Best Chess Players Of All Time: Chess is one of the oldest professional games in the world, with the first World Champion being crowned back in 1886. To look back at the history of this wonderful sport and pick out some of its greatest players is a mighty demanding task.
What makes a player one of the greatest of all time? Is it longevity at the top? The number of World Championships won, or something else?
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The three names listed here have shown a combination of long times as World No.1, their mastery over the game, how dominant they were at their peak, and their influence over the sport.
The 3 Best Chess Players Of All Time
1. Garry Kasparov
Regarded by many as the greatest Chess player of all time. The Soviet Union born was the Chess World Champion for a staggering 15 years from 1985 to 2000, from the height of the Cold War to the demise of the USSR. He won six World Championships in the process, joint most for any player.
Garry Kasparov was the face of Chess at the time when the two global powers were looking to one-up each other at every avenue possible. Garry was not only a symbol of pride for the USSR (and later Russia) but was also its greatest international representative.
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But what makes Garry Kasparov the greatest Chess player of all time? Simple, his sheer longevity at the top of the sport at a time when the game was full of some of the all-time greats. After first reaching the World No.1 ranking in 1984, he stayed at the top of the mountain for almost all of his career. He retired in 2006 as the No.1 ranked player. He Kasparov also received the Chess Oscar for the best player of the year a staggering 11 times.
But at times, Garry Kasparov was more than the sport of Chess itself. It was he who took on the IBM Supercomputer ‘Deep Blue’ in 1997 in a highly publicised event (and lost). It was also he who stood up against Vladamir Putin as a presidential candidate in Russia before he was banned for doing so in 2013. And it is he who has been in exile from his homeland since 2013 for raising his voice against the national government.
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2. Magnus Carlsen
The modern face of Chess has also found himself in contention of being one of the greatest players of all time. Magnus Carlsen‘s time on top has also been long and fruitful. First turning World No.1 in January 2010, he has had a firm grip on that spot since 2011 (over 12 years). He has also been a five-time Undisputed World Champion since. His first World Title came at the age of 22, which made him the second-youngest Chess player to become a World Champion after Garry Kasparov.
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The Norwegian great is considered the most versatile player in the history of Chess. He is the only player to be the World Champion in Standard, Rapid, and Blitz Chess. He was also the World No.1 in all three disciplines simultaneously in 2019.
Having turned a Grandmaster at just the age of 13 years four months and 27 days, Carlsen first rocked the chess world when he defeated former world champion Anatoly Karpov at the age of 13, and then went toe-to-toe with arguably the greatest player of all time, Garry Kasparov.
Magnus Carlsen was also the youngest player in history to reach the coveted 2300 Elo rating at the age of 18. He is also the highest-rated player in the history of Chess with a rating of 2889. Currently, Magnus is in the top two in World rankings in every discipline, with him topping the Classical rankings.
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3. Bobby Fischer
The troubled genius of the Chess world, Bobby Fischer’s inclusion in this list might seem bizarre to someone who has only seen the stats of his career, the one-time World Champion who quit the sport after his triumph. But it is when one looks at his legacy, his status as one of the GOATs (greatest of all time) becomes clearer.
To highlight his achievements, he is an eight-time US Champion, and the only player to win the tournament with a perfect score (back in 1862,63). He won the World Championship in 1972 against USSR’s Boris Spassky at the absolute height of Cold War tensions, at a time when Chess was at the peak of its importance on the global scale. His win shattered the perception of the Soviets’ intellectual superiority.
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But after winning the tournament, he became a recluse, turned down millions of dollars in sponsorships and locked himself in his house. While it is said that he went ‘mad’ trying to formulate every chess move in this time of seclusion, the man who emerged from this was not the same. With his troubled political and societal views, Fischer fell out of the public eye. In 1992, the US government also put out an arrest warrant for Bobby after he played a non-sanctioned match against Spassky in a then-embargoed Yugoslavia.
Bobby FIscher’s legacy in Chess lives on with his influence on the sport. Considered a computer-like mind in chess, Fischer’s moves on the board from 50 years ago are still studied to this day. Many claim that no player has ever had such an understanding of a Chessboard. His book ‘My 60 Memorable Games’ is still a required reading in Chess literature. His patent of timed Chess games is used to this day.
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