best italian game player

which GM do you think played the italian game (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4) the best?

here's a list of a few GMs that played/play this opening:

Mikhail Chigorin
Gary Kasparov
Vladimir Kramnik
Paul Morphy
Nigel Short
Henri Grob
John Nunn
Wilhelm Steinitz
Saviely Tartakower
Josh Waitzkin

my vote is for morphy. what do you think?

You left out Jesus.

greco

i thought jesus played the bird.

Jesus played faith-based chess. He just closed his eyes and hoped.

Josh Waitzkin isn´t a grandmaster, he´s an international master. And he really shouldn´t be mentioned in the same sentence as some other players in the list.

yeah you're probably right.

so only one vote so far...

Bobby Fischer should be included as he also played the Italian.

i wasn't sure if he did or not. i didn't have any games in my database by him playing the italian.

There is a famous game in which he played the Steinitz Variation 9.Nh3.

yeah i'd really like to get a database of his games.

800+ fischer games

http://www.chess.com/download/download_file.html?id=811

I like Morphys Italian games. he had a lot of passion for the Evans Gambit and it shows

Karpov. And Tiviakov is pretty fearsome with it too.

Morphy ftw!

nice :)

yeah i love the evan's gambit and morphy played it extremely well.

i only found 9 games in that database where fischer played the italian game. however it did include this nice game:

nigel short and john nunn have excellent records with it.