Secondly, a forgotten author wrote an interesting piece some 15-20 years ago on rating great players who played before ratings were established. I don't recall the exact metrics or formulas he was using but do remember he had Adolph Anderssen at 2550, Alekhine 2690 & Morphy 2710.

Referring specifically to Morphy, its true a majority of his beautiful combinations were against lesser opponents. This can't be disputed; but taking a close look at the strongest opponents he faced (Anderssen, Barnes, Boden, Bird, Paulsen, Harrwitz, Lowenthal, etc.) reveals a unique adjustment in his own play that brings out two notable features: (1) His positional mastery & (2) the fact he was a very great and stubborn defender (an aspect seldom mentioned when discussing Morphy).

[While its pointless to speculate on that which did not happen, I can't help stating its a real pity and loss to chess that Morphy didn't face Steinitz in a match]

So, I think the term "overrated" is off base with regards to Morphy; but I agree and do have an issue with the "over gushing" praise accorded to some of his games when the opponent was weak

What new principles are those? Pre-Morphy books extol control of the center and rapid development crowned by an attack on the king. What do you think the Evans Gambit is all about? You're giving up a pawn to accelerate your development and grab the center. If you look at Anderssen's games from London 1851 he had those concepts down pat. Morphy was just a lot more accurate and consistent than Anderssen was.

<Third, Morphy was head and shoulders above the best players of his day >

I remember people saying in the 1950s that the Yankees weren't really that good, the other teams were lousy.

That's a silly canard. His reputation doesn't suffer because he beat everyone who was around at the time. But if you are going to evaluate someone, you look at the strength of their opposition. I've got a higher winning percentage than Carlsen, if you ignore the fact that I only play on Gameknot.

<What more could he have done?>

I dunno, stick around for more than 18 months?

<And maybe some of these guys looked bad because they were playing against Morphy. Certainly Bird didn't look so bad against Steinitz.>

What new principles are those? Pre-Morphy books extol control of the center and rapid development crowned by an attack on the king. What do you think the Evans Gambit is all about? >

What books are those?

In any event, yes, games played in the 1800s did involve central control and attack on the king, but defensive technique and positional understanding as we know them were ludicrously absent. Things like Nimzovitch's "fork trick" to try and break up the center when faced with the gioco piano's bishop and an early ...d5 to establish a beachhead in the center were not at all well known.

The chess games that Morphy's era gives us were hack, slash and combine. Defensive technique consisted of "take all sacrifices, hope they amount to nothing, and wait for a chance to counterattack. The real understanding of time in chess that we see in Morphy's side of Morphy vs Consultants (phillidor's defense, 3...bg4?!) was largely absent. The players of the nineteenth century and earlier used the same toolbox we do, Morphy's real virtue however is that his play demonstrated that he knew how to use them better and all of it was the result of his personal intuition.

<Yeah, but they were pretty bad. He totally dominated a small, shallow talent pool. Could he have been great in modern times? I tend to think the answer is yes, but really it's just speculation.>

Yes, absolutely. But what made them "bad" in our eyes is their lack of understanding of positional principles that we take for granted today.

The games that lead to our understanding hadn't been played yet. Steinitz's ideas were still spreading. The upheaval of the first World War hadn't brought the notion of trench warfare to chess leading to the new understanding of space and time that lead to our love of closed positions. Maroczy Suechting's slow and very convincing positional crush hadn't been played. In the mid-1800s, Nimzowitz wasn't a gleam in his father's eye.

The development of chess is a process of how the best players of the day used their understanding of the game to win chess games and how the "how" of their wins were understood and spun into transmissible principles that became generally known by a larger and larger pool of chess-players as economic development increased the number of smart people with the leisure needed to devote themselves to the game. You could write whole books on how Russian culture and the society produced by the Soviet Union produced grandmaster after grandmaster—one world champion after another.

