I'd say today Fischer could crush Kasparov at blitz but in a slow game it would probably be a really close match between the two. Although if Fischer was in his prime then no doubts he would win. Besides didn't kasparov lose the title to Kramnik? Fischer was too good for the game thats why he left it.
Originally posted by OtisVera Menchik would beat them both -
I'd say today Fischer could crush Kasparov at blitz but in a slow game it would probably be a really close match between the two. Although if Fischer was in his prime then no doubts he would win. Besides didn't kasparov lose the title to Kramnik? Fischer was too good for the game thats why he left it.
Breaca
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Originally posted by geniusMy favorite resource on this is http://www.chessmetrics.com/. This guy goes to down with some fairly sophisticated statistical methods to determine who was the strongest chess player ever. Indeed, in one year peaks, Fisher comes in ahead of Kasparove.
kasparov has got the highest ever rating, beating fischers old record. however, over the years, ratings have been slowly increasing-this isn't such a good measure...
But guess what, he's behind the chess machine, J. R. Capablanca. And that is entirely fitting an proper. No one touches Capablanca, not even Fisher. As Reti said, "Chess was his mother tongue."
There is someone else in the room, and your opinion of him matters a lot in your assessment of Fischer-Kasparov. That man is Anatoly Karpov.
Karpov and Kasparov played FIVE world championship matches (1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, and 1990). In those matches, by my count, Kasparov won 21 games and lost 19 (104 draws!). So I think it's indisputable that Karpov was almost as good as Kasparov in the 80s (and good enough to win Linares in 1994 ahead of Kasparov). A couple things come out of that.
If you think Fischer would have had trouble beating Karpov to retain his championship, then you probably think Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, by a small margin over Karpov.
But if you think Fischer would have soundly beaten Karpov (my opinion), then I don't see how you can say he wouldn't have done the same to Kasparov.
I don't think anyone has ever dominated their competition the way Fischer did in the preliminaries to the Spassky match, going through Larsen and Taimanov 6-0-0 and 6-0-0, then crushing former World Champion Petrosian 5-1-3. So he went 17-1-3 against the three strongest non-champions in the world at that time! Then he crushes Spassky. Could Kasparov, at the peak of his powers, have done the same in that situation? I seriously doubt it.
On a level playing field I don't think it would even be close. Fischer was better than his peers by a wider margin than Kasparov, even though he had none of Kasparov's advantages...and I'd argue Fischer's competition - a collaborating group of Soviet GMs at or near their peak capabilities with abundant state support - was tougher than what Kasparov has had to face in his career.
So Fischer gets my vote. (As a human being...that's another story.)