Most attractive chess players | ChessBase

Who are the most intersting chess players in history, focusing on style, rather than just strength? Who do you count as your favourites? Candidates are surely:

• Paul Morphy (1837–1884) – who was the icon of romantic attacking chess, far ahead of his contemporaries in the 1850s, demolishing Europe’s best and leaving behind so many dazzling games.

• Wilhelm Steinitz (1836–1900) – the first official world champion and father of positional chess, who pioneered the principles of structured buildup and small advantages.

• Emanuel Lasker (1868–1941) – the world champion for 27 years, famous for practical, “psychological” play and choosing lines that were unpleasant for specific opponents.

• José Raúl Capablanca (1888–1942) – the “Human Chess Machine,” feared for his effortless endgame technique and crystal-clear positional style.

• Alexander Alekhine (1892–1946) – the brilliantly aggressive world champion whose games are packed with deep combinations and attacking ideas.

• Mikhail Botvinnik (1911–1995) – the father of the Soviet chess school, who combined scientific preparation, and disciplined training, mentoring stars like Karpov and Kasparov.

• Mikhail Tal (1936–1992) – the “Magician from Riga,” beloved for wild, speculative sacrifices that often looked unsound but posed impossible practical problems.

• Bobby Fischer (1943–2008) – the lone American superstar who crushed Soviet dominance, who won the 1972 “Match of the Century” vs. Spassky.

• Anatoly Karpov (b. 1951) – the positional boa-constrictor who dominated 1970s–80s chess, embodying the pragmatic side of the Soviet school.

• Garry Kasparov (b. 1963) – the charismatic, fiercely combative world champion whose opening preparation and use of computers transformed elite chess.

• Vladimir Kramnik (b. 1975) – the player who ended Kasparov’s reign in 2000 with superb preparation and defensive technique that shaped modern opening theory.

• Viswanathan Anand (b. 1969) – the “Lightning Kid” who played very quickly while maintaining high accuracy, with clear positional play plus explosive tactical shots.

• Magnus Carlsen (b. 1990) – the “Mozart of chess,” who has dominated the game with a universal style, grinding small edges and winning equal endgames.

And how about contemporary players like Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Gukesh Dommaraju, R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Alireza Firouzja? Or any others?

What does chess AI think?

Ed Schröder, Dutch software developer and author of the programs REBEL and ​Chess System Tal, came out of temperory retirement to develop a tool that evaluates games from general databases – specifically the best games played by humans and computers, from ChessBase Mega Database. The tool is called Best of Chess, and we described it in a previous report. It extracts the most spectacular games from a PGN database, with each game evaluated on three features:

• King Attack
• Material Sacrifice
• Length of the game (the smaller the number of moves in a game the higher the bonus).

Ed ran his algorithms on the many million of high-quality games contained in Mega Database, and it identified the 50 players it considered most attractive. We will not (yet) tell you the order of the players, but list them here alphabetically:

Please tell us which ten players you consider most attractive.

We will compare your choices with those of the the chess AI.