Who Is the Best Chess Player Ever?

Chess has been played for 1,500 years, and somewhere in that history is the best player of all time. The last two centuries have given us geniuses of the game. In this era of professional chess, grandmasters have come and gone. Which one stands out as the best chess player ever?

How to Rank the Greatest of All Time

Greatest of All Time (GOAT) debates are popular discourse in sports. Fans will argue over Messi vs. Ronaldo, Djokovic vs. Federer vs. Nadal, Jordan vs. LeBron, and chess is no different.

The top contenders are no secret: chess grandmasters Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, and Garry Kasparov. We’ll look at these claims in more detail, but what qualifies a player for the title?

• Ranking and Titles. The classical chess rating is usually considered most important, but rankings and the meaning of titles have changed over the years. And factors like rating inflation and changing rules may affect the objectivity of this metric.

• Computer Accuracy. Today, with high-powered chess engines, games can be evaluated to see how closely they conform to the top engine moves. This is quite a strong and objective measure of how well a player performs across their career.  

• Brilliance and style. Most great players have beautiful games and moves that support their claim to chess greatness.

• Competition. One way to define greatness is to look at how chess players performed against the other masters of their era. Many had to face incredible odds to become champions.

The balances of each factor change from player to player. Mikhail Tal was a dazzling and brilliant player, while Fischer was astonishingly accurate. For some, the greatness of a player does not come down to statistics, but to a perfect combination of qualities and abilities.

Chess Now Vs Then

One of the tricky things about ranking chess players is how much the game has changed over time. In the Romantic Era, chess was about aggression, brilliance, tactics, and gambits. Today, in what we might call the Engine Era, chess is about preparation, calculation, and, at the highest level, minimizing the small lapses that win or lose supergrandmaster games. 

The reality is that chess players one hundred years ago could not compete with those today. For some, this means excluding the historical greats, but others like to consider how well a player performed in the context of their time. 

Overall, so many of the best players will never face each other, let alone in their prime. To know who would win in a face-to-face match, we are left to speculate.

Runners-Up: Early Geniuses and 20th Century Masters

Though it feels wrong to describe these incredible chess players as runners-up, this is accurate in the context of picking the best-ever chess player. Each was a fantastic player. Some had extraordinary eras of supremacy, and others showed remarkable natural abilities without the resources we have today. However, they are unlikely to be chosen as the best of all time.

Paul Morphy 

• Nationality: American 
• Unofficial World Champion

Paul Morphy was certainly the greatest of his era. Romantic chess was a different game from the one we know today, and Morphy played it spectacularly. He introduced the world to extraordinary tactics, sacrifices, and checkmates. The beauty of his Opera Game has made it one of the most famous games of all time.

José Raúl Capablanca

• Nationality: Cuban
• World Champion: 1921 - 1927

Capablanca was fast, brilliant, and a genius of endgames. He was known for his natural ability to look at a position and find the best move in seconds. His most astonishing statistic is an eight-year win streak in tournament games. In the Championship match of 1921, he ended Lasker’s 27-year reign as world champion and began his own.

Mikhail Tal

• Nationality: Latvian
• World Champion: 1960 - 1961

What Tal lacked in statistics, he made up for in brilliance. Tal's games are reviewed, discussed, and analyzed again and again because of their undeniable magic. His vision and depth enabled him to make moves that, at first, appear to be absurd sacrifices. Only as the moves play out do we begin to understand what he has calculated. 

Anatoly Karpov

• Nationality: Russian
• World Champion: 1975 - 1985

Karpov’s decade of dominance between Fischer and Kasparov places him as one of the greatest. With these players on either side of his era, his abilities are sometimes overshadowed. 

While he won the world championship in 1975 after Fischer forfeited the title, he retained it with a relentlessness that soon silenced critics. For the next decade, he won practically every tournament he entered. The sheer number of chess matches he won puts him among the greats. 

Honorable Mentions and Recent Greats

There are many more players commonly mentioned in lists of the greatest. This includes other exceptional 20th-century grandmasters:

• Emanuel Lasker was the longest-running world champion (27 years). He had an extraordinary chess career and was also a mathematician and philosopher.
• Alexander Alekhine defeated Capablanca in 1927 and reigned as world champion for over 16 years in total. His aggressive and dynamic style still inspires players today. 
• Mikhail Botvinnik’s influence on the game is immense. Aside from an exceptional record and World Champion title, he was instrumental in creating the scientific method of chess study and preparation that inspired later champions. 

Dominant players of the last few decades are:

• Judit Polgar, certainly the best female player of all time, and universally a great of the game. 
• Vladimir Kramnik, a world champion for seven years, faced an exceptional group of competitors. 
• Viswanathan Anand, following Kramnik, defended his world championship title three times and lost it only to Magnus Carlsen. 

All the names we’ve mentioned are exceptional players who have contributed enormous amounts to the game. Nevertheless, few will argue that they can match the abilities and accomplishments of the following three. 

Related: Chess: The Difference Between the Genders

The Top Contenders

Three names come up again and again in the greatest ever debate. If you ask a top grandmaster today for their pick of the best ever, chances are they will give you one of these names. 

Magnus Carlsen

• Nationality: Norwegian 
• World Champion: 2013 - 2023

Among chess grandmasters in the world today, there are few (but not none) who deny that Magnus Carlsen has been the best chess player of the last 14-years. He has held the top ranking since 2011, becoming world champion in 2013 and defending the title four times until 2023. Since then, his career has not been without controversy, but he has constantly shown a near absolute dominance in every form of the game.

It is likely today that the standard of chess, and therefore his competition, is the strongest in history. Achieving the highest-ever chess rating and breaking records as a matter of course, his candidacy for the title is clear.

Bobby Fischer

• Nationality: American
• World Champion: 1972 - 1975

Robert Fischer has a claim to be the best chess player ever, not only because of his brilliance on the board, but because of the competition he faced. 

At his peak, Fischer was unmatched. He is often credited with being the sole force behind ending the Soviet chess dominance of the 20th century. Not only that, but he analyzed and studied largely on his own against teams of grandmasters. In 1971, he stormed the candidates' tournament and went on to win the world championship match against Boris Spassky after a terrible blunder and absence in the first and second games.

His Game of the Century, played at the age of 13, is a symbol of the extraordinary chess he would play in his career. The games were not only accurate; they showed a special kind of genius. While his chess career was certainly a rise and fall, at his best, many believe he was the greatest of all time. 

Garry Kasparov

• Nationality: Russian
• World Champion: 1985–1993 (Undisputed) | 1993–2000 (Classical)

World Champion at 22 and holding the top ranking for nearly 2 decades, Garry Kasparov has perhaps the strongest claim to the title. He dominated not only his own generation but also those of others. He put an end to Karpov’s reign in 1985 and successfully defended his title against Viswanathan Anand as late as 1995. His playing style was aggressive and dynamic. Importantly, he also introduced the chess world to an unprecedented level of preparation that would help shape the next generation of chess players. 

In contrast to Carlsen, Kasparov fiercely contested his world championship title, and his absolute passion for the game is one of many reasons he is considered the best ever.

Final Pick 

My position is that Kasparov remains in first place until we have a full picture of Carlsen’s career. To imagine an objective scenario in which both players met at their prime with the same resources is pure speculation. Instead, we have to imperfectly gauge the strength of their careers. Until Carlsen can maintain dominance for Kasparov’s two decades, or exceed him in some other way, the question at the very least remains open.