Plus, even Morphy lost or drew SOME! The chessgames.com DB has absolutely no losses by G. Greco out of 76 recorded games.

1. Greco would have mostly played aristocrats or clerics; peasants wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn chess.

2. Greco was considered the best player in Europe. Anyone who had in fact beaten him would have wanted to brag about it.

3. An aristocrat, or a churchman, would have had the means and the desire to publish the score of a game wherein he beat Greco.

4. Therefore, if Greco played a lot of real games, he should have lost/drawn a few; and so the odds of at least one Greco loss being published would go up.

Taken together, the above items make a good plausibility argument that while Greco did play some real games, he may not have played a lot of them.

Now-a-days anyone can go pickup a book from the local library and be competant enough to beat master if he is tired, distracted, makes 10 mistakes, etc. Back then that was not the case.

Consider: I'm a 1750 player, if I played 100 players who have never actually studied the game- I'd beat 90 of them. Put any level of master in my place and he'll beat all 100 of them. So for Greco (master) to play and win 100% when all his competition is basically clueless (except for what meager skills they've gained playing their buddies), is not such a stretch.

here's a brief bio I wrote on Greco for another site:

Gioachino Greco, also known as "Il Calabrese", was born around 1600 in Celico, which near Cosenza in Calabria. Calabria had already produced such players as Leonardo di Bono and Michele di Mauro. From his writing it's apparent the he wasn't educated and likely came from a lower class family. Already in 1619, Greco started keeping a notebook of tactics and particulary clever games and he took up the custom of giving copies of his manuscripts to his wealthy patrons. In Rome Monsignor Corsino della casa Minutoli Tegrini, Cardinal Savelli and Monsignor Francisco Buoncompagni all received copies (of which there are extant copies, dated 1620 in the Corsiniana library in Rome, under the title, "Trattato del nobilissimo gioco de scacchi").

Despite his popualarity in Rome, in 1621 Greco took off to test himself against the rest of Europe leaving this paper trail as he went. In 1621 he left a fine copy of his manuscripts with Duke Enrico of Lorraine in Nancy. He traveled to Paris where he played Arnauld(Isaac) de Corbeville, Enrico di Savoia (the Marquis of St. Sorlin and the Duke of Nemours and Geneva) and others. He had apparently been quite successful because in traveling from Paris to England he was waylaid by robbers who divested him of 5,000 scudi, a princely sum. Finally making it to London, he beat all the best players. Sir Francis Godolphin and Nicholas Mountstephen were given copies of his manuscripts. While in London, Greco developed an idea to record entire games, rather than positions (as was the custom of the times), for study and inclusion in his manuscripts. He returned to Paris in 1624 where he rewrote his manuscipt collection to perfect his new ideas. He then went to Spain and played at the court of Philip IV. There he beat his mentor and the strongest player of the time (other than himself), don Mariano Morano. He finally returned to Italy where he was enticed to traveling to the New Indies, the Americas, by a Spanish nobleman. He seemingly contracted some disease there and died around 1630 (possibly 1634) at the young age of 30 (34). He generously left all the money he earned at chess to the Jesuits.

Gioachino Greco stood head and shoulders above his comtemporaries, a feat seldom duplicated. David Hooper, in The Oxford Companion to Chess, states that Greco probably made up the games in his manuscripts. The question of whether he actually played the games or invented them is rather moot since, if he invented them, he was perfectly capable of playing them.

"...one of the most important productions in the history of chess." written by Harold James Ruthven Murray in his book, A History of Chess, referring to the 1656 publication by Francis Beale of Greco's work under the title, "The royall Game of Chesse-play."

This game reminds me of my shortest ever postal game, which was played in a 1984 Golden Knights semi-finals. (To reach the semi-finals, you needed to score at least 5-1 or better in a prelimary round, so the semi-finalists weren't slouches.) The game went: 1. e4 Nf6 2. Nc3 d5 3. e5 Nd7 4. d4 c5 5. Nxd5 cxd4 6. Nf3?? Qa5+ and White resigned.