Who is your favorite player and why?

Mine are two, Karpov and Ivanchuk. The first for his calm aggressiveness, where he suffocates and dominates the opponent little by little, until his strength is exhausted. I really like the karpov x unzicker match, the 24.ba7 movement was marked in my history.

And Ivanchuk for his eccentric play, where he finds combinations that may seem impossible for any other great master to do, but for him no problem, he does and wins with leftovers! The Ivanchuk vs karjakin (2008) match is just amazing!

Kasparov was a genius. When he was at his prime the game was in a much more exciting state. Today the top players don't take any risks for fear of the other player knowing a bunch of computer lines

@p-wnattack
Exactly, I realize that right here in the forum. Rating 2000+ players think it doesn't matter if you win a nice match, no matter what you did, just whether the computer says you hit or not. Romantic chess is dying today. At least we still have ivanchuk!

I don't have any favorite, but certainly the ones I admire the most are: Lasker, his contributions to the philosophy of chess are timeless and his style was way ahead of his era, people thought he played 'wrong moves' to confuse his opponents but in reality he only played maneuvers that used the strategy elements in a subtle way like in this game http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1026352 ; Alekhine, for the finest tactics ever in my opinion http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1012498 ; Yusupov, for his great technical approach to strategical chess and clear methodology on training, this classical game of his is one the best I've ever seen http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1259931; and Kramnik, because defeating Kasparov is just not something any mortal does, and the way he plays is just too elegant and precise http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1252049, of course there are many other players worthy of mention like Morphy, Tal, Fischer, Kasparov himself and even Carlsen, for me the greatest of the modern era, but overall the first four I quoted are my most inspirational ones.
I see you like Karpov's style and couldn't be less reasonable because he is also one of the greatest, his recorded games illustrate endgame technique at its best, Ivanchuk has great romantic style and is also a great reference to epic chess http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1060207 this is one of his best games ever that I enjoyed studying. In respect of your criterion on computer chess, I think hopefully that computers can't take away the human element of the game because it will always need intuition to play with, the fact that humans lose to chess modules is because the standard position has been just so monotonously over-studied that their databases cover most opening moves at perfection and any inaccuracy from a human player quickly gets out-calculated in activity because the engine can't fail at calculating an optimal sequence based on the human inaccuracy for that's what the engines have been designed for, but they can't truly understand the value of the pieces beyond the material factor as was shown in the Alphazero-Stockfish match, like in this game for example http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1937930, Alphazero somehow seems to illustrate the development of an 'intuition' but I think that is more like a module-calculation with structure dynamics that belong to a balanced projection of piece activity within its own system of space, like 'playing without blundering but also keeping balance over the territory controlled', how the programmers achieved that I have no idea, but I think it's something that can be rationally studied too and learned by humans' intuitive quality, as that's how I approach my chess training, although for this I think the standard of chess should be reconsidered so as to not to restrict the understanding of the game like Chess960 attempts to do, so that learning the game becomes a study of activity and structure, not just "such pawn-london-hedgehog-fianchetto system opening" which restricts the understanding of the game to positions that can only be achieved in the current standard, while there can exist infinite possible structures in the game by which people can learn and improve, reason why I support the promotion of the 960 variant, which interestingly was designed by a chess prodigy and that couldn't mean less for recognizing it as a great approach to the game, because no matter what the starting position is chess will always be about security of the king, piece development, central control and draw or checkmate, but in my opinion computers in general can't be superior to its creators for there is always humanity to optimize these concepts just like the Alphazero thing, don't give up on romantic chess man! just enjoy the game in life

@KaosAquarius
Despite my poor English, I have to admit that it is rare to see a comment as well written as yours today. Thank you!

Thank you for not being bothered by the amount of writing! Regards

I am too bad at chess to pretend I understand the style of top players. However, I like Tal because he seemed a nice guy. First of all, he only had three fingers on his right hand. And also, he said things like:

"I drink, I smoke, I gamble, I chase girls – but postal chess is one vice I don't have."

“There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones, and mine.”

and a lot of other funny stuff. According to wikipedia, his wife would thus describe him:

"Misha was so ill-equipped for living... When he travelled to a tournament, he couldn't even pack his own suitcase... He didn't even know how to turn on the gas for cooking. If I had a headache, and there happened to be no one home but him, he would fall into a panic: "How do I make a hot-water bottle?" And when I got behind the wheel of a car, he would look at me as though I were a visitor from another planet. Of course, if he had made some effort, he could have learned all of this. But it was all boring to him. He just didn't need to. A lot of people have said that if Tal had looked after his health, if he hadn't led such a dissolute life... and so forth. But with people like Tal, the idea of "if only" is just absurd. He wouldn't have been Tal then."

My favourite chess player is Late. Mr. Robert James Fischer and Late. Mr. Paul Morphy because these two legendary chess players have their motto development above all.
In modern word we know the lines and analyzing games by using help of computers but at their time there were no computers
which were used to analyze game so they used to analyze their games by themselves and with other grandmasters.In many matches of these two players they have played nearly the strongest moves of the position they had on board.

Nice guys!

@KaosAquarius

You say "the fact that humans lose to chess modules is because the standard position has been just so monotonously over-studied that their databases cover most opening moves at perfection".
i don't think this is correct: even starting from a position which has not been studied, computers still defeat humans.

You say "but in my opinion computers in general can't be superior to its creators...". Well, it certainly is very honourable of you to defend the honor human mind, but antichess has been solved using a computer. This means there is an objective optimal strategy for white, that can be computed by a computer, however it is too complicated to be computed by a human being. This is the reason why some human beings keep on playing antichess, yet they play sub-optimal moves and thus they can't win with black against a computer that has been programmed to play the best moves (and it is even very unlikely that they can win with blacks, for they would have to always find the best move).

Then you say "...for there is always humanity to optimize these concepts..." that human are still able to optimize machines doesn't mean that machines didn't already outperform human, at least for the task they are programmed. Maybe machines are still worse than human at programming other machines, but they are already better at playing chess, antichess, go, ... It's a bit like saying "formula one in general cannot outspeed its creator, for there is always humanity to optimize formula one engines".

Finally, you say "... just like the Alphazero thing". The truth is the opposite. Alphazero has not been optimized by a human to play chess. It is an artificial neural network that self-taught itself to play chess by playing against itself. If you want to know about neural networks, you can have a look at wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_neural_network , but very briefly and imprecisely an artificial neural network is a network of "neurones" that communicate between them via "synapses" in order to produce an outcome (eg the evaluation of a chess position). This network is used to perform some task (eg playing chess), and each time it performs good (eg wins a game), the neurones and synapses that has been used are rewarded, whereas if it performs bad, these neurones and synapses are penalised. Hopefully this updated network is thus a bit better than the previous one. Repeating this a huge amount of time hopefully automatically yields a very strong neural network. The whole point is that in the whole process, human never really "optimize" anything that has to do with chess. Human only hardcode the basic rules of chess, and the reward/ penalty system. Even worse, it is not currently possible to "translate" the way the whole neural network acts into say a programming language or anything else understandble by human being. We kind of have an intuition *why* it works (even if we are far from really understanding it), but we have no clue about *how* it works. It's a bit like saying "to understand chess, let's just open Kasparov's brain and see how the neurones are wired to each other": it's probably the worst way to proceed!