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The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part I

24.04.2005 Last month Garry Kasparov retired from professional chess. Was he the greatest, most
dominant chess player of all time? That is a question that can be interpreted in many different ways,
and most answers will be extremely subjective. Jeff Sonas has conducted extensive historical
research and applied ruthlesss statistics to seek a solution to an age-old debate.
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part I
By Jeff Sonas
With Garry Kasparov announcing his retirement last month, it seems like an appropriate time to look back on
his career and compare it with the careers of other all-time greats, to try to place him in some kind of
historical context. The obvious question at this point is: was Garry Kasparov the most dominant chess player
of all time? And if not, who was?
Of course, there is no clear answer; it is a question that can be interpreted many different ways, and most of
the answers are extremely subjective. First of all, I am not trying to produce any sort of definitive statement
about whose actual chess skill was greatest, or strongest, or most artistic. I'm not looking at the moves they
made; I am only looking at overall game outcomes (win, lose, or draw), and drawing conclusions from
analysis of those outcomes. I have developed several different "metrics" for exploring this issue objectively,
and I would like to share some of them with you. Its an entertaining topic, and even if you think the question
is ultimately meaningless, I hope that you will nevertheless enjoy the ride.
One of the reasons I am excited to write about this right now, is that I have just released an all-new version
of my Chessmetrics website. I have invented a new rating formula, and a new way to calculate performance
ratings, and a new way to evaluate the "category" of historical tournaments. I have calculated monthly
historical ratings going all the way back to 1843, and so I can tell you in great detail who was the highest-
ranked at any time and for how long (according to my formulas and my underlying data). I hope that these
inventions can help to shed additional light on some of the more intriguing "best-ever" questions that
surround chess but have always required a somewhat subjective answer. I encourage everyone to go visit
my website and look around for yourself. I don't want to go into much detail about the formulas, or the
underlying data, at this point, but you can read a lot about them on the Chessmetrics site if you are
interested.
However, I do want to say one quick thing about rating formulas. In recent months, I have read quotes from
many different people saying that we need a new rating system, that the FIDE formula is too conservative
and slow, and that right now the top-rated players can simply remain inactive and retain their valuable high
ratings at no cost to themselves. My rating formula was carefully chosen to be more accurate and dynamic
than the FIDE rating formula, and to require players to stay quite active in order to maintain high ratings. As
soon as you go a month without playing, your Chessmetrics rating will start to drop.
There are many ways to measure "greatness" or "dominance" in chess, even when you are just looking at
things statistically. You can look at world championship results, or win/loss records, or performance ratings
http://www.chessbase.com/newsprint.asp?newsid=2345 (1 of 6)2005-05-28 17:33:10

ChessBase.com - Chess News - The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part I
(if you have historical rating lists). Or you can look at peak ratings, or world rankings, or the gap between
players ratings (if you have historical rating lists).
"If you have historical rating lists"... it sounds so simple. But it used to be that we couldnt really use many of
those metrics across a significantly long stretch of chess history. We all knew the lineage of world
champions, and we had ratings for everyone going back a few decades. But if you wanted to look earlier,
there were no real rating lists to speak of, other than Professor Elos book that only provided one peak rating
per each players entire career. Then came Chessmetrics...
Who was ranked #1 for the longest consecutive span of years, or for the most combined years over their
entire career? Not just since the 1970's, but going all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century? Who had
the strongest single tournament performance, or the strongest single match performance? Who was the
highest-rated player of all time? Who had the most success in super-tournaments, or the largest rating gap
between #1 and #2 at one time? All of these are very valid questions when youre trying to figure out who
was most dominant, and its not like it was the same player winning each of these categories.
There are so many different approaches that I cant do them all justice in merely one article, so I have turned
this into a four-part series. In the remainder of Part I, we will look at Wilhelm Steinitz and Emanuel Lasker,
the first two world champions. In Part II we will look at some more recent all-time greats, especially Bobby
Fischer and Anatoly Karpov, and Part III will cover some of Garry Kasparovs most impressive
accomplishments. Finally in Part IV I will introduce a brand-new way of looking at this topic, as well as
wrapping up with some final thoughts.
Before we get into the Chessmetrics numbers, however, I would like to start with the most traditional
approach to assessing historical dominance: looking at the duration of each world champions reign. This is a
somewhat controversial topic, for a number of reasons. First of all, World War I and World War II are
considered to have artificially extended the reigns of Emanuel Lasker and Alexander Alekhine, or at least to
have postponed the rightful challenges of Jos Capablanca and Mikhail Botvinnik (among others). Second,
there is considerable disagreement regarding exactly when Wilhelm Steinitz originally became the first World
Champion. Various claims have been made for his term as champion having started with his match against
Adolf Anderssen in 1866, or his first match against Johannes Zukertort in 1872. There is no question,
however, that once Steinitz won his second match against Zukertort in 1886, that he was definitely world
champion. So depending on whom you ask, Steinitz was either champion for 8.2, 21.7, or 27.8 years, until
losing the title to Emanuel Lasker in 1894. Historians appear to have mostly settled upon 8.2 as the "official"
duration of Steinitzs reign, but of course there will always be disagreement about that. In any event, if you
try to graph the total amount of years that each player spent as champion, this is what you get:

