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:
Was Garry Kasparov the most dominant chess player of all time? If not,
who was?
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 |
Maróczy |
Duras |
Lasker |
Duras |
Lasker |
1910-1919 |
Lasker |
Rubinstein |
Rubinstein |
Tartakower |
Capablanca |
Capablanca |
Lasker |
Janowsky |
Capablanca |
Capablanca |
1920-1929 |
Réti |
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 |
Ståhlberg |
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 José 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.