some of the older players. Maybe Botvinnik and Kramnik too.
The chess site chess.com had an article a while back on this sort of question. The site has a measure of “How close to engine-precision did you play?” that they call CAPS. They ran the game history of players from the past through this evaluation to make some estimate for their relative playing strengths. There are obvious caveats as the article is quick to point out, but it’s fun and relevant to the thread.
(Though I suspect we have a paucity of data for such a thing to ever happen.)
