Rate Your (elo era, classical) GOAT

I have built a spreadsheet where you can input your own valuation on various categories and it will spit out a top 20 ranking for goat, according to you, via the criteria of your choice. The part you can edit is the numbers under the criteria. Should be self-explanatory. You can click it and play around with it now or read onwards. Up to you! I don’t know how fun people will find this but if you do enjoy it feel free to share it somewhere like Reddit, where everyone can get big mad about it. I’d enjoy seeing more people’s results. Also if someone wanted to redo this project more prettily and better, I’d be all for it.

If you don’t like a criteria, ignore it! Give it a zero! If you think winning world championships is bad you can go right ahead and give it a negative score even! If one of my categories is stupid give it a zero, that’ll show it. I put in the criteria I thought of and could (mostly) assign reasonable Elo scores to. I’ll break down each category below but you can go check it out at the link above whenever you want, all you have to do is change the numbers under each category title. I recommend putting in numbers like 0, 1 or 2, but you can go wild and put in 50 if you like.

You’ll notice there’s a show results button. If you want to hide results as you set the weights that’s a good way to do so. I think people often choose the result they want (say, Fischer is GOAT) and then pick metrics that will get the result they want. What I want to offer here is twofold: first, maybe the criteria you pick do not actually lead to the result you want, and secondly, it forces consistency. You can’t have one criteria for first place and a completely different criteria for second. You decide what matters, it outputs a consistent list based on that.

There are five general categories: Peak (as determined by ratings either at a specific moment or over a short time span), Career (duration of achievements), World Championship (performance in WC matches and duration as WC), Candidates (success in candidates tournaments), Computer Evals (performance as judged by computers) and Recency (do you want to give a boost to recent players, penalize them, or stay neutral to era?).

Some categories have more subcategories than others. It’d be easy to assign more points to categories with more subcategories. So below it tells you what % of value you’ve assigned to each section, if you find you put more than you wanted in peak, you can easily adjust.

If someone else is using the sheet and you want to as well just make a copy of the spreadsheet and adjust that. No, I don’t know how to make a website that will do individual instances for each user, I am incompetent. Apologies! This is Elo era only, so all achievements prior to 1969 are excluded. Players like Tal, Petrosian, Spassky or Fischer have parts of their careers not included, which for Tal and Petrosian means their World Championships are cut. I included 40 players, apologies if your favorites are not in there.

A random challenge someone out there might find fun. Without using negative weights, how many different players could you get to a number 1 ranking and how did you do it?

Click me to go to the spreadsheet!