Until now, this is mostly where the analysis had to stop, or at least it had to slow way down. However, now
that we have reasonable (though not perfect!) historical rating lists, on a monthly basis, we can start to
describe other measures of dominance. Certainly one method that comes to mind, when we talk about
"dominance", is to measure how far the rating-point-gap was between the #1 and #2 players, and to see, for
each player, what their maximum gap achieved was, when they were ranked #1.
Garry Kasparov recently stated that "the greatest gap between the number one and the rest was Bobby
Fischer in 1972". This would be very revealing, if true, because you would think that the largest rating gap
would have occurred long ago, when there were relatively few players within striking distance of the
strongest player. Now, you have to be careful in trusting these mid-nineteenth-century ratings too much,
because on some dates there is only a small handful of players with enough games to qualify for the rating
lists, and one or two aberrant performances can totally upset the list. If you have an approach that is
sensitive enough to thrust Paul Morphy into the #1 spot after a tiny number of rated games in the late 1850's,
it will probably thrust others as well into an unfamiliar limelight, names like Serafino Dubois, Lionel
Kieseritzky, and Berthold Suhle. Subjectively we can just dismiss them as outliers, or even flaws in the rating
approach, but they come along for the ride on any real attempt at an objective approach.
So, what do the numbers say about "the greatest gap between the number one and the rest"? Was Garry
Kasparov right? Well, sort of...
Wilhelm Steinitz, the first official world champion, dominated the 1870's. He had the longest winning streak in
the history of master play, winning 25 straight games over a nine-year period between 1873 and 1882
(although he didn't play at all between 1876 and 1882). Already #1 in the world going into the Vienna

tournament in 1873, Steinitz won his final 14 games, and then both games in the playoff against Joseph H.
Blackburne. Thirty straight months of inactivity caused Steinitz's Chessmetrics rating to drop 70 points but he
was still #1 when he faced Blackburne, the #2 player in the world, in a match in February/March of 1876.
Incredibly, Steinitz maintained his winning streak, by winning all seven games of the match. This was an
incredible feat, and a performance rating more than 50 points higher than anything ever seen in chess to that
point. On the next monthly Chessmetrics ratings list, on April 1st of 1876, Blackburne had dropped down to
#4 in the world, and Steinitz was rated 199 points higher than the new #2 player, Henry Bird. This is easily
the largest gap between #1 and #2 achieved by any top-rated player over the past century and a half:
As a historical aside, a match between the #1 and #2 players in the world is actually quite rare, sort of the
Halley's Comet of chess. It has only happened fourteen times in history, more than half of them including
Anatoly Karpov! Before historical ratings, it would have been easy to think that matches between #1 and #2
regularly happened every three years, because that's in fact how we defined #1 and #2, as being the winner
and loser of the latest world championship match. However, the rating lists reveal that the chess world once
had to wait 41 years between any matches involving the top two players from the rating lists, stretching from
Steinitz-Zukertort II in 1886, all the way until Alekhine-Capablanca in 1927. And after that match, it was even
worse, with a 47-year dry spell until the Karpov-Korchnoi Candidates' Final in 1974. Note that the Lasker-
Capablanca match in 1921 didn't count because Lasker, the world champion, had fallen off the rating list due
to inactivity. Of course Steinitz himself was also quite inactive in the mid-to-late 1870's, playing only the
Blackburne match between 1873 and 1882 (at which point Steinitz continued his winning streak at another
Vienna tournament in 1882, with a first round defeat of... Blackburne!). So if you discount the 1870's as just
being too aberrant, then you can see from the above chart that Bobby Fischer did indeed have the largest
rating gap of modern times. So I guess the winner of this category is half-Steinitz and half-Fischer.
Rather than just focusing on one peak date, if you look across players' entire careers, there is a significant
amount of statistical evidence to support the claim that Emanuel Lasker was, in fact, the most dominant
player of all time. In this latest Chessmetrics effort, I did work a lot on improving my formula, but I also did a
lot of manual work collecting 19th century results, trying to focus on collecting all known complete events
rather than just a hodge-podge of available games.
One of the things that surprised me most, when I actually calculated the 19th-century ratings, was how early

Lasker showed up as the top-rated player in the world. I had always thought that it would have been around
the time he took the official title from Steinitz in 1894, but in fact Lasker entrenched himself at the top of the
list at the tender age of 21, in the summer of 1890, and did not give up the #1 spot until well after the turn of
the century. And although Lasker did lose the world championship to Capablanca in 1921, Lasker's victory a
few years later at the 1924 New York tournament was enough to move him back to the top-rated spot for two
more years after that. So even though he was world champion for 27 years, his time at the top of the rating
list actually stretches an additional four or five years in either direction. On the other hand, he was not a
particularly active champion, and so there are several points where inactivity or a rare poor showing would
drag his Chessmetrics rating down to the point that someone else surpassed him. Nevertheless, over the
course of his career, Lasker spent 292 different months on the top of the rating list, a total of 24.3 years,
more than anyone else in history. Garry Kasparov might have caught Lasker if he had stayed around a few
more years, but he ended up second all-time, with a total of 21.9 years. The following chart makes for an
interesting companion piece to the first graph about world champion durations:
Tigran Petrosian, with the eighth-longest reign of all time among world champions, isn't even in the top
fifteen when you rank players according to the number of months spent as the #1-rated player. And of
course you can see that both Bobby Fischer and Garry Kasparov had shorter spans as world champion than
the rating lists would have suggested. Fischer was the top-rated player in the world for much of Petrosian's
reign and all of Boris Spassky's. Despite being world champion until 1969, Petrosian never retook the top
spot on the Chessmetrics rating lists after Fischer moved into the #1 spot with a perfect score at the U.S.
Championships right at the end of 1963. And of course we all know that Kasparov continued to have the top
rating in the world even after losing the world championship to Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. Some people will
certainly say that the actual world championship title is all that matters, but I think it must be preferable to
have both perspectives.
You might have noticed that in none of this analysis did I actually tell you what the players' actual historical

