How strong were rennaisance Italian masters like Polerio and Greco?

I just replayed some games of rennaisance Italian master Polerio at http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1336258

You can check this game below:

I once scanned a bunch of Greco's games with PGN Spy.  His stats came out similar to modern players in the FIDE 2000-2100 range.

Thank you very much for this information! Pretty not bad to be in this rating range before 400 years. His play is probably a bit influenced by worse chess skills of his opponents, so I think he did some unusual and even unsound moves to complicate things (expecting his opponents will go wrong eventhough if they react well his position is worsened)...so it seems he played the man and not the board sometimes...Anyway he was a creative and gifted player then, I guess on my level I can learn a lot from him if analyzing his play by the computer.

This game, played between Polerio and Don Lorenzo before Jacomo Buoncompagno, the Duc di Sora, comes to us in a poem from the so-called Bone manuscript, circa 1572-1884, consisting of 36 verses, 8 lines each.
The first two stanzas describe the board and pieces. Then Polerio is described hiding a white pawn in one hand and a red pawn in the other, letting his opponent choose to see which pieces he would have. Lorenzo picked the white pawn - this gave Polerio, with red pieces, the first move.  the poem then describes the game above.

Thank you very much for these interesting informations! I read an article written by you about this rennaisance chess here: http://www.angelfire.com/nj/becjosh/chesshistory/chesshistory3/earlyModernWriterssalvioCarreraGreco.pdf It was also very interesting.

I read Gioachimo Greco was the first professional player and he was payed 300 scudi by his sponsors (nobles) so he can focus on chess research - don´t you know how much was that 300 scudi? Probably decent income, like few times better than the income of average craftsman?

I found an excerpt from Greco´s work translated to early English by Francis Beale here:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A41975.0001.001/1:8?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

There are many game examples but the chess notation is different from today´s times so it is not easy to read (they use the terminology like "the king´s rook first house" - it seems "house" is used for the rows so for example "king´s rook first house" meens h8)

I also read that they played chess matches with bets in rennaisance Italy - so it was possible to win money betting on the winner - was it the most common way the chess was played by those well known players those days?

It's doubtful that Greco was the first professional player. Polerio of Lanciano who preceded Greco and whose game appears above- a game played that gaem in his youth -became a favorite of Giacomo Buoncompagno, a wealthy aristocrat with an affinity for chess. The Duke put Polerio up in a rent-free villa in Giantro with an annual stipend of 300 crowns. During that time Polerion was considered the strongest player in Rome (until he lost a match to Girolamo Casio of Sicily, in 1606, after which Cascio supplanted Polerio as the favorite of the Duke of Sora (Buoncompagno).
Polerio got his start in chess as the servent and apprentice to Giovanni Leonardo di Bona and, along with Tomaso Capuo, accompanied Leonardo to Madrid to play Ruy Lopez and Ceron. Leonard was a lawyer but received a good chess income from patrons such as the Duke of Urbino, the Duke d'Ossuna and the Prince of Bisignano. Paolo Boi, who also showed up in Madrid to play Lopez and Ceron, was a close friend of Leonardo and considered his equal as a chess player. Boi also received a stipend of 300 crowns per annun from the Duke of Urbino.  According to Carrera (considered Boi's and Leonardo's equal), Boi earned over 30,000 crowns (minus gifts) in the course of his association with Urbano.
So professional players were not uncommon during the Renaissance. It's likely there was betting on the games by both the players and the spectators and sponsors. The players were often given bonuses for winning.

It's hard to determine value of different currencies in different times and different economies. I once read that the average income in Venice during the 16th century was about 20 scudi (scudi is the plural of scudo), but who knows?
Leonardo da Vinci, who kept detailed records,  was paid between 50 and 100 ducats/year but when he worked for the king of France during the latter part of his life he earned 400 ducats/year. A ducat, it is estimated, was worth 2 crown. If that's the case, Leonardo da Vinci earned anywhere from 100-800 crown/year. Leonardo also seems to have put a scudo as just slightly less than a ducat or a florin. So his 400 ducts would have been roughly 360 scudi.  What this all means, you have to decide for yourself.

How many of Polerio's games still exist?

Only a handful.

v.d. Linde's "Das Schachspiel des XVI. Jahrhunderts" gives us about a half dozen of Polerio's games.
But Polerio left several MSs one of which, edited in book form by J. A. leon, contains 46 games (many are just varations of the same games), and probably, like Greco's, was intended as teaching material. 

So probably not much data I can find to run his games through PGN Spy.  The data was a bit sparse with Greco too, and I could only find a very small handful of games from Ruy Lopez de Segura.

Moves 16 and 17 are silly bad, but it's hard to compare to modern standards where we value technically correct play over flashy-but-bad moves.

Greco's "games" were probably not actual games ever played by him (though they could have been)  but rather clever ideas he could sell to sponsors or give as presents. 

