Malditah Musings

Simply the Best

Only The Best

Bobby Fischer died in January of this year in Reykjavik, still tilting sa windmills, the bats of paranoia still fluttering around his head and his prejudices firmly in place. He is back with a loop for 36 years the scene of his greatest successes and, although nobody realized at the time, the place where his career almost ended.
Fischer became World Chess Champion in 1972 by defeating the title holder, Boris Spassky, in the unlikely setting of Reykjavik, Iceland. It was the first championship match held outside of Moscow since 1946 and this is the first time in decades that 'the Russians', such as Fischer always called it, was damaged by anyone from outside the Soviet bloc, let alone by an American.
Robert J. Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943. She moved with her mother and sister, in Brooklyn at the age of six he learned the basic moves of chess, to becoming absorbed in the game when he was seven his mother, Regina, put an ad on the Brooklyn Eagle, asking if there might be other children of Bobby's age willing to play chess with him. Eight years old he joined the Brooklyn Chess Club.

It is clear that Bobby has a head, but he is not a phenomenon in the sense that, say, Raul Capablanca is. The Cuban Capablanca is known for elegant simplicity of his style. The age of four, so the story goes, Capablanca had watched his father playing chess with a friend. After game, lost his father, young Raul told him he had made an illegal move in the cavalry and showed the correct move. His father set up the pieces again and Raul won the game … Capablanca in due course became World Champion and held the title for most of the 'twenties. He does not seem to have studied the game and had many a reputation for being rather lazy! He claimed never to have owned a chess book.

Bobby Fischer is not as though the experts noticed the similarities between the Cuban's and Fischer's style as he matured. . He is an incredible or incredibly retentive memory, learning and working memory in the game all the important players, past and present. He also resurrected some long-forgotten game from the 19th century. Up until he was 12 years old he improved steadily, but at about 13, and quite suddenly, he was moved to a class of its own. He became youngest player to win the U.S. Junior Championship and began to win tournaments throughout the U.S. circuit. From age 14 he won every single tournament he competed in chess for the rest part of his career, with two exceptions. Over the next few years he has become quite simply the best. Many people, and here I hold my hands up, think he is the biggest player in the long history of chess.

But he also has major psychological flaws, as you We see that now, ultimately destroyed his career and his life. Early on it was noticed that he just wants to win, he liked to make his opponents squirm. "I like the moment when I break a person's ego," he said in an interview. He hated everything to do with the Soviet Union and came to see it as his mission to crush the Russian conquest. He also began to mutter about 'International Jewish Conspiracy' and his lackeys, who seems to care only about everything. It is very strange because his mother was Jewish and probably his father, a physicist, too, and he brought up in a Jewish area of Brooklyn.

As he became more successful Fischer started to get a name for being difficult to work with. He put everybody's back up, tournament officials, sponsors, journalists and interviewers. He pulled out of tournaments, complained about these conditions, light, Photographers, the amount of money on offer and anything else he could think of. In 1971 he took on three other contenders for the right to challenge the World Champion. He beat the first two, and Larsen Taimanov 6-0 each, a score line never achieved before or since. The last three were Tigran Petrosian, a Russian of the old school with a reputation for being extremely hard to beat. Fischer won with a score of 5-1 and three draws. That being said then, although not by by Fischer, who has a bad cold in time!

The run-up in what is billed as the most important match of the century is full of dramas before, accusations and postponements which came to be associated with Bobby Fischer. He even threatened to boycott the event entirely if his conditions are not met. Everyone knows that he is quite capable of doing just that. He's done it before – some again. In 1962 and again in 1968 he stopped playing tournament chess for 18 months each time. press charged the coming World Championship match as a classic confrontation between East and West. And in 1972, as the world hunkered down further in the Cold War, it is easy to see it as the Russians against the Americans, against the totalitarian state in the free world, the bad guys versus good. That's how Bobby Fischer saw it. "Someone has to stop them. I have chosen. I intend to teach them a little of humility ", he said. It was Clint Eastwood facing up to the crooked sheriff and his deputies.
Fischer was the last person anyone teach humility, but that does not matter. The public loved it. For the first time ever, chess is sexy. Bobby was young, tall and handsome, charismatic and immensely talented, and He was not about to be over-awed sense of history or political events. No sir.

And there is something anyone else. Fischer is a loner. Most Grandmasters is a whole team behind them. It is especially used in the Soviets. The point is that if, after a days of playing the position is adjourned, the Grandmaster could fall into bed for an appropriate sleep, while his team, consisting of other Grandmasters and analysis experts may worry the position and find the best continuation for the next day. Fielding the Soviet Union was a very strong team of Grandmasters to help with Spassky, including sources of about 35 Grandmasters back home. Bobby Fischer did not have any longer. He is one Grandmaster and two administrative helpers, but in fact he is his own studies. He once said, "If I win a tournament I win it all by myself.
I play. Nobody helps me. "Nobody knows whether Fischer was there in the first game on July 12. He dithered and dallied and seemed uncharacteristically nervous. He is still in New York when Spassky's team is settling in to their hotel in Reykjavik, but at the end of English entrepreneurs topped the prize money up to $ 250 000. It is unknown the prize for a chess match, and it finally attracting Fischer above.