rating numbers were. It's a tricky point. I think most people would agree that historical ratings are very
meaningful in identifying the relative strength, at one particular time, for contemporaries of each other. It's the
effort of trying to compare ratings across eras that is less popular. Even if that important point has always led
you to discount the usefulness of historical ratings, I hope you will agree with me that there are approaches
you can take, such as the last two graphs indicate, which do let you make comparisons of relative
dominance across the years, without having to compare actual ratings or calibrate two rating lists against
each other.
However, if you do concede the point that it is possible to assign meaningful numbers that allow direct
comparison of ratings across eras (even if the numbers represent the relative degree to which individuals
dominated their own time, rather than making any claims about whose chess was objectively stronger), it
opens a whole lot of analytical doors. You can talk about who was the highest-rated player of all time, and
about performance ratings, which can be applied to lots of different situations.
I even have my own follow-up to the recently-announced Chess Oscars (for which the top players of each
year are identified, based upon subjective balloting). I'm sure you won't be surprised if I tell you that I have
developed my own technique for retroactively determining who deserved the "gold medal" each year, with a
method that is somewhat more objective. I even have another new graph to illustrate that particular measure
of dominance. Now, more objective is not necessarily better, but it hopefully does allow for a wider
perspective than you would otherwise have. However, you'll have to be patient and wait a while for all of
those things I just talked about, because this article is getting quite long.
Please do look at my Chessmetrics website, and also please feel free to send me email about any of this;
that's one of the big reasons why I take the time to do all this writing. In Part II we will look at some of the
things you can do with performance rating comparisons across the ages, as well as some other interesting
graphs. See you in a few days...
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ChessBase.com - Chess News - The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part II
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part II

28.04.2005 What was the greatest chess performance of all time? Fischer's 6-0 6-0 whitewash of
Taimanov and Larsen in 1971? Karpov's 11/13 in Linares in 1994? And which player dominated his
contemporaries at the most advanced age? These are questions that must be answered if we want to
find the greatest player of all time. Jeff Sonas explains.
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part II
By Jeff Sonas
This is the second installment in a four-part series where I am using various statistical techniques, applied to
my brand-new Chessmetrics data, to explore the following question:
Was Garry Kasparov the most dominant chess player of all time? If not, who was?
In Part I we saw that Emanuel Lasker spent the most months at the top of the rating list, with Garry Kasparov
second. And in terms of a single peak time, Wilhelm Steinitz had the largest gap ever between a #1 player
and the rest of the world, in 1876, with Bobby Fischer having the second-largest gap ever, in 1971. Both of
those calculations could be made without attempting to "calibrate" historical rating lists against each other.
However, if you try to assign comparable numbers across the eras, so that a 2800-rating a century ago
means roughly the same as a 2800-rating today, it opens new opportunities for analysis. For one thing, you
can see who was the highest-rated player of all time. Now, in Part II, we will use these calibrated ratings to
explore peak ratings and peak performance ratings. I will leave it to my Chessmetrics site to explain how that
actual calibration is done; for now you'll have to trust me that the ratings are roughly comparable across the
eras, and they are matched up with the current magnitude of the FIDE ratings.
Bobby Fischer's rapid rise to the chess throne in the early 1970's is well-known. Along the way he
demolished several top-ten opponents in match play. He defeated #9 Mark Taimanov with an almost
unprecedented 6-0 score, and followed that up with an identical 6-0 defeat of #3 Bent Larsen. He then
defeated #6 Tigran Petrosian, 6.5-2.5, to qualify for the championship match against world champion Boris
Spassky.
For an eight-month period, from the end of the Larsen match until a few months before the Spassky match,
Fischer had a higher Chessmetrics rating than anyone else in history. The ratings are calculated each
month, and include any completed games from ongoing events. Thus there was a new rating list as of
October 1st, 1971, between the first and second games of the Fischer-Petrosian match. As of that rating list,
Fischer had won nineteen straight games, and was awarded the highest Chessmetrics rating of all time
(2895). Obviously, any comparison between eras is uncertain and depends heavily on how you adjust the
rating lists against each other. But based upon my method, the second-best peak rating of all time was held
by Garry Kasparov with a 2886 rating on the March 1993 Chessmetrics list, right after his +7 score in Linares
1993 (one of the two strongest tournaments of all time).

