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(October 2003) It goes without saying that a great chess tournament includes a field of great chess players.
We took the About Chess register of Famous Tournaments (see the link box in the upper right corner for the first of the three pages), mapped it on to the register of Famous Players (see the link box again for the first of the two pages), and took a good look at the results.
The following table provides some basic high-level information about the players in our famous tournaments.
If the term 'Player/event pairs' is not clear, a 10-player tournament counts as 10 pairs.
| 207 |
Events |
| 537 |
Players |
| 2602 |
Player/event pairs |
| 19277 |
Games played |
| 73 |
Players who have won at least one event
(including shared 1st) |
The next table shows who the most successful players have been. The column 'Pct' is the overall winning percentage; a score of +8-0=2 in a 10-round tournament would be 90%.
The list includes some of the greatest players ever and their overall percentages are remarkably close.
| Player |
Pct |
Games |
| Morphy, P. |
86.1% |
18 |
| Szen, J. |
73.5% |
17 |
| Lasker, Em |
72.1% |
269 |
| Fischer, R. |
69.8% |
58 |
| Kasparov, G. |
69.5% |
497 |
| Alekhine, A. |
69.4% |
319 |
| Capablanca, J. |
67.8% |
230 |
| Pillsbury, H. |
67.3% |
217 |
| Botvinnik, M. |
67.0% |
179 |
| Engels, L. |
66.7% |
9 |
If you're interested in historical statistics, we did an analysis of Chess Informant's Chess Is Chess CD in 2001.
The CD contains Informant's list of the 200 greatest tournaments.
Because the player and event statistics for those tournaments (link box again) match our new calculations fairly well, we won't repeat them here.
The similarity is not too surprising; there is an overlap of 170 events on the two lists.
The About Chess list has more events from the 19th century.
Morphy is missing from the older statistics because New York 1857 was not on Informant's list of events.
The external link includes a note on the results of Szen and Engels, who are not as well known as the other players.
***
If you're following the evolution of our Famous Chess Players, you know that the list is largely derived from multiple sources of calculated ratings.
It's democratic and impartial : a player who appears on more than one source is on our list of Famous Players.
We added as another source the 73 players who have won at least one of our great events.
Of the 73 names, only 3 had not already appeared on other sources.
Five players received the second vote required for inclusion on the published list : Rudolph Charousek (1873-1900), Oldrich Duras (1882-1957), Tony Miles (1955-2001), Vladimir Petrov (1907-1945), and Rudolph Spielmann (1883-1942).
We also started profiles for players who won at least three tournaments (two tournaments if they were active before 1980).
This came to 15 players and there's no arguing that they are among the greatest players of the game.
- Adams, Michael
- Anderssen, Adolph
- Andersson, Ulf
- Beliavsky, Alexander
- Flohr, Salo
- Gelfand, Boris
- Ljubojevic, Ljubomir
- Maroczy, Geza
- Miles, Tony
- Nimzovitch, Aron
- Portisch, Lajos
- Rubinstein, Akiba
- Stein, Leonid
- Teichmann, Richard
- Topalov, Veselin
For the 35 players who have participated in a World Championship event, we added information about the events to the profiles that we had already started.
Most of these 35 won at least one of our great events, but a few did not : Akopian, Euwe, Gunsberg, Janowsky, Khalifman, and Ponomariov.
Three of these were finalists in recent FIDE World Championship Knockout tournaments, sometimes called lotteries by their detractors. Perhaps they have a valid point.
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