17 Great Chess Players Throughout History

Chess is a mere hobby that some people play for fun to pass the time with friends and online apps — but the game of chess is also an all-consuming life’s passion for a select group of hardcore devotees. In this article, we’ll talk about 17 of those devotees, and some the best chess players that have ever played in its centuries-long history.

To be sure, this is not necessarily a list of the best-ever chess GOATs to ever chess. Rather, it’s a list of best-ever chess GOATs that also includes notable and interesting modern chess players. From Bobby Fischer to today’s teenage prodigies, these are some of the greatest chess players of the past and present — and the female chess players have their own list on Content Bash. In no particular order, here they are.

 

1. Who was Bobby Fischer?

Arguably the most popular chess player of all time, Bobby Fisher has played a number of out-of-this-world chess games that will remain forever etched in the memories of chess aficionados. He was considered a prodigy at a young age and when he was 13, he won what was known as the “Game of the Century” against Donald Byrne at the Marshall Chess Club in New York City in 1956. At age 14, he became the youngest U.S. Chess Champion and at 15, he became the youngest chess Grandmaster at the time. Some of his most famous matches were against Boris Spassky of Russia — which were particularly culturally symbolic at the peak of the Cold War — including the World Chess Championship in 1972, which he won. Apart from chess, Fischer’s life was pretty tumultuous. He was known for behaving unusually and erratically, and often fought with the chess world. He once accused the Soviets of colluding against him, and refused to play in the 1975 World Chess Championship over a dispute with the World Chess Federation (FIDE), and the event didn’t take place at all. Fischer was also controversial, frequently expressing his anti-Semitic views in public and alienated the United States by playing in Yugoslavia in 1992 despite a United Nations embargo. The US Chess Federation also revoked his membership over his comments about the events of 9/11. Some have speculated that Bobby Fischer was mentally ill, possibly from schizophrenia or paranoid personality disorder. Bobby Fischer died from kidney failure in Reykjavík on January 17, 2008.

 

Key Match: Fischer vs. Boris Spassky (1972)

 

2. Who is Garry Kasparov?

Apart from Bobby Fischer, few other names ring a bell outside chess circles and have cultural cachet — but one such name is Garry Kasparov. He’s known for becoming the youngest chess world champion in 1985 at age 22, when he defeated then-champion Anatoly Karpov. He’s also known for being the first chess world champion that lost a game against a computer in the much-publicized matches versus IBM supermachine Deep Blue in 1997. Even still, he’s known as one of the greatest chess players in history. He’s a well-known activist with a prolific Twitter account, and has been an outspoken leader of the opposition against Putin in Russia. Kasparov is also a writer who has written several books, some only tangibly related to chess, like Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins and Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. At the peak of his career, Garry Kasparov had a rating of 2851.

Click on the cover to buy these books by Garry Kasparov!

 

Key Match: Kasparov vs. Anatoly Karpov (1985)

 

3. Who is Magnus Carlsen?

And now we enter into the modern era by introducing the young Magnus Carlsen, already one of the greatest chess players the game has seen. He’s known for holding three titles all at the same time: World Chess Champion, World Blitz Chess Champion, and World Rapid Chess Champion. What’s particularly unique about Carlsen is that he shows no discernible weakness in all facets of a strong chess game: the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame, with the middlegame being his personal favorite. His rating peaked at 2882 — which is the highest official rating in the history of chess. The vegetarian Carlsen has other business endeavors and is busy enough to need an agent, appearing in modeling campaigns and even on a 2017 episode of The Simpsons. He’s also been known to play chess anonymously online under unassuming screen names — which means it’s possible you may have played against Magnus Carlsen without even knowing it.

Key Match: Carlsen vs. Viswanathan Anand (2013)

 

4. Who was Boris Spassky?

Though Boris Spassky lost some of the most well-known chess games in history against chess legend Bobby Fischer, that shouldn’t detract from the fact that Spassky is a chess powerhouse in his own right, and one of the biggest names in the history of chess. He’s played three matches for the World Chess Champion, losing to Tigran Petrosian in 1966 but beating him in 1969 to become champion. He held the title for three years until he lost to Bobby Fischer in 1972. What’s especially interesting about Spassky is that he learned to play chess when he was 5 years old, on a train of civilians that were evacuated from Leningrad during the siege by the Wehrmacht in 1939. For all his substantial accomplishments in chess, perhaps his most impressive is when he managed to beat Mikhail Botvinnik in a simultaneous match (where one player faces many opponents in different games at the same time) at a time when Botvinnik was the Soviet chess champion — when Boris Spassky was just 10 years old. He is portrayed by Liev Schreiber in Pawn Sacrifice, Edward Zwick’s 2014 biopic about Bobby Fischer, and his famous use of the King’s Gambit opening was even replicated by James Bond in From Russia With Love.

