If all Chess World Champions were simultaneously alive?

Each grandmaster builds upon the work of the masters before them, and Carlson is able to use the work of all the champions before him.

@Autofill I agree that this is how it turns out chronologically, but I guess the premise is that all the players - each in their prime - would have several months to read up on developments. So by that system, Morphy, Capa and Dr Lasker would know about all the games played by Spassky, Karpov and Kasparov before the tourney started.

#5 jose1122,

Wow, very comprehensive list !

I would move Alekhine to the top because from various stories we already know he'd work for hours and hours on end even when all he had was pencil and paper. With a computer database in his hands I think he'd be second to none in work ethic and laser focus. Maybe Kasparov and Fischer too, but him for sure.

Here's an intersting AA snapshot :

www.chess.com/blog/batgirl/encounters-with-alekhine

<< Alekhine began work on a collection of the games of the All-Russian tournament of Masters of 1913-1914. He drew me into this work, and almost all evening long I spent in analysis.

I was amazed at his diligence and capacity for work. On any one analysis he was capable of spending several evenings. In analysis Alekhine was very objective. There was one case, when after a multi-hour analysis we arrived at the conclusion that the position had finally been exhausted, and he wrote out an extensive commentary on several pages.

Late in the evening I left to go to sleep. At 4 A.M. a telephone call awoke me. I raised the receiver. "Come to me immediately ", I heard Alexander Alexandrovich’s voice.

Entering Alekhine’s room, I found him behind the chessboard. It was the position that we had "drawn". "We did not notice the move b7-b6”, announced Alekhine, “which refutes everything. Let us take a look at it". And we took up the analysis again, sitting throughout the morning and the entire following day, since Alekhine turned out to be right. >>

@jose1122 said in #5:
> My top 30 chess players of all time at the peak of the strenght with all chess knowledge available....

Well, Hans Niemann would still manage to beat all of them. But then soon he will be mysteriously undergoing a rectum surgery...

I Personally think' A Phillidor would do better than most people would think' as his THEORY on Endgames still lives today in Rook & Pawn , Rook v Bishop 7 Rook Bishop vs Rook Endings . The man was creating this theory as The Champion of his day & his Pawns ! ' the Pawns are the soul of Chess ... He would LOVE Chess even more today if he was alive @Clearchesser An ancient scientist' becoming a modern one' ... Clone him Today !

@LloydThompson said in #13:
> #5 jose1122,
>
> Wow, very comprehensive list !
>
> I would move Alekhine to the top because from various stories we already know he'd work for hours and hours on end even when all he had was pencil and paper.

Amazing! I'm pretty sure Alekhine would kick everyone's ass due his passion on chess.
Fischer also had such amazing stories like he learned russian as kid only to read chess books and magazines, he did absolutely everything he could to surpass and win the most strong chess era of all time, no one will ever do anything closer than Fischer did, to stomp the entire URSS chess school in the middle of the cold war. And Kasparov in his best form was simply unbeatable, he was the perfect player.

Kasparov was the last top player to grow up in the chess world without substantial computer assistance (let's remember that Kasparov beat all computers until 1997, and he was World Champion in 1985, he was the reference for good chess, not the machines), it means he was the last heir of everything the chess world produced manually.

I believe that the advent of the internet is paradoxal, the more the internet gives us tools to improve, the less we actually do. The big amount of arrows pointing good moves, the evaluations easily popping to tell the truth, the lot of streamers throwing moves on blitz games... Well, all of this is very entertaining, and a huge anesthetic. People will hardly develop the true wish to dive into the chess world for real like the old masters did, we will never have the fibers that Fischer, Alekhine and Kasparov had, we kind of lack in principles, energy and morals. The modern chess is better than never, but still, there is something missing outside the chessboards.

That's why I consider Kasparov the GOAT. As the last genius of an era, he brilliantly showed himself to the world as the final product of a legacy, and as expected, he was absolutely unbeatable.

I would say Bobby Fischer simply because he was head and shoulders above his peers in his own time period at the height of the Soviet Chess School so I would assume in a modern time period with access to the same resources as everybody else, he would maintain that dominance.

I could also see arguments for Carlsen, Kasparov, or Morphy being the GOAT as well though.

In the next zombie apocalypse movie, I would like to see a subplot about someone trying to round up all the famous chess players of the past for one great competition.