The Playing Strength and Style of Wilhelm Steinitz

Statistical rating systems are unkind to Steinitz. "Warriors of the Mind" gives him a ranking of 47th, below several obscure Soviet grandmasters; Chessmetrics places him only 15th on its all-time list. Chessmetrics penalizes players who play infrequently; opportunities for competitive chess were infrequent in Steinitz's best years, and Steinitz had a few long absences from competitive play (1873–1876, 1876–1882, 1883–1886, 1886–1889). However, in 2005 Chessmetrics' author, Jeff Sonas, wrote an article which examined various ways of comparing the strength of "world number one" players, using data provided by Chessmetrics, and found that: Steinitz was further ahead of his contemporaries in the 1870s than Bobby Fischer  was in his peak period (1970–1972); that Steinitz had the third-highest total number of years as the world's top player, behind Emanuel Lasker and Garry Kasparov ; and that Steinitz placed 7th in a comparison of how long players were ranked in the world's top three. Between his victory over Anderssen (1866) and his loss to Emanuel Lasker (1894), Steinitz won all his "normal" matches, sometimes by wide margins; and his worst tournament performance in that 28-year period was third place in Paris (1867). (He also lost two handicap matches and a match by telegraph in 1890 against Mikhail Chigorin, where Chigorin was allowed to choose the openings in both games and won both.)

Initially Steinitz played in the all-out attacking style of contemporaries like Anderssen, and then changed to the positional style with which he dominated competitive chess in the 1870s and 1880s. Max Euwe wrote, "Steinitz aimed at positions with clear-cut features, to which his theory was best applicable." However, he retained his capacity for brilliant attacks right to the end of his career; for example in the 1895 Hastings tournament (when he was 59) he beat von Bardeleben in a spectacular game in which in the closing stages Steinitz deliberately exposed all his pieces to attack simultaneously (except his king, of course). His most significant weaknesses were his habits of playing "experimental" moves and getting into unnecessarily difficult defensive positions in top-class competitive games.