Best Player- Never World Champ.

Kasparov got nightmares until

now! And remembered it very well!

Really? Is your point that Morphy is rated low relative to those other very strong chess-players...I'd have to agree... but Morphy is a truly special case. Statistical evaluations can't be better than the records they're drawn from and we just don't have enough games from Morphy played against top rated players to evaluate properly. Odds games and games against amateurs and second-raters make up a large amount of his surviving games.

Our judgement/estimation of Morphy's strength comes from his obvious sheer out-classing of opponents. You and I can see that Morphy spanks Anderssen, Europe's best or second best player, like a school boy -- we can see that Morphy's chess seems at least a generation ahead of Anderssen and other European masters. But Chessmetrics doesn't evalutate quality it just relies on cross referenced scores -- indeed this mathematical objectivity is in the vast majority of cases chessmetrics' strength.  But Morphy's is a special case, because lacking enough good data, our subjective judgement of quality has to take the place of number-crunched results. So, Chessmetrics method doesn't do Morphy justice. I think that's to be expected.  Europe's best didn't do right by Morphy, ducking him. (And Morphy didn't do right by Morphy, giving up chess.) And that leads to chessmetrics rating Morphy below his true relative strength (not that +2700 is all _that_ low!) So, I don't disagree that chessmetrics gets Morphy wrong... I just don't think it's surprising, or indicative of a larger general unreliability of chessmetrics' method. Like all evaluative methods chessmetrics has it's limitations and blind spots... you've identified one with Paul Morphy. 

 Or do you have other problems with those numbers? 

 KORCHNOI KICKED BUTT! IN THE 2ND EDITION OF CHESS FOR DUMMIES THE AUTHOR, JAMES EADE, LISTED KORCHNOI AS THE GREATEST PLAYER NEVER TO BE WORLD CHAMPION, THIS WAS THE INSPIRATION FOR THIS FORUM!

"Is your point that Morphy is rated low relative to those other very strong chess-players"

That would be a corrollary.
Chessmetrics seems to gain in accuracy beginning in the latter part of the 19th century when tournaments became more common and better organized and match play was less helter-skelter. Chess itself was evolving from an amateur pasttime into a professional milieu. In short the nature of playing chess pre-Steinitz was entirely different.  Chessmetrics, in my opinion, handles this era rather poorly and seems to use the same criteria as it does for later periods. 

Compare Chessmetrics to Jon Edward's EDO retro-ratings (peak ratings):
Morphy: 2802
Anderssen:  2640
Staunton:  2636
Kieseritzky:  2531

The dissimilarity is striking.  This isn't to say that EDO is right and Chessmetrics is wrong (although the EDO results makes far more sense to me), but rather that different ways of looking at the same data produces very different conclusions. The fact that Anderssen is rated higher that Morphy and even more so that Kiesertitzky is rated almost equal to Anderssen and Morphy and better than Staunton is indicative to me that there's a problem with Chessmetrics' interpretation of the pre-Steinitz data.

The dissimilarity is striking.  This isn't to say that EDO is right and Chessmetrics is wrong (although the EDO results makes far more sense to me).

The EDO results make more sense to me too... but I'm not expert enough in general, nor expert enough on those specific players to say, "oh yes of course Kieseritzsky is weaker than Staunton" ... I'll take your word for it Bat-girl, I think this is your turf! 

Well, now I get to go find out about Jon Edward's retro-ratings EDO, which I confess I'm completely unfamiliar with.

My typo: Jon Edwards should be Ron Edwards.

Edo -

http://sbchess.sinfree.net/EDO.html
http://sbchess.sinfree.net/EDO2.html
http://members.shaw.ca/edo1/

 I agree, though I disagree with all of what he says!!!

 The title of the thread is "Best PLAYER never world champ" and that is what I and probably others based their answers on.

And is there any doubt in your mind that the top players from prior to the creation of the GM title would have earned it had it existed in their day?  

Dillon> The title of the thread is "Best PLAYER never world champ" 

That's what you get for reading the title and not the message. ;)

I posted this waaay back on page 2 to call attention to the original poster's full question, "Who do you think is the best chess grand master never to be world champion?", since only folks who looked at page 1 would see it.

Dillon> And is there any doubt in your mind that the top players from prior to the creation of the GM title would have earned it had it existed in their day?  

Of course Morphy deserved the title for his brief but brilliant career.