 

Key Match: Anatoly Karpov vs. Spassky (1974)

 

5. Who was José Raúl Capablanca?

Our next chess world champion is another person that started as a young chess prodigy. José Raúl Capablanca was born in Havana, Cuba in 1888, and had some of the strongest endgame skills in chess history. His gameplay style was known to be very simple, yet devastatingly effective. A shortstop for the baseball team at Columbia University, he soon dropped out of college in 1908 to concentrate on chess, and was the chess world champion from 1921 to 1927, eventually losing the title to Alexander Alekhine. He was a huge influence and favorite player of chess legend Bobby Fischer, who stated that Capablanca had “a real light touch” in the game. Capablanca remains one of the most influential chess players in history and even wrote several books on the subject. He’s known for proposing new rules in the game of chess, like a bigger board and two additional pieces — the archbishop and the chancellor — with the intention of preventing chess from becoming stale in the following decades. Of course, this never really caught on.

 

Key match: Capablanca vs. Lizardo Molina Carranza (1911)

 

6. Who was Alexander Alekhine?

Alexander Alekhine is widely considered to be one of the greatest chess players that ever lived. He too became a chess world champion after beating José Raúl Capablanca in 1927. In the early 1930s, Alekhine practically dominated with ease every tournament that he played. He was known for his highly creative and devastatingly effective attacking chess style, and he also had prowess in the opening and endgame. Alexander Alekhine is also known for his substantial influence and contributions to chess theory, including the frequently-used opening that goes by the name of the Alekhine Defense. Alekhine had political problems with his native country Russia for making public statements against the Bolsheviks, and assumed French citizenship in 1927 after studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. He died in 1946 under mysterious circumstances in Portugal. There is debate as to whether it was due to a heart attack, a food-choking incident, or an assassination.

 

Key Match: Capablanca vs. Alekhine (1927)

7. Who is Wesley So?

Born in 1993, Wesley Barbasa So is a Philippine chess grandmaster who holds the distinction of having beaten reigning chess world champion Magnus Carlsen with four wins and two draws to get the title of first World Fischer Random Chess Champion. Known for his aggressive style, some of his mentors at his young age have commended So’s talent to sacrifice important pieces like the queen to develop a devastating attack and win decisive games. Wesley So is currently one of the best chess players in world and was even ranked second closely behind current chess world champion Magnus Carlsen for a time. In 2014, Wesley So transferred from the Philippines to the United States, and he now competes as an American citizen. His adoptive mother is Lotis Key, a prolific Filipino-American film actress who has appeared in Black Mama White Mama (1973) with Pam Grier, and Untamed Heart (1995), with Marisa Tomei and Christian Slater.

 

Key Match: Jeffery Xiong vs Wesley So (2017)

 

8. Who was Mikhail Tal?

Arguably the most eccentric chess player of all time (and top-ranking chess players are known to be pretty darn eccentric), Mikhail Tal has played some of the best chess games ever recorded. Born in Latvia under the Soviet Union, Mikhail Tal was the 8th chess world champion and known as the “Magician of Riga,” he is often cited as the favorite player of many of the best chess players in history. His forte was his never-before-seen attacking style of chess using incredibly imaginative combinations. Impulsive and artistic, Mikhail Tal was also widely known for his eccentricities outside of chess. Day-to-day things that most people do to get by in life were simply boring to him and he was not well-equipped with knowledge for a solitary life, with enough eccentricities his wife Sally Landau was able to fill a book about. Mikhail Tal was so bad with money that his wife said he never bothered filling out the expense forms so he could be reimbursed by the Chess Federation, and he once spent $500 on haircuts in a month. Mikhail Tal was a compulsive drinker and smoked so often he never needed a light; he just lit his next cigarette with the previous one. All this eventually took a toll on his already-frail health — he was born with ectrodactyly, a congenital deformity on his right hand — and despite this, he was also renowned for his skill in playing the piano. Mikhail Tal died on July 28, 1992.

