1. The true Chess World Champions are the holders of the Traditional Title that originated with Steinitz and passed on in faithful succession to Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik, and Anand. The sacredness of this Title is what makes it so valuable and the Chess World so unique in the World of Sports; and in my opinion all serious chessplayers and fans should defend its legitimacy and continuity.

2. How does one become the true Chess World Champion? In general and by Tradition, by beating the previous Title holder one on one in a Match! Matches are preferred over Tournaments because of the Tradition of the World Championship Succession and because it would preempt the possibility of connivance among the participants of a Tournament to pre-select an eventual Winner by throwing away games and pre-planning grandmaster draws.

The only exceptions to this rule:

A. In case where the Candidates and World Champion participate in an event that all the participants agree to be a World Championship event because of extraordinary circumstances. Thus, the 1948 World Championship Tournament was justifiable because of the death of the Title holder Alekhine, and the Winner Botvinnik was the true Successor to Alekhine. Likewise, the 2007 World Championship Tournament was justifiable under the extraordinary circumstances of the Chessworld trying to heal its internal rift over the 1993 Kasparov Schism; and the Winner Anand was the true Successor to Kramnik who also participated and placed second. Anand himself became the true World Champion in this 2007 Tournament and not in 2000 when he won a knock-out Tournament that FIDE deemed as a 'world championship'. Karpov lost his Title to Successor Kasparov in 1985, and never regained it in the 1990s events that FIDE labeled as 'world championships' but held outside the Tradition of World Championship Succession. All FIDE Champions that emerged outside World Championship Traditional Succession elaborated on above, strong as they were, were not true World Champions (eg., Bogolyubov in 1928, Khalifman in 1999, Ponomariov in 2002, Kasimdzhanov in 2004, Topalov in 2005).

B. In case the previous Titleholder defaults an event that by and large the Chessworld deems as a World Championship event in the Tradition of the World Championship Succession. Thus, Karpov was the true successor to Fischer who defaulted their World Championship Match in 1975.

2. The strongest player in chess history? I really don't know, and you will find as many subtleties in answers as there are chess fans.

In my view, we have to take this question in the context of the limits of the human Anatomy and Physiology. It's the same context that we should consider for any human sport or competitive event. A concrete example would be the one hundred meter dash. The human body is designed such that the limit it can run is about 9 to 10 seconds for this event, and this forms a Stonewall for runners. In order for a human being to run faster, we would have to redesign the human anatomy into that of say a cheetah. Even the most mediocre cheetah, because of its specialized anatomy, would easily beat any Olympic sprint Champion, because the cheetah anatomy has a limiting Stonewall farther the the human anatomy when it comes to sprinting. For this reason, I also doubt that any modern day pianist plays better than Franz Liszt, for the reason that Liszt seemed to have hit the limiting Stonewall of the human Anatomy and Physiology (musical ability and finger dexterity) when it comes to playing the piano. One can rev up the human Physiology, say with steroids, and obtain slightly faster runners, but this regimen would have an eventual stonewall too; the same way that we could rev up the human chessplaying ability with computer assistance and rigorous training methods ala Botvinnik.

Thus I seriously doubt if any modern day chess player can play much better than Morphy or Capablanca. These guys seemed to have hit the limiting stonewall of human chessplaying ability in their era. Modern professional chessplayers are now revved up with computers of course, but if we take the old 'what if' scenario of a 1920 version of Capablanca transported to the present era on a time machine and given a two year intensive course in computer assisted training on all the modern opening novelties, I doubt very much if any super GM could push this Capa over so easily. And given that Capa in 1920 was at the peak of his strength after just demolishing GM strength Kostic in a match, and would still have not tasted what it feels like to be World Champion, he would probably have all the motivation to beat up every GM and grab the World Championship himself.

So who was the strongest player in history? As I said, I don't know, but I would guess that the likes of Morphy, Capablanca, Fischer, Kasparov, and Karpov would be close to the limiting Stonewall of human chessplaying ability.

(I am not mentioning the likes of Anand and Kramnik who are still active and who can therefore still improve their playing strength. Maybe in the future an operation can be done to interphase the human brain with a computer, or a super mentat bred in clone vats with the mental capacity of a calculator, but that's still the stuff of science fiction. As of now the present human Nervous System sets a definitive limit to how well a human being can play chess.)