who do you think is the best chess player of all time?

Humphrey bogart without a doubt

It is me of course

you can't compare players of different eras

...something like "the best (...whatever...) of all times" simply does not exist...

Why try to compare, that can't be compared...?

The Brilliancy prize goes to Mikhail Tal.  His games are inspirational.  Who wouldn't want to play like Tal?

Kasparov on Tal: "Mikhail Tal became so quickly popular and famous because he played completely different chess than most of the other Soviet grandmasters who more or less imitated their acknowledged leader, the world champion Mikhail Botvinnik who preferred quiet, calculating, rational if not somewhat boring playing style. Tal played "wrong" chess - entertaining, spectacular, dramatic, combinational. He was like the legendary American Paul Morphy, the unofficial world champion of the mid-19th century. And he was like Russian chess emigree Alexander Alekhine, the only chess world champion who died undefeated.

Tal would sacrifice minor and major pieces, creating positions so complicated that most of his partners couldn't calculate all the possible variants and choose the right one during the game. They got nervous, made mistakes and lost. Later, after the quiet analysis, especially in recent years when powerful chess computers became available, it was often proved that many Tal's combinations, with pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen sacrifices, were unsound and could have led him to defeat. But in the game, they brought Tal one win after another."

I am the Greatest Chess Player!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tal didn't objectively play the best chess, but he had the best games.

PLACE ?????????//////////////////////////////////////////

Stockfish and Komodo are the best chess players so far. 

yeah but they have a terrible personality.

as much as I loath these kind of threads, I'll be darned if a couple lifeless computer programs is accepted as the best chess players of all time.

and if you want a reason- a great chess player should understand the concepts in a position.  but this is NOT how chess engines work.

stockfish has No clue about concepts.  

Stockfish proves that you can compensate for a lack of conceptual understanding with sheer calculation, which is also a major part of chess.

so true.

but is the "best chess player" is just a calculation of who the strongest chess player is ?

if that's true, I really, REALLY hate these kinds of threads.

(the only silver lining would that we don't have to discuss whether Fischer is crazy or not- as he's not in the running of the 'best (strongest) chess player')

 thegreat_patzer.

If Stockfish doesnt know about concepts how can he evaluate king safety?

Evaluation function..

right?

http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Evaluation

this isn't my thing.   but a function-  isn't understanding a concept IMHO.  its a calculation, an equation, however long and involved it is...

So you dont evaluate king safety? You magically can feel if the king is safe or not?

I say Chuck Norris ! He is the best !

Stockfish evaluation code  is likely going to be interesting to a good chess player in terms of positional stuff he/she has not thought about - how the pawn structure is, how many squares are defended etc etc. It has a great deal of positional knowledge hard-coded inside, one of the reason why it plays so well. So Stockfish has great positional ability.

I think his point was that Stockfish doesn't understand why that stuff is important. It just accepts that it is, like a three year old. A superhuman calculator three year old, but still, while the computer can move the pieces, do the math and even win, it's not really playing chess.

I am the Best!!!!