It´s impossible to know who is the best chess player in history.

i never knew about rubenstein. pretty interesting! any other interesting chess players?

These are some of the best players in chess history.

Paul Morphy
William Steinitz
José Raúl Capablanca
Emanuel Lasker
Alexander Alekhine
Mikhail Botvinnik
Mikhail Tal
Bobby Fischer
Anatoly Karpov
Garry Karsparov
Viswanathan Anand
Vladimir Kramnik
Magnus Carlsen

@ZicZhang

I miss some players on that list:

Tarrasch
Pillsbury
Reshevsky
Keres
Bronstein
Geller
Petrosian
Kortchnoi
Smyslov
Spassky
Gata Kamsky
Polougaievski
Yusupov
Topalov

And there are more first level players

It's a pity I don´t play as well as any of them.

I don't believe in such thing as best player ever. Sometimes you have bad day, other day you feel enthusiastic, next day you want to play some crazy sharp thing and all this inner mind state have affect on a game. In high level chess some games are lost becouse one bad decision during game which you wouldn't do the other day, not even consider maybe. All of great players are equally good it's like trying to find which fruit have best taste.

the best player ever is ScorpianFire7

its obvious

I forgot to mention Hikaru Nakamura.

The idea of fruit made me think. A fruit is ripe at a particular time and different fruits ripen at different times. So do people reaching their peaks. So their peak games is as close as any one can get to discovering a player at their best. Then again we do not play alone. So during our best period in our lives, we need a worthy opponent that is also at their peak. Then maybe the quality of the games can be compared.

How do we define "best"? The definition has to be very specific for us to answer the question.

Carlsen has the highest all time rating, some other dude held the title the longest, some beat their peers by the widest margins, one was american etc.

As I told you, it is Erwin Wackernagl after all.

SCNR