2/20/2026 – Who is your favourite chess player – we asked you recently. Whose games do you enjoy the most? We got a lot of feedback, and will show you the choices that human chess players make – and compare them with what a chess AI chooses, after it has played through and evaluated millions of games.
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The question we asked our readers was: Who are the most intersting chess players in history, focusing on style, rather than just strength? Who do you count as your favourites? We listed a number of candidates: Paul Morphy, Wilhelm Steinitz, Emanuel Lasker, José Raúl Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Mikhail Botvinnik, Mikhail Tal, Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, Magnus Carlsen, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana, Gukesh Dommaraju, R Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi, Alireza Firouzja.
This is the list we got from the feedback of our readers:
Ed Schröder, the Dutch software developer, used his program Best of Chess, which we described in an earlier report, to extract the most spectacular games from chess history, evaluating them by 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 players it considered most attractive. This is the top 50 list generated by Best of Chess:
Here's a page that lists the results with all the individual factors that contributed to the final evaluation. Here's an explanation on how Best of Chess conducts its evaluation. And here you can directly compare the rankings of both groups:
Humans
AI
01. Fischer
02. Carlsen
03. Kasparov
04. Aljechine
05. Karpov
06. Tal
07. Capablanca
08. Keres
09. Spassky
10. Polgar
11. Smyslov
12. Rubinstein
13. Petrosian
14. Morphy
15. Lasker
16. Kramnik
17. Korchnoi
18. Botvinnik
19. Topalov
20. Shirov
21. Anderssen
22. Anand
23. Steinitz
24. Bronstein
25. Timman
26. Nezhmetdinov
27. Ivanchuk
28. Zukertort
29. Vachier-Lagrave
30. Tartakower
31. Svidler
32. Rapport
33. Planinc
34. Niemann
35. Miles
36. Lasker
37. Hou Yifan
38. Geller
39. Firouzja
40. Euwe
41. Chigorin
42. Boleslavsky
43. Bohatirchuk
01. Morphy
02. Nimzowitsch
03. Anderssen
04. Reti
05. Zukertort
06. Steinitz
07. Chigorin
08. Lasker
09. Alekhine
10. Euwe
11. Tarrasch
12. Rubinstein
13. Tal
14. Fischer
15. Shirov
16. Spassky
17. Polgar
18. Capablanca
19. Kasparov
20. Wei
21. Bronstein
22. Geller
23. Anand
24. Botvinnik
25. Van Foreest
26. Keres
27. Erigaisi
28. Reshevsky
29. Kramnik
30. Petrosian
31. Aronian
32. Ding
33. Gukesh
34. Keymer
35. Carlsen
36. Kortschnoj
37. Svidler
38. Topalov
39. Niemann
40. Adams
41. Praggnanandhaa
42. Giri
43. Firouzja
Ed created a page with games of four top scorers. The values for each of the three criteria are quoted in the games, which you can replay it on the page. "BTW, the first Morphy game is hilarious, I did not know it," Ed writes.
Finally, here's an animation of a list, based solely on their ratings, that was independantly generated by Chess.com five years ago:
Frederic FriedelEditor-in-Chief emeritus of the ChessBase News page. Studied Philosophy and Linguistics at the University of Hamburg and Oxford, graduating with a thesis on speech act theory and moral language. He started a university career but switched to science journalism, producing documentaries for German TV. In 1986 he co-founded ChessBase.
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