Who is your favorite chess player?

Greatest of all time? For me, Fischer; that is why I will be analyzing all his games till I die. I know he had talent and desire and worked so hard. No computers. Anyway, those three things are what you need to be really good. Not looking at Fischer or his games because of his behavior is like deciding not to look at classics (paintings or books) just because you don't like the author! Aw, what a loss!

Capablanca was my favorite for a long time, but I changed because... I don't hear much about Capa's work ethic. Was just made to play Chess.

After finishing Fischer, I will probably analyze Capa's games. 

Here are my favorites that I have personally met and are the nice guys in chess.  Perhaps my favorite is GMYasser Seirawan.  Very friendly, nice, and a pleasant guy to be around.  Next is IM John Donaldson.  Good friend.  One of my favorites is GM Ian Rogers of Australia.  Very nice guy.  Had dinner with him and ran the demo board for him in San Francisco International.  Eduard Gufeld was very nice and funny.  He almost burned down a hotel cooking in his room (must have been chicken Kiev).  I had to put out the fire.  I've met Anatoly Karpov and his wife several times and very nice.  GM Larry Christiansen has been a cool guy and doesn't mind partying and drinking.  Igor Ivanov stayed at my house a few times and was a nice guy and brilliant, but drank alot.  Mikhail Tal was a nice guy (I ran his demo board, but he agreed to too many quick draws).  He also liked to drink.  I gave him one of my chess books and he thought it was one of his and he signed it and gave it back to me.  No, Mikhail, that was your book to keep.  Funny guy.  I've been at the apartment of George Koltanowski, and he was always nice.  Viktor Korchnoi was a very friendly guy.  I knew Arnold Denker for many years and he was very pleasant and easy to to talk to.  He borrowed my chess clock in one tournament, then after the game he lost it.  The TD found it later.  He was using it to play blitz and forgot.  Walter Browne has always been a nice guy to me.  We've played tennis and he is just as agressive, but not as strong as he is in chess and poker.  Paul Keres was a perfect gentleman and a nice guy.  Susan Polgar and I have corresponded, but I have not met her.  She seems pretty nice.  I take that back!  I just realized I did meet her in the San Francisco Internationa.  Her simul rates were higher than the other GMs I was able to get.  I've known Joel Benjamin since he was a kid.  First met him in 1977 at the US Open in Columbus, Ohio.  He seems like a nice guy. I have known and played Eugene Torre of the Philippines and he is a nice guy.  I knew IM Milan Vukcevich and he was one of the nicest guys.  Other GMs I have met but were hard or difficult to talk to include Kasparov, Hjartarson, Bill Lombardy, Maxim Dlugy, Patrick Wolff, and Reshevsky

Richard Réti

hahahaha, very funny nyarlathotep!

I'm going to go for Pillsbury. After all, it's favourite chess player, not "who do you think was the greatest?". Pillsbury's simul-Blindfold skills were monumental... love it.

I'll go out on a limb and vote for two favorites you rarely ever hear mentioned:

Botvinnik and Petrosian-- both legendary positional players!!

 

 

 

Robert James Fischer..

Erik, I cannot agree with you more! Anand and Capa - two of the greatest

I like Tal, but the best is Kasparov.

Viswanathan Anand (IPA: ʋiɕ'ʋəˌnɑˌt̪ʰən ɑnˌənd̪) (born December 11, 1969) is an Indian chess grandmaster and former FIDE world champion. Anand is one of only four players in history to break the 2800 mark on the FIDE rating list and he has been among the top three ranked players in classical time control chess in the world continuously since 1997.^[2]

In the April 2007 FIDE Elo rating list, Anand was ranked first in the world for the first time,^[3] and he retained the number one spot in the July 2007 list with an Elo rating of 2792, a lead of 23 points. He is only the sixth person to head the rating list since its inception in 1970; the other five being Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik and Topalov.

anand is the man!

This is a very amateur perhaps naive, but a very strong point of view:

Josh Waltzkin, not so much because of any record or machine/perfection way to play, but because of the way he saw chess.

"Chess is like art, don't think, just play chess, let chess flow throughout your unconcious mind, it can perform trillions of calculations per second that your awareness never could!"

Now, I am a musician and a composer. Love, logic and mathematics is my religion. A very balancing mixture. It is normal that I want to translate that into chess.

Garry Kasparov also blows my mind.

But there's this Ivanchuk, of which I've seen a couple of games... I can't believe the deepness of his game...

I like Paul Morphy for his stunning sacrifices Bobby for novelties Alekhine for combinations Tal for attacking play Tigran Petrossian for solid defense and Botwinik for strategy

 

tal

Nimzowitz is my favourit chess player, because he discovered law of overdefending and etc. He did revoliuton in chess and that you can see in his games. I recommend his book "My system"

RichardHayden. i want to be him.

 

I have to throw my hat in for Kasprov. Despite his er... political ambition, his games are so dense and impressively thought out that I think it's a real indication of how deeply the human mind can think and plan. Alekhine also falls in this realm and is really fun to watch.  Again, he's a complete nutjob, and politically I don't agree with him, but honestly, everyone who's scariliy good at something has something wrong with them.

 Capablanca is also astonishing, and one of the few seemingly sane grandmasters out there.

cliffhanger407 wrote:

 but honestly, everyone who's scariliy good at something has something wrong with them.

 

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  Kasparov!!! Deep in the strategy but, you have to admit, he does play beautiful Sicilian lines!!!

kasparov