Jeff Sonas, an expert on ELO ratings, runs the Chess Metrics web site
http://www.chessmetrics.com/ where, among other things, he calculates ELO
ratings retroactively back to the earliest days of modern chess. He
publishes listings of all-time top 500 players for peak periods of 1 year, 3
years, 5 years, 9 years and 15 years. Here are the top three of the lists,
the number on the right are the ratings (Jeff Sonas has additionally
published the year which I omitted, there is a tremendous amount of detail
to be found on Jeff's web site)

1 year peak period:
1. Capablanca 2921
2. Fischer 2914
3. Kasparov 2895

3 year peak period:
1. Capablance 2903
2. Fischer 2902
3. Lasker 2877
Kasparov is #4 with 2873

5 year peak period:
1. Capablanca 2898
2. Fischer 2892
3. Kasparov 2869

9 year peak period:
1. Capablanca 2877
2. Kasparov 2866
3. Fischer 2846

15 year peak period:
1. Kasparov 2853
2. Capablanca 2841
3. Fischer 2794

Capablanca dominated for about decade and has achieved the greatest
domination over his contemporaries, i.e. the highest ELO rating ever.
Fischer came close to that level of domination, but did not quite reach it
in the half decade when he did dominate. Kasparov has achieved an even
(slightly) lower level of domination than Fischer, but Kasparov has
maintained his domination for a much longer period of time than even
Capablanca. Kasparov has had the highest ELO rating since 19 years now, i.e.
since 1985 (except for a short period in 1988 when Karpov had a slightly
higher rating).


"Kim" wrote in message
m...
there has been much debate as to who is the best chess player of all
time and it seems it almost always comes down to 2: bobby fischer and
gary kasparov. setting aside that debate for the moment (just
assuming that they are 1 and 2, you pick the order) who would you
consider next in line?