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I'm not familiar enough with Morphy's games to have an opinion about his number/rate of blunders. But the allegation was that he had a significant pattern of such things, and listing one blunder by Anand, one blunder by Capablanca etc. isn't an answer to that. It's like saying, "Nobody's perfect, so nobody is better than anybody else." Oh, come on.
Wouldn't it be odd that people (like Fischer) would respect someone with a 'significant pattern' of blundering?
Thousands (if not millions) of chess players, for 150 years??
Wouldn't it be odd that someone could beat all the best players of their era (except Staunton of course
) if they don't see mate in 2?
Even if you're not familar enough with Morphy's games, I didn't think I really had to explicitly state that
of course Morphy didn't usually hang pieces or miss easy mates. The guy beat Anderssen in a match. He beat everybody in a match!
He gave pawn and move to anyone in the world.
Does that sound like a guy that blunders frequently?
I didn't think I had to even bother refuting the strong claim that Morphy has a tendency to play that poorly.
So, I took the time to address the more interesting form of the argument rather than attacking a straw man.
I assumed that everyone would agree that Morphy didn't
usually do such things but only that he did so from time to time and that the "greatest player of all time" ought not do that sort of thing. Hence my listing of the "greatest" candidates and their gigantic failures. I was trying to point out that all the great champions have their bad days, so lets not boot Morphy off the list for that. That seems like a pretty reasonable argument to me. But, of course, I'm a bit biased on the matter...
By the way, Morphy died on this date (July 10th) back in 1884.
Its pretty amazing that there's still so much talk about the guy and people debating how he stacks up against today's greats.
Cheers,
Nietzsche
I was making a point about a particular argument of yours, and saying that it was a red herring. You're doing it again, by the way. "Everybody has bad days" indeed, but that's irrelevant to the question of whether Morphy blundered much more frequently than those other guys.
Naturally other things (like Fischer's view) can be taken into account.
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Who is the greatest player of all time? (Read 39260 times)