As I mentioned previously, one of my latest inventions is a new way to calculate a player's performance
rating in a single event. Current approaches do not account for the length of an event, and they are often
"undefined" when trying to evaluate a 100% score. This has been problematic because it was impossible to
calculate a performance rating for Bobby Fischer in some of his historic perfect-score performances. Now,
however, based on my new improved formula, I can say that his match performance against Larsen was
indeed the strongest match performance of all time, with a 2887 performance rating. The exact meaning of
that 2887 is that if we knew nothing else but the results of that one match, our best guess at Fischer's rating
would be 2887. Emanuel Lasker actually holds both the second-best and third-best match performances of
all time, for his +8 scores in the 1896 return match against Steinitz (2882 performance) and in the 1907
match against Frank Marshall (2876 performance). Here are the top seven match performances of all-time:

After Fischer resigned his world championship, Anatoly Karpov took over the chess crown. It is difficult to
seriously suggest that Anatoly Karpov was a more dominant player than Garry Kasparov, simply because
their peak years overlapped so closely and Kasparov outperformed Karpov directly most of the time.
However, there were a few areas in which Kasparov never did surpass Karpov. One of them was the ability
to sustain the highest level of performance into middle age. Obviously, Kasparov's abrupt retirement makes
any further comparisons difficult, but if you align their historical rating charts so as to compare Kasparov and
Karpov at the same ages, you can see that the 41-year-old Karpov (from 1992) had already caught up to the
41-year-old Kasparov (from 2004) by the end of Linares a year ago:

Although most players reach their peak in their early thirties and begin to decline significantly by the time
they reach their early forties, Karpov was just as dominant (in terms of rating) at age 45 as he had been at
age 25. In fact, Karpov's greatest tournament accomplishment was achieved in 1994 at Linares, a few
months before his 43rd birthday. Moreover, it was the strongest performance by any player, in any
tournament, in the history of chess, according to my calculations. In a tournament including nine of the top
eleven players in the world, Karpov had a +9 score (11/13, or 85%). For the tournament, his Chessmetrics
performance rating was 2899, meaning that if we knew no other results for Karpov than this one event, we
would have estimated that his rating should be 2899. It was even a higher performance rating than Fischer
achieved in his match against Bent Larsen. Although Fischer did score 100%, that was across six games,
compared to thirteen for Karpov, and thus on balance not quite as impressive as Karpov's performance:

I would like to clarify one thing about the Chessmetrics performance ratings, because I have already seen
some people (accustomed to traditional performance ratings) confused by a notion that initially does seem
paradoxical. It is quite possible to have a peak Chessmetrics rating that is higher than any of your individual
Chessmetrics performance ratings. You may have noticed that Bobby Fischer reached that peak rating of
2895, despite never having any event performance ratings higher than 2890. The reason? No one single
event was enough evidence, all by itself, to suggest that Fischers strength was so high. But when viewed as
a whole, the group of performances provided sufficient evidence to push Fischers rating to that all-time high.
Just as someone who plays rarely is "punished" by my rating formula, someone who plays a shorter event is
"punished" in the same way by the performance rating formula. The formula is less convinced by smaller
numbers of games, but several short events added up together (like when a monthly rating is calculated) can
lead to a whole that is greater, in a sense, than the sum of its parts.
I know this concept will take some getting used to, but when you think about it, isnt a performance rating
supposed to estimate someones playing strength based on just the one event? It makes sense to be more
conservative when there are only a few games involved, and to be more generous once the number of
games gets higher. Anyway, sorry for the digression. You can read lots more about the formulas on my
Chessmetrics site if you really care. The performance rating formula is actually quite simple. All you need to
know is your number of games played, your percentage score, and the average rating of your opponents. It
doesn't even have to use Chessmetrics ratings; you could use FIDE ratings instead. It's just that the
Chessmetrics ratings are not subject to the same sort of inflation that the FIDE ratings face, and so it is
easier to compare performances across the years if you use older Chessmetrics ratings rather than older
FIDE ratings. But for performances right now it really doesn't matter too much which ratings you use since

they both reach the same magnitude.
In Part I we saw that Emanuel Lasker spent the longest amount of time at the top of the rating list in chess
history, as well as the longest amount of time as world champion (unless it was Steinitz). We saw that
Wilhelm Steinitz and Bobby Fischer had the largest rating gaps compared to the rest of the world. And now
we have seen that Bobby Fischer had the highest rating of all time, and that the two greatest single-event
performance ratings of all time were achieved by Anatoly Karpov (best tournament performance) and Bobby
Fischer (best match performance). Where, then, is the justification for claiming that Garry Kasparov might be
the most dominant player of all time?
Oops, I'm out of space again. But trust me, there is plenty of justification. Stay tuned, and in a few more days
we will look closely at some of Garry Kasparov's career accomplishments, in Part III, the next installment of
this series.
Again, feel free to browse around my Chessmetrics website, and also please feel free to send me email
about any of this. Most of the research for these articles has simply come from clicking around on the site, so
if you just can't wait a few more days for Part III, maybe you can find some answers there...