 

Key Match: Fischer vs. Tal (1959)

 

9. Who was Paul Morphy?

And now we come to Paul Morphy, the chess player known as the “Pride and the Sorrow of Chess,” which is a really heavy way to describe someone. Paul Morphy was born into a rich family in the United States, and he picked up on chess at a very early age by watching his father (Louisiana State Supreme Court Justice Alonzo Michael Morphy) and uncle play the game. He showed obvious talent and he was put into the chess bubble by facing some of the biggest names in chess at the time — which he soundly beat. Morphy favored a more romantic school of chess, where the player executes dashing attacks and sacrifices to win against the opponent in a small number of moves. However, Morphy’s career in chess came to a grinding halt due to simple disinterest when he turned 22, much to the dismay of the world chess public. He chose to practice law but he didn’t find any success in this endeavor and he led an idle life, eventually dying from a stroke at age 47. Some of the greatest chess minds like Bobby Fischer have stated that Morphy was one of the greatest chess players in history and one that was well ahead of his time.

 

Key Match: Louis Paulsen vs. Morphy (1857)

 

10. Who is Viswanathan Anand?

Being one of the handful chess players in history that has clocked a chess rating of 2800, Viswanathan Anand is a chess grandmaster and a former world champion from India. He’s known for is his incredible skill at speed chess, which came to show even when he was a child when he earned the moniker of “Lightning Kid.” In time, he developed to become a universal player with vast knowledge and skills in all levels of the game of chess. Many of the world’s best chess players in history tend to develop over-the top-personas where they publicly make controversial political statements and display erratic behavior, but this does not seem to be the case with Viswanathan Anand. He generally refrains from thrusting himself into the public eye and directs all his focus into his chess game. This has made him well-liked and respected, and Anand remains one of the world’s strongest chess players to this day.

 

Key Match: Kramnik vs. Anand (2008)

 

11. Who was Emanuel Lasker?

Emanuel Lasker was a German-born chess player who was known for his psychological style of play, making unsound moves just to confuse the opponents into making a blunder. However, modern analysis of his playing style have concluded that he was well ahead of his time with his approach. After beating Wilhelm Steinitz (the very first chess champion) in 1894, Lasker maintained the longest chess championship reign in the chess world — a record he holds to this day. Emanuel Lasker also dabbled in playwriting and philosophy, though his works in those fields garnered little attention. Lasker was, however, a proficient and prominent mathematician who has made numerous influential contributions in the field of commutative algebra, including the Lasker-Noether theorem.

 

Key Match: Harry Nelson Pillsbury vs. Lasker (1895)

 

12. Who was Vladimir Kramnik?

Vladimir Kramnik became the world chess champion after defeating Gary Kasparov in 2000. During his reign, he was known as the most difficult chess player to defeat because of his impenetrable gam. From his opening game, to his middle game, and his endgame, Vladimir Kramnik had zero weaknesses and no holes in his game whatsoever. He played with a sound positional style, with huge endgame efficacy. At one point in his life, Kramnik was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis, an unusual kind of arthritis that affects the spine and caused him a lot of physical discomfort playing chess and being seated for prolonged periods of time. Vladimir Kramnik retired from professional chess in 2019, though he did pop up in November 2020 to win the Razuvaev Memorial, an online blitz tournament honoring the late chess coach, journalist, and player Yuri Sergeyevich Razuvaev.

 

Key Match: Kramnik vs. Anand (1996)

 

13. Who was Mikhail Botvinnik?

A Soviet-based chess world champion born in 1911, Mikhail Botvinnik is one of the world’s greatest chess grandmasters that ever lived. His playing style was known for its iron-clad logic where he made very few mistakes during his entire chess career. Being the first Soviet-based world champion in the game, Mikhail Botvinnik considerable influence in all things chess-related in the Soviet Union — which also put him under a lot of pressure to maintain a high level of performance. Since chess was considered in the Soviet Union as proof that the Soviets were the smartest people on Earth, Mikhail Botvinnik was under close scrutiny from the authorities at all times. It’s even suggested that the authorities gave hints to Botvinnink’s opponents that they were not supposed to beat him. He was also a successful engineer and a pioneer of computer chess, having won prizes for his contribution in the field in the Soviet Union.

