That article from 2006 is interesting but there have been many other attempts at such an answer and they don't agree on Capablanca.
Starting with CAPS which came out in 2016 and takes advantage of more than ten year's progress in computer chess evaluation to conclude that Carlsen is the most accurate.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/who-was-the-best-world-chess-champion-in-history
And many others:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history
Thanks for sharing, those were really interesting articles! Only shame that Carlsen was not included in the first one. Capablancas score on both of those is really impressive, considering the era that he played in. I guess there is reason why a lot of masters recommend beginners to take a look at Capablancas games. Simple, but superbly effective. However, it's still up to a debate whether you could call Capablanca the best ever based on those results. After all, the competition has gotten stronger and stronger every year, and during Capablancas time, there wasn't really strong enough chess scene to challenge him properly. Not Capablancas fault of course, but compared to other people on those lists it's worth noticing. For example Kasparov had to play against both Karpov and Kramnik at their peak. And if you look at the games and players of today, the competition is even tougher. Carlsen has to play continuously against players like Caruana, Karjakin, Mamedyarov, Anand, Liren and so on. All of them would've probably beaten most of World Champions before Kasparovs era, due to game getting more and more theoretical (mostly due to the help of engines).
It is a bad way to figure out the best player. Just straight up bad.
It will probably will say that I play better than, say, Mikhail Tal.
That article from 2006 is interesting but there have been many other attempts at such an answer and they don't agree on Capablanca.
Starting with CAPS which came out in 2016 and takes advantage of more than ten year's progress in computer chess evaluation to conclude that Carlsen is the most accurate.
https://www.chess.com/article/view/who-was-the-best-world-chess-champion-in-history
And many others:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_top_chess_players_throughout_history
Thank you for those links. Great articles!
One point Ben Finegold made that I had never thought about before was that all great chessplayers from say Capablanca on have had the games of other great players to learn from. Except Morphy. So while Morphy didn't play against very good competition, it also must be appreciated that he was that good with no real past games to learn from, or computers obviously.
So how did he get so good?
Carlsen Was not World Champion by 2006, they could have not included him.
The CAPS study seems intrinsically flawed because it is based on computer matches. The fact that modern GMs who prepare with computers very deep into the middlegame match computer moves more than older GMs does not mean the modern GMs are stronger.
The modern GMs probably are stronger, but you would need to find some way to eliminate all the computer preparation to prove the modern GMs are stronger at finding good moves than the old GMs were.
really? but it should be updated, since chess engine has evolved drastically in the past 10 years. But I have analyzed tal. He was perfect in stockfish analysis
The CAPS study seems intrinsically flawed because it is based on computer matches. The fact that modern GMs who prepare with computers very deep into the middlegame match computer moves more than older GMs does not mean the modern GMs are stronger.
The modern GMs probably are stronger, but you would need to find some way to eliminate all the computer preparation to prove the modern GMs are stronger at finding good moves than the old GMs were.
While it's true that computer analysis is advantageous, it's unclear how much the evaluation of the playing strength of the greats of the past would change if they too had computer analysis available to them.
We can only speculate, but it likewise seems intrinsically flawed to evaluate players who had the advantage of studying master games with players who did not. How good would Bobby Fischer have been were he not able to study copious volumes of master games? Consider Morphy and Steinitz who would probably be at the greatest disadvantage, not being able to "stand on the shoulders of those who came before" as it were.
In the end, we'll never know who could've been the greatest and that's a different topic than who IS the greatest.
And the winner is...
Capablanca
With caveats. Of all of the world champions, he played in the simplest positions. But of course, part of that was his incredibly clean playing style. OTOH, champions who played very complex games like Tal and Fischer scored much lower. But possibly created a bigger challenge for their human opponents.
Was surprised to see that when you factored in game complexity, it was Kramnik who finished first.
I was also surprised to see that Steinitz's games were the most complex.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220174548_Computer_Analysis_of_World_Chess_Champions