Part I of this four-part series

ChessBase.com - Chess News - The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part III
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part III

06.05.2005 What was the greatest chess performance of all time? Jeff Sonas has analysed the duration
different players have stayed at the top of the ratings list, at the highest individual rating spikes and
best tournament performances. Today he looks at the most impressive over-all tournament
performances in history, and comes up with some very impressive statistics.
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part III
By Jeff Sonas
This is the third installment in a four-part series where I am using various statistical techniques, applied to my
brand-new Chessmetrics data, to explore the following question:
In Part I we saw that Emanuel Lasker spent the longest amount of time at the top of the rating list in chess
history, as well as the longest amount of time as world champion (unless it was Steinitz). We saw that
Wilhelm Steinitz and Bobby Fischer had the largest rating gaps compared to the rest of the world. And then
in Part II we saw that Bobby Fischer had the highest rating of all time, and that the two greatest single-event
performance ratings of all time were achieved by Anatoly Karpov (best tournament performance ever, at
Linares 1994) and Bobby Fischer (best match performance, in Fischer-Larsen match 1971). Where, then, is
the justification for claiming that Garry Kasparov might be the most dominant player of all time?
Despite the impressive accomplishment of Karpov at Linares 1994, it is nevertheless very clear that Garry
Kasparov had the most impressive tournament career of any player in chess history. You may have noticed
from the final graph in Part II that although Karpov did have the best-ever single tournament performance, it
was Kasparov who had five of the top ten of all time, and the story doesn't change much as you run further
down the list. For instance, out of the top fifty tournament performance ratings of all time, Kasparov had
seventeen of them, with nobody else having more than six:

Despite his fifteen-year run as world champion, with many successful title defenses, Kasparov was
significantly more successful in tournaments than in matches. Over the course of his career, he was
probably about 40-45 points stronger in tournaments than in matches. For instance, he actually lost rating
points over the course of his career in match play. Based upon Kasparov's ratings, and the ratings of his
opponents, Kasparov could have been expected to score 58% in his matches and he actually scored 57%.
On the other hand, despite his high rating, Kasparov gained rating points in three-fourths of the tournaments
that he played in, averaging a 69% score rather than the 66% score that his rating would have predicted.
This pattern held true even more strongly if you only consider events where his average opponents' rating
was 2700+.
As impressive as that above list is for Kasparov, it is important to recognize the context within which these
accomplishments occurred. It has been far easier to play in a large number of tournaments in recent years
than in the first half of the twentieth century, for instance, with its wartimes and inferior travel opportunities.
Nevertheless, the above list is hardly skewed towards recent years if you look at the remaining 33
tournament performances of 2820+.

That's about as far as I can go with single-event performance ratings. However, there are certainly other
ways to measure tournament success. Rather than performance ratings or rating point gains, a more
tangible measure would be to look at actual first-place finishes in top tournaments. And as you might expect,
Kasparov is at the top of the list however you look at it.
I mentioned in Part I that I had invented a new way to calculate the "category" of historical tournaments. I
have written a lot about this topic in the past, although it was a few years ago. In mid-2000 I was
commissioned by KasparovChess.com to write an article somewhat similar to this one, in which I tried to
place Kasparov's 1999-2000 tournament success in its proper historical context. In order to compare
tournament successes across history, there needs to be a way to make valid comparisons. And the
traditional measure of tournament strength, the "category", is going to show a bias towards recent years,
partially because of FIDE rating inflation but even more so because of the quantity of highly rated players
these days. It is relatively easy to assemble a tournament field with a high average rating, just because there
are so many players to choose from. As an example, 28 of the top 30 category tournaments (using
Chessmetrics ratings) occurred within the past twenty years. The only exceptions were the super-elite
tournament held in St. Petersburg 1895 and the World Championship tournament of 1948.
The approach that I used in that article five years ago, building upon an original suggestion from Kasparov to
use historical top-ten lists rather than ratings, still seems like a sound one, so I am still using it with my new
data. My idea is to assign points to each tournament based on the participation of the top-ranked player in
the world (worth four points), the #2 player (worth four points), the #3 or #4 player (worth three points each),
the #5 or #6 player (worth two points each), and/or the #7 through #10 players (worth one point each). The
overall number of points for the tournament should be roughly comparable to the traditional "Category" of the
tournament. I call this classification the "class" of a tournament. There is lots more about this on my
Chessmetrics site, including historical rankings of the highest-class tournaments. One of the things I show is
that the "strongest" tournaments (based on "class") are distributed much more evenly across time, rather
than the highest category listing, where the top-30 list of tournaments is still more than 90% made up of
tournaments from the past twenty years.
It is a historical curiosity that there has never been a tournament that included all of the top ten players in the
world, other than the famous 1970 "USSR vs. The Rest of the World" team event (which really shouldn't
count as a tournament). In fact, there has never even been a tournament with the top nine players from the
rating list. There have, however, been six tournaments in chess history that included the top eight from the
rating list. Two of them (Vienna 1882 and Linares 1993) also included the #10 player and so they share the
distinction of being the highest-class tournaments ever (Class 21). The other four tournaments were missing
both the #9 and #10 players from the rating list, and so they count as Class 20. Those tournaments were
Nottingham 1936, AVRO 1938, Linares 1992, and Corus 2001 (Wijk aan Zee).
I'm amazed that I never noticed this until a few days ago, but it turns out that only one player in chess history
has ever won clear first place in a tournament that included the top eight players in the world (i.e., one of
those six tournaments I just listed). Guess who is the one player? Garry Kasparov actually achieved this
unique feat three different times: twice at Linares and once at Wijk aan Zee. All three of the other
tournaments ended with a tie for first place.
Even if you get slightly less exclusive, and go down to the tournaments that included all of the top five
players in the world, the list is still dominated by Kasparov. Only five players have ever won clear first place
in such a tournament. Emanuel Lasker accomplished it twice: Nuremberg 1896 and St. Petersburg 1914,
and three others managed it once (Johannes Zukertort at London 1883, Viswanathan Anand at Reggio
Emilia 1991, and of course Anatoly Karpov at Linares 1994). Garry Kasparov, on the other hand, did this
more times than everyone else combined, a total of six times (including the three already mentioned, plus
Belfort 1988, Las Palmas 1996, and Wijk aan Zee 1999). Just for comparison, Bobby Fischer only played
one tournament in his entire life that even had the top three players in the world: Bled/Zagreb/Belgrade 1959,
where he finished fifth.

