Best player never to win the World Championship

[Ronnie Burton]

Perhaps the best-known statistical model is that devised by Arpad Elo in 1960 and further elaborated on in his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present,[1] he gave ratings to players corresponding to their performance over the best five-year span of their career. According to this system the highest ratings achieved were:
2725: José Raúl Capablanca
2720: Mikhail Botvinnik, Emanuel Lasker
2700: Mikhail Tal
2690: Alexander Alekhine, Paul Morphy, Vasily Smyslov.

[Ronnie Burton]

Perhaps the best-known statistical model is that devised by Arpad Elo in 1960 and further elaborated on in his 1978 book The Rating of Chessplayers, Past and Present,[1] he gave ratings to players corresponding to their performance over the best five-year span of their career. According to this system the highest ratings achieved were:
2725: José Raúl Capablanca
2720: Mikhail Botvinnik, Emanuel Lasker
2700: Mikhail Tal
2690: Alexander Alekhine, Paul Morphy, Vasily Smyslov.

[Colin Patterson]

Thanks folks. An interesting response thus far.

In the poll, I stuck with those candidates that I had read such a claim about, and so rejected all the other 'possibles' because I had no solid basis for including them. Still, it just goes to show that things are never as clear cut as you might imagine.

Rubinstein and Reshevsky do seem like good shouts. Not so sure about others, like Morphy ... I thought it was clear that the period in question would be during the tenure of the world championship. Topalov? Okay I see where that's coming from, but still a world champion by title, even if we choose to query the relative stature of the two contests.

Caruana? Really? In my book, still a bit to prove and plenty of time to win the title, or at least demonstrate that he is the outstanding contender. Again, it seemed clear to me that this was not in the spirit of the question, but I'm happy to be disagreed with.

Anyway, keep them coming. And if users would like to see the table extended to include the other names being put forward, then please go ahead ( - an admin required? Carl seemed to be in favour of this anyway). It's probably better that the outcome is more meaningful and less constrained by my original selection guidelines.

[Joshua Gibbs]

Caruana all day long...

I'd say Keres was the best player relative to his era never to have won it!

[Brian Towers]

Having drawn with Kortchnoi in 1972 he gets my vote .

Seriously though, if you look at the closeness of the loss in the final then Gelfand must be up there after tieing 6-6 with Anand and only losing it on the second rapid tie-break.