Who is better Paul Morphy or Magnus Carlsen

Hard question

Carlsen wins. Morphy is legendary but if you put him up to todays standards with the knowledge he has before, he’s probably just an IM. But he is very talented and if he studies all of the chess developments he missed, he can definitely become a GM.

I've studied several of Morphy's games and I've played a few IMs. Long ago, when I was a USCF "expert" class OTB player, I beat a few masters and made the IMs work hard for their win. I felt that better opening and endgame knowledge might have given me an occasional draw. There was no way I could have put up a good fight vs Morphy, he was clearly several class superior to me. It is foolish to think that a player with Morphy's super-GM talent would be baffled by today's players' superior opening knowledge--he could certainly have seen the purpose underlying the moves they made and responded appropriately.

Fair enough

@mpaetz, it would take an IM class player to destroy Morphy, but they could do it by avoiding open games entirely and playing for structural advantages.

Morphy taught the world to play open games, as Botvinnik said, but he didn’t have the chess vocabulary, the knowledge of correct positional sign posts that were developed in the 1920s that today’s masters take for granted. 

An expert may not be able to steer Morphy away from his favorite open games, but an IM could. 

As Willy Hendrix wrote, an avid player now could do more tactical training in a day than Morphy (or Zukertort) did in a lifetime. It’s not just about the openings.

A well known GM, discussing the upcoming World Senior Championships, argued that today’s elite players can gain understanding in a few years what the professionals from before the computer age took decades to understand.

Morphy couldn’t absorb all that information in a month or two.

I fail to understand why you think a player of Morphy's caliber would be unable to fathom what another player's moves were meant to accomplish. Somehow, despite living in a chess backwater and having heavy academic commitments (memorizing the entire Louisiana legal code and graduating from law school while still years too young to take the bar exam) he managed to achieve an understanding of the open games popular in his day that far exceeded all the chess professionals who had spent years immersed in the game. This is super-GM level talent. That a player of his strength would be of of his depth because someone played in a style with which he was unfamiliar seems doubtful. And of course a well-known World Champion said Morphy was the best chess player who had ever lived.

[Removed - Staerex]

Morphy

• more creative
• better planning
• stunning attacks

Magnus

• infinite patience 
• more positional
• less creative
• good attacks

personally fischer was right when he said chess is becoming alot about theory

Come on. Paul Morphy by far. The only reason Magnus has the highest recorded Elo is because he surrounded himself with Grandmaster coaches and engines since he was an infant. All Paul Morphy had was some books

“I’m 7 years old”

I believe it

Lmfao. Also a cheater. Buddy played something like 17 rated games against himself in rapid chess. Just look at his games ffs

You're only 2100 because of rating manipulation💀

i checked your profile

nerd

What? Too stupid to play on your own?

💀💀💀💀

what even is the point of this 💀

other than trying for most asinine forum ofc

Me