So I think it is indisputable that Kasparov had the most dominant tournament career of anyone in chess
history. Nobody else is even close. And in match play, he held the world title for a very long stretch, and in
fact never lost a match to any human until the 2000 match against Kramnik where he lost a grand total of two
games. Thus it will come as little surprise that since 1985 Kasparov was ranked first for an extremely long
stretch.
My Chessmetrics ratings are calculated at the start of each month, using all known game results at that
point. Thus players' ratings are actually recalculated during any events that span across multiple months.
The first world championship match between Karpov and Kasparov certainly qualifies as a "multiple-month
event". Kasparov began the match in September of 1984 with a 34-point rating advantage over Karpov. That
rating lead quickly dwindled after Karpov's superlative start to the match, and by game #20 Karpov had
retaken the #1 spot. It was not until February of 1985, after winning game #47 of the same match, that
Kasparov finally regained the #1 spot, which he then held for almost twenty straight years. This put Kasparov
firmly at the top of the next measurement: consecutive months as #1 on the rating list.
Perhaps even more impressive is the firmness with which Kasparov held onto his #1 spot. For a stretch of
18.5 years, not a single other player even came within 10 rating points of Kasparov on any of the monthly
lists. Nobody else in chess history has come remotely close to having such a stretch of dominance like that,
with Lasker managing 8.8 years, and Karpov 7.8 years, before anyone came within 10 points of them.
Kasparov finally fell out of the #1 spot on my monthly Chessmetrics rating lists on November 1st, 2004,
where the combination of Kasparov's poor performance at the European Cup in October, and Anand's
excellent score at the Calvi Olympiad in October, finally lifted Anand into the #1 spot, ending one of the
most impressive streaks in chess history. This means Kasparov was actually not the favorite at Linares
2005, since Anand was still ranked #1. It was the first time in 24 years that Kasparov did not go into an event

as the Chessmetrics rating favorite (going all the way back to Moscow 1981, where the 18-year old Kasparov
shared second place behind world champion Karpov, ranked #1 in the world).
My original plan was to stop my analysis, and my series of articles, at this point. I was going to tell you that I
had done the best I could, to present these various explorations into the question of who was the most
dominant player of all time, and that it was up to you to pick which factor(s) you consider the most relevant.
However, a few days before writing this I hit upon another avenue of analysis that I think is really interesting
and exciting, and certainly sheds some additional light on the question of who was most "dominant". So
instead of a mere three-part article, you're getting a bonus Part IV in a few more days. Hopefully it will be
worth the wait...

Part II of the series

ChessBase.com - Chess News - The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part IV
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part IV

25.05.2005 Sotell us already, who was the greatest chess performance of all time? After analysing and dissecting
many different aspects of this question, Jeff Sonas wraps it up in the final installment of this series, awarding his
all-time chess "Oscar" nomination to the overall greatest of all time.
The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part IV
By Jeff Sonas
This is the last installment in a four-part series where I am using various statistical techniques, applied to my brand-new
Chessmetrics data, to explore the following question:
In previous installments we have looked at several metrics for evaluating who was the most dominant player of all time. It
seems fairly clear that Bobby Fischer established the largest gap between a #1 player and the rest of the world, but that
was only for a few months and then he retired. Emanuel Lasker, on the other hand, had the longest total duration as world
champion, as well as the most total months at the top of the rating list. However, both of those included long stretches
where he was on top through inertia, rather than through actively and frequently defeating his contemporaries. Not that
Lasker necessarily had an alternative, given the times he lived in, but perhaps his durations are not strictly comparable on
a one-to-one basis with the durations of excellence achieved in more recent times by Anatoly Karpov and Garry
Kasparov. I think if you are trying to find a balance between peak rating gap, and overall career duration of dominance,
the best candidate has to be Garry Kasparov. However, I do have another way of looking at all of this...
Each year the Russian chess magazine "64" organizes a vote among the chess community to determine the winner of the
Chess Oscar, the "best chess player award". It is always interesting to see the results of the balloting, and the winner
always seems like a very reasonable choice, subjectively speaking. Recently, however, someone suggested that I should
run some calculations to see whether the Chess Oscar results also seemed reasonable, objectively speaking.
I thought this was a great idea, not the least because it gave me an opportunity to use my new rating formula once again.
It is flexible enough that I actually use the exact same formula for the overall rating calculation, plus the single-event
performance ratings, plus anything else in between. So I applied my formula on a yearly basis, to see who had the best
performance rating in each calendar year. And based upon those rankings, I figuratively awarded a gold medal, silver
medal, and bronze medal to the top three performers each year.
This idea actually has a lot of practical appeal. Rather than a scheme like the ACP tour's scoring system, where the points
have to be awarded in a somewhat arbitrary (and thus controversial) fashion, why not just pick a performance-rating
based approach that also rewards activity? My rating formula does exactly that (you can read more specifics on the
Chessmetrics site). And while my official rating lists are based upon a weighted performance over the previous four years
(the duration that was found to be most accurate at predicting future results), there is surely a desire for some kind of
metric that rewards recent results in an extremely dynamic way, far more dynamically than the existing FIDE ratings.
So, why not go with one year? We could calculate a yearly performance rating, across all of a player's game results
during the year, and then rank everyone during the year based upon those yearly performance ratings. Maybe at the end
of the year, that ranking would determine the "yearly champion", or maybe it would even determine the automatic seeding

