Myself I don't really see the point of directly comparing Carlsen (or any other contemporary player) to past masters. As already mentioned previously, today's players are standing in the shoulders of the past giants.

It is more interesting if we take today's top players and try to fit them into say Lasker's era.

It is there where maybe Carlsen is more of a Lasker and Kramnik is more of maybe a Capa and Aronian is more of a ..., etc.

MartinC wrote on 10/19/12 at 10:03:59:

Why not? 

chk wrote on 10/19/12 at 08:16:29:

A few other interesting quotes of the same document:
'his knowledge was incredibly extensive for his time'
There is no doubt that today Carlsens knowledge is many times better than Laskers. Very normal considering the fact that Carlsen was able to learn from almost 100 extra years of chess.
' Lasker began to realise that dynamics played an important role but it did not form the basis of his games, he just kept it in mind and sometimes used it.
From any topplayer today, dynamics play a crucial role. Also here you can see that Carlsen plays on a different level than Lasker.

You see indeed in Carlsens play something of Lasker, Capablance, Karpov,.... However he is surely playing on a level above these former worldchampions.

ErictheRed wrote on 10/17/12 at 19:46:05:


I don't know about this paragraph EricTheRed, isn't it fairly well established that Lasker was like this? He was said to have accepted it himself also. Over time, old portrayals have been re-evaluated and the same picture of Lasker is still stated. You don't have to understand the chess fully, you could research how great players assessed him, that's a legitimate way to find information on him. Serious people have studied it a lot, it's not just lazy journalists. 
 

I agree with CHK, and respectfully disagree with Ametanoitos.  I think the whole "chess psychology" thing with Lasker is way over-blown, probably from lazy chess journalists and writers that didn't actually understand what he was doing at the board.  Practical, absolutely; psychologist?  I don't really think so.  I don't think that he remained the strongest player in the world for what--27 years?  I'm too lazy to check--without having some deep chess understanding.  When he chose an unconventional continuation, in my opinion, it was usually due to situations on the board, trying to maximize his chances of obtaining the result he wanted, and not overly concerned with "psychology," in the sense that I don't think his approach varied considerably from opponent to opponent.

I do feel that Botvinnik and Tal were both the "psychological" types and Smyslov was not, for a point of reference.  Of course all players engage in some amount of psychological fighting...

My gut feeling is mostly that both players were extremely non-dogmatic and blazed new trails, interpreted positions differently than many of their peers, etc.  This leads contemporaries that don't fully understand their chess to say that they are deliberately playing inferior moves, using tricks and psychology, etc.

I'm too weak a player to really understand the large body of Carlsen's and Lasker's games though, so who knows.

Afterthought: I think something similar with Fischer as well.  He often played moves that his contemporaries didn't understand, like that famous Nxd7 (Knight takes "bad" Bishop) game where it was reported that all the Russian spectators breathed a sigh of relief--Fischer just made a mistake!  But he didn't, he won the game with ease.  It's just that Fischer had a greater/different understanding than them, he changed the game, and it took another generation (Karpov's I guess) to fully assimilate his ideas and make them look "normal."

No, in my opinion Lasker was a different thing. Lasker was a chameleon, he could play wild tactical games and very boring ones also. Lasker was playing with the mind of the opponent. Carlsen is not like this. Carlsen is the "active positional" player that modern chess loves so much (because this style is not reckless but also puts enormous pressure to the opponent without the need of "Topalovian" or "Kasparovian"-like calculation). Carlsen plays "objective" chess according to his style. For Lasker there was simply no "objectivity", only practicality. Carlsen is a practical player but not of the kind of Lasker, not at all. (In my humble opinion of course)

WSS wrote on 10/17/12 at 15:03:05:


I was going to point out the same thing, more or less.  I'm not a strong enough player to seriously comment on Carlsen's play, but I wonder whether he does some deep and serious thinking about which types of positions will be uncomfortable for which opponents, with less regard to "theoretical status." 

I still highly doubt that Carlsen thinks he's playing suboptimal moves; my personal view is more along the lines that humans are quite dogmatic, and there are more ways of playing positions well than we realize.  This seems to be backed up by computers in many cases, though I don't like to claim computer evaluations as some sort of gold standard in chess truth.  Still, in many positions a computer will give 5-10 continuations that are all within 0.15 "points" of each other, whereas in the same positions most human players will only consider a couple of candidate moves based on the patterns we've accumulated in the past, having read what the "proper" way of playing a position is in My System, etc.   

I think that Carlsen is, in some ways, showing us a new sort of System, where he has found less known but equally viable ways of playing many positions.  But this is just speculation on my part; I'm not strong enough to really understand.