The practice of recording games didn't really catch on until 1836 when William Greenwood Walker published the Labourdonnais-M'Donnell match he helped record in 1834 [William Greenwood Walker, George Walker and William Lewis all recorded games from that series and Lewis published 50 of them independently.];  for instance many of the known Philidor games were recorded in his later life and only because George Atwood.  
George Walker wrote: "Philidor's visits to this metropolis were spread over a long series of years—from 1747, to his death in 1795—and during that time, he must have played many hundred games of the highest order. It is, unfortunately, too notorious, that most of the chief Chessplayers are careless about noting down their games ; and in almost every case of the preservation of similar relics, we are indebted more to the zeal of the bystander, than to the generosity of the author. Philidor was rarely, if ever, known to record games of his own playing, and the same indifference has been since remarked in La Bourdonnais, Le Breton des Chapelles, and other distinguished players. "

Really, any attempt to somehow appraise the works of these early players is marred by the uncertainty of the games themselves.  But even if we were able to get a hold of a mass of bonafide games,  comparing them in any way to modern games, i.e applying objective analysis,  can only result in an unfair prejudice against these players.  While objective data has its place, it's only plays a small role in examining chess' developmental reality.

Regardless of whether Greco's games were played or composed, to come up with moves resulting in similar stats to a modern FIDE 2000 player is pretty impressive.  But the sample size is smallish.  It does, however, suggest that if he were to somehow come back to life and walk into a modern open tournament, while he might get tripped up in an unfamiliar opening, he'd probably be a handful for a typical club player and could sometimes put up a good fight against an FM.

Of course, he contributed to building the foundation that modern players are standing on.

Note that in the past there was no time control as such, and players would often be allowed to spend as much time thinking their moves through as they need. Some games lasted a few days in a row. It's really impossible to compare their play in these conditions with modern games under strict time control. If you give, say, Carlsen as much time per move as he wants, then his "effective rating" will suddenly jump by a few hundred.

I think they were at around the level of modern ~2000 players, but it is hard to say for certain, because they lacked a decent opposition, and there were very few players they could truly demonstrate their potential against.

ciarli,

Greco was born in Celico, a town in the province of Cosenza in Calabria, a region in the "boot" of Italy, hence his nickname, Il Calabrese (though he was sometimes called Cusentino - a nickname, not a given name, as I've seen mentioned in several places).  Giovanni Leonardo and Michele di Mauro were also from that region which, while one of the oldest civilized areas of what is now Italy, during the time all these players lived, was an oppressed region and mostly an area of poverty.  It's no wonder people tried to escape it.  When Greco left his homeland in 1621, he never returned. It's highly doubtful, almost certain, that Greco ever even visited Greece.

Very impressive knowledge, batgirl. Tell us something more .

I really don't think Carlsen needs the justification of more hurried playing conditions to improve his comparison to 15th and 16th century players.  In fact, the playing conditions may have been more difficult in those bygone days not only it was before real theory existed, but more so because those times were without any codification of rules.  Even in Italy, the castling rules may have varied from province to province, from the medieval "king's leap" to "free castling" to "regular casting."  Italy didn't observe "en passant,"  but Spain and Portugal did.  In some parts of Italy, once a King was checked he lost the right to castle; in other parts, as well as in Spain and Portugal, this wasn't the case.  Actually, that now archaic rule led to some bizarre games since the players at that time, according to Alessandro Salvio talking about the players in Naples,, considered in many openings that a King check - resulting in long the right to castle- was sometimes worth an entire piece, so the defender might offer a piece to avoid a check, while the attacker may have offered a piece sac to check the enemy King.  

Yeah, give Carlsen as much time as he wants, and he'd probably score pretty well against stockfish... by which I mean a lot of draws. Nothing like what comparing his FIDE rating to the computer's CCRL rating would make you think.

My point was that a given player plays effectively at different strength, depending on the time control. Of course, Carlsen doesn't need such justifications, but, again, to properly compare the strength of Carlsen to that of Polerio or Greco, we need to study their games played in similar/equal conditions, including the time control, which seems impossible with the limited data on their play we have.

Also, since you mentioned the different knowledge availability, I think there are two different questions we can ask, and they may have very different answers.

1. How strong were Polerio and Greco, in the conditions they played, compared to Carlsen, in the conditions he plays?

2. If we were to give all the information and tools Carlsen has to Polerio and Greco, after a few years of study how strong would they be, compared to him?

We can see that it is very hard to make a proper comparison here, because of how different the times are. Were Greek Olympic Pankration winners better fighters than Mike Tyson or Evander Holyfield were at their best? Were Roman legionnaires better trained than American marines are? How good was Newton as a scientist compared to Einstein? We can write tomes exploring these questions, because they are incredibly complex, with a lot of variables - this isn't something that can be answered with "500 less ELO".

I don't think are any record of serious games by Greco. All his games were compositions Though there is no proof but come on, just look at the games)  but Botvinnik considered him the first professional player.

Just read this thread now. So interesting! Thanks to batgirl and everyone who contributed!