into some sort of "yearly world championship" tournament.
Another neat thing about this is that there is no opportunity for a player to just sit out the action and maintain a high rating
forever and ever. At the beginning of each year, your yearly performance rating resets again, and you have to start over
from scratch. And because the rating formula rewards players who play a lot of games, there would still be incentive to
keep playing even if you did manage a fantastic result in your first event of the year.
It's hard to show off the dynamic nature of this measure in recent years, exactly because of the incredible degree to which
Karpov and then Kasparov have dominated chess for the past three decades. But if you look at who wins the gold medal
each year, going all the way back to the 1840's, you'll see how dynamic the list of winners can be:
Decade Year 0 Year 1 Year 2 Year 3 Year 4 Year 5 Year 6 Year 7 Year 8 Year 9
1840-1849 --- --- --- Staunton --- --- Kieseritzky --- Buckle ---
1850-1859 --- Anderssen Harrwitz Harrwitz --- --- --- --- Morphy ---
1860-1869 Kolisch Paulsen Anderssen Steinitz --- Suhle --- Neumann --- Neumann
1870-1879 Steinitz Zukertort Steinitz Steinitz Wisker --- Steinitz Paulsen Zukertort Englisch
1880-1889 Zukertort Zukertort Mason Zukertort Zukertort Schallopp Steinitz Blackburne Gunsberg Tarrasch
1890-1899 Lasker Tarrasch Lasker Lasker Tarrasch Lasker Lasker Charousek Tarrasch Lasker
1900-1909 Lasker Janowsky Schlechter Tarrasch Janowsky Marczy Duras Lasker Duras Lasker
1910-1919 Lasker Rubinstein Rubinstein Tartakower Capablanca Capablanca Lasker Janowsky Capablanca Capablanca
1920-1929 Rti Alekhine Rubinstein Nimzowitsch Lasker Alekhine Nimzowitsch Alekhine Capablanca Alekhine
1930-1939 Alekhine Alekhine Flohr Lilienthal Euwe Euwe Capablanca Alekhine Fine Botvinnik
1940-1949 Lilienthal Botvinnik Alekhine Alekhine Botvinnik Botvinnik Botvinnik Sthlberg Botvinnik Smyslov
1950-1959 Bronstein Keres Kotov Smyslov Keres Bronstein Botvinnik Smyslov Tal Tal
1960-1969 Tal Botvinnik Petrosian Fischer Tal Spassky Fischer Korchnoi Spassky Petrosian
1970-1979 Fischer Fischer Tal Karpov Karpov Karpov Karpov Karpov Korchnoi Karpov
1980-1989 Karpov Karpov Kasparov Kasparov Karpov Kasparov Kasparov Karpov Kasparov Kasparov
1990-1999 Kasparov Kasparov Kasparov Kasparov Kasparov Karpov Kasparov Kasparov Anand Kasparov
2000-2004 Kramnik Kasparov Kasparov Anand Anand --- --- --- --- ---
It is incredible how closely this list matches with the historical results from the (totally subjective) Chess Oscar voting.
Over the past ten years, they only disagreed twice. In 1995, Kasparov won the Oscar vote with Karpov finishing second,
whereas Karpov had a gold-medal yearly performance rating 13 points ahead of silver-medal-winner Kasparov. And in
1997, Anand won the vote with Kasparov finishing second, but Kasparov had a gold-medal yearly performance rating 19
points above that of silver-medal winner Anand. The other eight years, the Chessmetrics gold-medal winner matched the
Chess Oscar winner.
And before that, they matched even better! In fact, there was a perfect match every single year from 1973 all the way
through 1988, at which point the original Chess Oscars stopped because of the death of the founder. That means the two
approaches have agreed on who was the most successful player of the year, for 24 of the past 26 awards! It is interesting
to note that Garry Kasparov had the best performance rating for every single year in the six-year stretch from 1989
through 1994 when the Chess Oscar was not awarded.
Let's say we were to abolish the current tradition of having the world championship determined by a match. In fact, let's
pretend that there never was such a tradition. We'll pretend chess turned out to be more like how golf, or tennis, works
currently. If they'd had Chessmetrics yearly performance ratings available way back in the nineteenth century, perhaps
they would have determined the world championships based on yearly performance. If the world championships had
always been determined in this way, with gold, silver, and bronze medals awarded each year, we wouldn't be talking
about the 27-year reign of Lasker, or the injustice of various players never getting a chance (or a second chance) at the
title. We might instead be marveling at the seven-year streak of gold medals won by Kasparov from 1988 through 1994,
or the record-breaking (at the time) five-year stretch of gold medals won by Karpov from 1973-1977. We might even be
waxing nostalgically about the famous "three-peat" jinx in the yearly chess performance race; just look at that list above
and see how long it took, and how many failed tries, until someone finally won three straight years. And instead of