 

Key Match: Botvinnik vs. Capablanca (1938)

 

14. Who was Tigran Petrosian?

Known as “Iron Tigran,” Tigran Petrosian is one of the biggest names in chess. He became a world champion after defeating Botvinnik in 1963, and snapped Bobby Fischer’s incredible and unprecedented 20-game win streak after winning a game against him in their candidates match (despite the fact that Fischer eventually won the match). Petrosian is known for his prowess in exchange sacrifices and his numerous contributions to opening theory in chess. He’s also known to be one the world’s best chess defenders, even though this meant that he adopted a somewhat relatively boring style of chess play by sniffing out danger up to 20 moves ahead. As a street-sweeping orphan, the self-proclaimed Soviet Armenian had a rough Dickensian childhood, using his meager savings to buy chess books like Aron Nimzowitsch’s Chess Praxis and Rudolf Spielmann’s The Art of Sacrifice in Chess. Tigran Petrosian began training at age 12 and dealt with partial deafness to become an elite player and one of the best the world has ever seen, and his life is a beautiful, inspiring story of success and overcoming adversity.

 

Key Match: Petrosian vs. Fischer (1959)

 

15. Who is Anatoly Karpov?

Anatoly Karpov grabbed the chess world championship title in 1975 and he held it tight for a decade until he was defeated by Garry Kasparov in 1985. He won over 160 chess tournaments during his career, despite the fact that one of his first mentors — none other than Mikhail Botvinnik — noted that he had no future in chess due to his confused style of play. This forced young Anatoly to focus more on studying and reading chess books, which helped improve his game by leaps and bounds. He’s known for his vocal opposition to FIDE imposing new rules in organizing the tournaments, though he ran (and lost) for the presidency of FIDE in 2010 with support from Garry Kasparov and Magnus Carlsen. There are reports that his personal chess library contains well over 9,000 books. To this day, he’s known as one of the best chess players in history.

 

Key Match: Karpov vs. Veselin Topalov (1994)

 

16. Who is Fabiano Caruana?

The best chess player to come out of Brooklyn since Bobby Fischer, Fabiano Luigi Caruana became a FIDE master by the time he was 10 years old in 2002 — and an international master just 4 years later. Then became the youngest Grandmaster in the United States (and Italy, too, as he is a dual citizen) just days before his 15th birthday. It’s been all uphill from there, as he’s been winning tournaments and climbing the rankings ever since. Even at such a young age, Fabiano Caruana is one of the strongest chess players in the world in a tier behind Magnus Carlsen, with a future as bright as his game. He’s got his eye on being the first American chess champion since Fischer himself, but in the meantime, he approaches chess as an athletic sport and keeps himself in peak physical shape by jogging and playing tennis. “Chess requires a lot of stamina,” he told Time magazine in 2018. “You’re sitting down and you’re playing six, seven hours at a time. You’re burning a lot of calories and you can easily get mentally tired. If your physical form is not good, then you’re likely to crash at some point.” 

 

Key Match: Caruana vs. Emanuel Berg (2008)

 

17. Who is Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa?

In order to be the man, you gotta beat the man. Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa was not on the list of top 100 players by FIDE rating when he faced Magnus Carlsen at the Meltwater Champions Chess Tour 2022 in February — but the 16-year-old player from India stunned the chess world by becoming the youngest player to beat the Norwegian grandmaster since Carlsen became champion in 2013. Pragg (as he is often colloquially called) became a FIDE Master in 2013 at the ripe young age of 7, and three years later became the youngest international master ever at 10 years, 10 months, and 19 days old. Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa hasn’t quite racked up as many accolades as the other chess players on this list — though he is among the best in the world two years after defeating Carlsen — his presence is a reminder of how exciting and deep the chess talent pool is in the 21st century.

 

Key Match: Praggnanandhaa vs. Carlsen (2022)

 

Final Thoughts about Great Chess Players

These are some of the greatest chess players throughout history who have had epic games and playing styles that were every bit as impressive as their outsized personas. Some of these grandmasters triumphed over harsh living conditions to become greats while others relinquished their greatness for other pursuits — but all of them are enormously influential and shaped the game and culture of chess as we know it today. Also, if you’re super new to the hobby, be sure to check out our piece on Buying a New Chess Set: What You Need to Know. And don’t forget to check out our list of great female chess players!

Image Credit: Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

 

*****This post contains affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something we may earn a commission. Thank you for reading!*****