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When you see a good move, look for a better one.
Emanuel Lasker, a German chess player, said those words, and everyone in the chess world knows he meant it because he was the reigning World Chess Champion for 27 years (1894 to 1921).
He went down in the annals of history because nobody has officially beaten his record. However, he is not the only chess player to make history.
If you are an aspiring chess player or occasionally play chess online, the following list of the most significant and strongest chess players of all time will excite you. Kindly note that the names of the players are not in any order. Let’s go.
Vasily Smyslov started playing chess at the age of six. He was born in Moscow in 1921.
At 20, Vasily became a chess Grandmaster and the World Chess Champion in 1957. He had a stirring professional career for forty years and held seventeen Chess Olympiad medals.
He played his final match at the age of 79 in 2000.
Anatoly Karpov’s list of achievements reads like a shopping list. This Russian Grandmaster became the World Chess Champion in 1957 and held the title till 1985. He also was the FIDE World Champion in 1993, 1996, and 1998. What’s more, he is a nine-time Chess Oscar winner.
Anatoly is one of the most noted chess players of all time and is known for holding his spot as the highest-rated player for 102 months. Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov have bettered the record.
Moreover, Karpov has written several chess books, most focusing on chess openings. So if you want to master some of Karpov’s chess moves, don’t forget to read Caro-Kann Defence: Advance Variation and Gambit System and other books.
Cuban chess player José Raul Capablanca was the World Chess Champion from 1921 to 1927. He learned to play the game at the age of four and was the biggest natural talent ever seen in the world of chess.
He is renowned for his speed of play and endgame skills. As an adult, he only lost thirty-four serious matches, and he was undefeated from 10th February 1916 to 21st March 1924.
Hungary-born Judit Polgar started playing chess as a child and became a Grandmaster at fifteen.
For her entire 26-year career, Polgar held the No. 1 ranked women’s chess player title. She won games playing against Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen.
In 2014, Polgar retired from the sport and still ranked as the top female player that year.
Her notable achievement includes holding the No. 1 women’s chess player rank for 26 years.
Vishwanathan Anand is among the greatest chess players and has been among the top five for over two decades. In 1995, he played a stirring match against Kasparov, but in this match, Kasparov’s psychological tricks and energy were too much for him.
Anand is regarded as one of the chess game’s pure talents; in his youth, he could trounce Grandmasters by spending no more than ten minutes.
With faster time controls, it is not hard to understand his strength, and it is always a pleasure to watch him play chess games live.
In 2008, he took the title from Kramnik. Even Mark Dvoretsky considers Vishwanathan Anand a genius.
Even today, Anand shows his class and can fight on equal terms with the younger generation of chess players.
To see outstanding chess achievements, look at Magnus Carlsen’s career. He won the Grandmaster title when he was only thirteen in 2004.
Carlsen reached an Elo rating of 2800 in 2009, and one year later, he held the No.1 spot in the FIDE rankings. Finally, after three years, Carlsen defeated Vishwanathan Anand in a match of twelve games and achieved the title of World Chess Champion.
He retained his title the following year in a rematch against Anand and won the 2014 World Rapid Championship. He also won the World Blitz Championship.
In May 2014, Carlsen achieved a peak rating of 2882. This was one of the highest chess ratings for a chess player in the history of chess.
In 2016, Carlsen defended his title for the second time against Sergey Karjakin.
Born in 2003 in Iran, Alireza Firouzja fell in love with chess at the age of eight. At fourteen, he achieved the title of Grandmaster and became the youngest Iranian chess champion.
He is also one of the youngest chess players in the world, with a rating of more than 2700, and the only teenager among the top fifteen chess players.
Due to significant changes to his home country’s competition rules, Firouzja no longer represents Iran. Instead, the chess prodigy plays under the French flag.
Jan-Krzysztof Duda is also a chess prodigy like Firouzja. He is a Polish chess Grandmaster who achieved the title at fifteen. He is ranked No.1 in Poland as of November 2022 and No.18 worldwide.
His personal best rating of 2760 makes him the greatest Polish player of all time.
In 2016, Andrzej Duda, the President of Poland, awarded Jan-Krzysztof Duda the Silver Cross Merit for his contributions and achievements in the game of chess.
The chess players mentioned above are only the tip of the iceberg, but their achievements are like a never-ending song. You can learn their suave chess moves and beat your opponent by practicing free matches online.