memorizing world championship dates, we might have memorized these kinds of numbers instead:
For each player, you can see how many yearly gold, silver, and bronze medals they would have won. It includes the
breakdown of medal types for everyone who ever won five or more medals in their career. In addition, the next tier of
players, with two, three, or four career medals, is listed at the bottom. By the way, in that lower picture, that's Jos
Capablanca on the left and Emanuel Lasker on the right, in case you didn't recognize them. The photo is courtesy of
chesschamps.com.
There is so much to be gleaned from this graph that I encourage you to just stare at it for a while and see what you notice.
It really is a different way of measuring the accomplishments of the most dominant players in history, but it's also a very

good way. One nice thing about having silver and bronze medals is that it leaves room for two or three truly dominant
contemporaries to still be rewarded for their excellence, without losing sight of who the top-performing player actually
was. I think it is incredible that neither Karpov nor Kasparov ever managed a bronze medal in a single year; it's because
the two of them were too busy winning the gold and silver each year. In fact, and this deserves a paragraph of its own:
For a fifteen-year stretch from 1981 through 1995, Anatoly Karpov and Garry Kasparov combined to win all fifteen gold
medals, and fourteen of the fifteen silver medals! The only player to briefly join the exclusive K-K club during that time
was Vassily Ivanchuk with a silver medal in 1991 thanks to three different 2800+ performances during that one year (out
of the six 2800+ performances that he has had in his entire career).
As long as we are pretending things, let's try another fantasy question: what would have happened if Garry Kasparov had
never become a serious chessplayer. If Anatoly Karpov had still maintained his same ability and same overall results that
he did in real life, then I think it would be a foregone conclusion by now that Karpov was the most dominant chess player
of all time. He would have far surpassed almost all of the accomplishments of Emanuel Lasker, except those that were
artificially extended due to the infrequency of play during Lasker's time. In fact, had Karpov defeated Kasparov in their first
world championship match, it would almost certainly have eclipsed Fischer's main claim to all-time fame, which was his 6-
0 match scores against Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen. Even if Karpov had waited until Game 48 to reach his sixth win
by a score of 6-2, it would still show up right now as the best match performance rating of all time, better than Fischer's.
And if Karpov had managed to win the match by a 6-0 score before Kasparov reached his first win, then it would have
gone down as the only 2900+ performance rating in Chessmetrics history (as long as the match didn't last longer than 66
games!) Imagine the weight of chess history resting on those players' shoulders at the time, had they only known what
was at stake... (I'm joking!)
Despite the possible interpretation of "dominant" as suggesting that you must be number one, I nevertheless think you
can still be "dominant" even if there is another person who is also very dominant. As an example, in late 1988 there was a
96-point Chessmetrics rating gap between #2 Karpov and the rest of the world, with the #3 spot fluctuating among Valery
Salov, Alexander Beliavsky, Vassily Ivanchuk, and Jan Timman. That is easily the biggest gap between #2 and #3 of all
time. Was Karpov a dominant player then? Ask his opponents.
I don't think it seems right to penalize Karpov for happening to be a contemporary of Kasparov. So I would actually place
Karpov above both Lasker and Fischer in the all-time annals of who was most dominant. If you removed Kasparov from
the picture, think how many Karpov silver medals would turn into gold medals. Eleven, in fact. Look back at that graph
and change eleven of Karpov's twelve silver medals into golds, and remove Garry Kasparov, and then tell me that anyone
else before Anatoly Karpov's time was as dominant as Karpov was, if not for Garry Kasparov. It may seem too outlandish
to talk about "removing Garry Kasparov from the picture", but I think it does help to clarify the issue. There simply is no
other pair of chess players in history who were so jointly dominant. There were fourteen different years where they
Karpov and Kasparov, between them, had the two top overall performances for the year. The next pair who were most
"jointly dominant"? Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi, with five years where they won both the gold and the silver.
And of course, once we stop the pretending, and acknowledge that Kasparov did in fact compete, and dominated even
the mighty Karpov, then I think it's a no-brainer to answer the overriding question of these articles. If I had to hand out
medals for who were the most dominant players of all time, I would give the gold medal to Garry Kasparov, and the silver
medal (fittingly) to Anatoly Karpov. And then the bronze medal goes to either Emanuel Lasker or Bobby Fischer,
depending on the fine print about whether the most important timeframe is their whole career or their peak year.
Admittedly, I think it's pretty clear that for about a year, Bobby Fischer dominated his contemporaries to an extent never
seen before or since. It's also clear that if you exclude Kasparov and Karpov from consideration, Emanuel Lasker was
number one in the world longer than anyone else, and moves up to the top of the list on several other graphs you have
seen throughout the course of these articles. Who deserves the bronze medal. Fischer or Lasker? Lasker or Fischer? And
the debate rages on
I hope you have enjoyed these articles. Please send me email if you'd like to chat about them. In conclusion, let me just
take the opportunity to wish Garry Kasparov well, and to say thanks for all that he has done for chess during his
competitive career. I've greatly enjoyed playing over his games, following his accomplishments, and reading his books,
and I can still do all of those things. As much as I would love for him to remain an active player, I can certainly understand
and respect the desire to move on to bigger and better things. Let us hope that this is not just the end of one great story,
but also the advancement of another, even greater story.


Part II of the series
Part III of the series

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The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part I

The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part I

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The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part II

The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part II

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they both reach the same magnitude.

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The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part III

The Greatest Chess Player of All Time Part III

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into some sort of "yearly world championship" tournament.

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