{"id":39086,"date":"2023-11-04T08:00:47","date_gmt":"2023-11-04T07:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiotimes.com\/?p=1919132"},"modified":"2023-11-04T18:02:35","modified_gmt":"2023-11-04T17:02:35","slug":"best-chess-players-of-all-time-ranked","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/rss_feed\/best-chess-players-of-all-time-ranked\/","title":{"rendered":"Best chess players of all time ranked"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our expert round-up of the 10 best chess players of all time. <\/p>

By Ben Johnson\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Saturday, 04 November 2023 at 07:00 AM<\/p>

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In any sport, fans love to argue about who the GOAT is at their game. Chess players are no exception.<\/p>\n

You might think that determining this answer would be easy, since chess has a reasonably accurate statistically-derived rating system (called Elo).<\/p>\n

However, said system is more helpful for comparing players within generations than across them.<\/p>\n

This is because, in chess, as in so many other domains, humans have a tendency to keep getting better.<\/p>\n

And whether we are talking about the professional or the amateur level, human chess ability has been turbo-charged in recent decades by studying with our silicon friends (chess players commonly refer to chess computers as \u201cengines\u201d).<\/p>\n

You can use statistically-driven historical sites like Chessmetrics.com<\/a> to help form an opinion, but a top 10 list will still often come down to personal philosophy.<\/p>\n

Do you prefer the player with the highest peak (Bobby Fischer) or one with a much longer reign (Emanuel Lasker)?<\/p>\n

Disagreements notwithstanding, most chess players actually concur on the top three players of all time, but they often clash on the order to put them in, and there is little consensus on the remainder of the elite ranks.<\/p>\n

My own top three is in line with the chess player consensus, but let\u2019s go through the whole top 10 to get there.<\/p>\n

RadioTimes.com<\/a> ranks the 10 best chess players in the of all time.<\/p>\n

10. Paul Morphy<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Morphy is always a particularly contentious player because he peaked way back in the 1850s. This means that modern players are leaps and bounds better than him, but Morphy was utterly dominant over his peers. Grandmaster Larry Kaufman wrote: \u201cMorphy was by far the largest leap over his predecessors and contemporaries of anyone in chess history.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morphy doesn\u2019t make that many top 10 lists, but for me, this dramatic leap in chess understanding when there were very few resources to learn from should count for something!<\/p>\n

9. Vasily Smyslov<\/strong><\/h2>\n