In a very real sense, you can say that the development of chess as we have received it was a slow burn brightened to a bonfire by giants like Steinitz, Lasker, Capablanca, Nimzowitz, Alekhine, Botvinnik etc. whose understanding of the game survives the test of time via their successes and informs how we play to this day. Anatoly Karpov is personally credited with changing our understanding of bishops of opposite color endings.

Every generation tends to think that it is so much better than every preceding generation. But in reality we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. And human beings have hardly evolved one jot in the last few hundred or even thousand years.

Take Paul Morphy. He memorised Louisiana Civil Code at some ridiculously young age. That would be quite a feat for someone today.

If he had modern chess books and computers, I have no doubt that he would be a very strong competitor today. Maybe even world champion. Or maybe not.

Similarly, if you take today's grandmasters and put them into Morphy's shoes there is no guarantee that they would either be great or rubbish.

I disagree. We are many times less cruel and violent than we were even a hundred generations ago. Technology has facilitated killing on an ever-larger scale of course but that's another issue.

<Take Paul Morphy. He memorised Louisiana Civil Code at some ridiculously young age. That would be quite a feat for someone today.>

There is mechanical positional play with development that ignores what's actually happening on the board (I remember a note by Botvinnik in 100 selected games: "Natural and bad") and there is positional play that displays and exploits a deeper understanding.

Morphy's pawn moves attempt to create a broad center at the cost of piece development. This is considered perfectly sound in Ponziani's opening and there is no reason to call it unsound here.

The only problem with black's play was using his "development" to engage in a two-piece attack on white's position in an attempt to win the exchange.

Given the position after 4.de5, a modern player might have struggled for the initiative by attacking the e-pawn either with 4...d5 or with 4...nc6, and met either bf4 or nf3 with 5...d5! threatening to win time with ...Bc5 or ...Bg4.

Morphy's 5. Qg4 was an exploitation of black's lack of harmonious development by offering the exchange for what turned out to be a devastating attack.

This shows a deeper understanding of positional play because morphy integrated dynamic, time-based, elements into his development with marvelous effect.

Let me cut through that thicket of clichés with a simple analogy.

There are two islands. Island A has 100 people and a copy of Staunton's handbook. Island B has 1,000 people, Chessbase, Stockfish,and the collected works of Dvoretsky. The people on both islands teach themselves how to play chess, using the resources available to them. If the respective champions of Island A and Island B meet in a match, who do you think will win?

Suppose that each island only has Staunton's handbook, but there are 100 times as many people on Island B. Where is the stronger chessplayer likely to come from, Island A or Island B?

That is the difference between chess in 1858 and now.

No one believes that there has been significant human biological evolution since 1858 (though some might argue that there have been some developments since the Pyramids -- I don't know enough to have an opinion). No one thinks we don't learn from our predecessors, or that that Morphy wasn't a talented guy.

I would disagree with this, though. Staunton here doesn't defend by grabbing material; he just plays very passively.

Anderssen vs Staunton, 1851

And here Andersson plays a fairly positional sort of attack.

In fact cavemen were more or less as intelligent as we are. There is a difference between "intelligence" and "cultural heritage".

Only human beings are able to transmit knowledge to the next generation, no other animal can (at least at our rate). This is a separate item from the pure intelligence.

Except that is precisely what many people do believe and say. You only need to read the comments to this game to see that.

People are making direct comparisons between Morphy and modern players without adjusting for the extra knowledge and resources that the modern day players have.

Pre-Morphy books and understanding about attacking principles were as good as those available now? Come on, you don't really believe that? Do you?

Yes, a better prepared player will usually beat a less well prepared player. That is almost a "d'oh" statement. But that's not what people are saying. Surely when we talk about the all-time greatest players we need to adjust for the resources and knowledge that each player had?

Your better equipped island would almost certainly produce the strongest player, but there is no guarantee that it would produce the greatest player.

<Shams> Caveman as intelligent as modern men? Maybe not that far back, but a heck of a lot further into antiquity than most people realise. Some of the achievements of ancient civilizations show a level of skill that we find hard to reproduce, given the tools that they had to hand.