Fischer was uncomfortable in the first game and lost pretty easily. He refused to play the second game until all the cameras were removed from the hall. He probably figured the officials agree its needs but they are not and he has done with the game. Fischer is now two games down. A lead of two games are usually enough to secure the a match. Protect your lead, playing defensively ie play for draws, and you should win. But not against Fischer. He arrived late for the third game, as he was for most of the game and won convincingly. He won the next game to level the score at two games later he took the lead. By ten he was leading the game 5-2. After that there was not any real doubt as the outcome. Fischer became the new World Champion in 1 set in the last 7-3 points, not counting the draws.
Fischer received a heroes welcome back in New York. Offer and sponsorship deals flood but, although nobody realized it yet, Bobby's glory days are all but over. It would be tempting to end the story at this point, a high school drop-out from Brooklyn with no knowledge of art, culture or politics – even an IQ of 181 – were taken into mightiest chess-playing nation in the world and beaten them single-handedly vision.

After the match Fischer gave more than $ 60,000 of his prize money to the World Wide Church of God, an evangelical sect that he has been connected to since the mid 'Sixties, but shortly after he won the title of the church hit a rocky patch when this statement was predicted and failed to fulfill one Its founder, a prominent radio preacher resounding name of Garner Ted Armstrong, was involved in a sex scandal. Fischer felt betrayed and sued the Church, say it took his orders from "a secret world government satanical.

Before the World Championship Fischer has promised not to sit on its title. He said he played a lot of competitive chess. In fact he played very little. He is due to defend his title in 1975 against Karpov but he bickered Anatol officials up to and beyond the date of the match, about prize money and conditions, and thus lost his title by default.

Fischer now started his long journey to an exciting experience of his own making. He started to dress like a hobo and grew his hair and beard long. His paranoia deepened as he ranted about Jews, the 'Commies' and the FBI. The Russians are cheats and are involved in a conspiracy to 'fix' international chess, and he lived in fear of being poisoned. He said a man at this time, "If the commies come to poison me, I do not want to make it easy for them." He also has all his fillings removed in case someone managed to put an electrical bug in one of his teeth to influence his thoughts.

Fischer did not stop playing altogether and are played with him reported that he is playing as well as ever. In 1992 he came out of his self-imposed exile in play Boris Spassky in a rematch. The winners will share $ 3,650,000. By this time he really needed the money, after all, he has turned down millions dollars over the past two decades, and million dollar sponsorship deals match in charge. But the real reason he was taken on the challenge seems to have been the love of a 18-year-old chess prodigy from Budapest called Zita Rajcsanyi.
He has finally persuaded the reclusive Fischer to leave the refuge of her flat in California and trip to Yugoslavia.

Government officials advised him not to play the match in Yugoslavia because of strict UN sanctions were in place but when asked on TV if he would heed U.S. warnings Government He held up the letter and the Treasury department said: "This is my response to their orders is not to defend my title here," and spat on it. Fischer went on to win the match 10-5 and his passport was immediately revoked and an order for his arrest issued by the Bush administration, making it impossible for him to come back to us.
Again he was gone, and with good reason. This time they are really after him. Reports had him seen in Poland, Germany and the Philippines. And it is in the Philippines Fischer hit rock bottom. In a local radio broadcast on September 11, 2001, just after the Towers were destroyed said: "It is all wonderful news. I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel is slaughtering the Palestinians … for years. I want to see the U.S. wiped out. "

For a while now, he has lived in Tokyo, with his wife Miyoko Watai actually, the Japanese women's chess champion, before arrested by Japanese authorities for using a revoked passport. He was held for nine months, and threatened with deportation to the U.S.. Finally in 2005 a grateful Iceland offered him citizenship. He died of liver failure in January 2008 with Miyoko at his side, still tilting at windmills as the light faded.

The charitable view is that he is insane. Grandmaster Lev Alburt, a close friend of Fischer in an hour to put it like this: 'Chess is a game that forces you to be objective and to make the account an opponent's views. It forces you to make reasonable judgments and with a bright mind. When Bobby quit playing, This is really the end of his life rational. And he began filling that void in crazy ideas'. Bobby Fischer leaves us a big problem. How to evaluate a person who was a Colossus in chess and a failure in everything else? He left us with a multitude of game records, available to anyone with A chess set and the ability to read chess notation. It is no exaggeration to say his game is in the midst of great intellectual hallmark of our age, perhaps any age. Robert J Fischer died alone and far from home, with only his faithful wife Miyoko by his side. In the end, we should not pity someone who wasted 30 of his best years with anger and small-minded bigotry?
James Donaldson Collins

www.scottish-essays.com

About the Author

James Collins is an artist and writer living in the Highlands of Scotland with his wife, daughter and three dogs. His interests are history, science-fiction, chess, snooker and wolves. He also claims to play guitar like a ringing a bell.