🇺🇸 Bobby Fischer

On a July evening in 1972, in a stark hall in Reykjavik, Iceland, two men sat down to play chess with the eyes of the world upon them. One represented the Soviet Union, the dominant chess power that had held the World Championship for twenty-four consecutive years. The other was a twenty-nine-year-old from Brooklyn who had learned the game from a pamphlet at age six, who had barely slept in weeks, who had already threatened to withdraw from the match twice, and who was now the most famous chess player on earth. Robert James Fischer — Bobby — was about to change everything.

Fischer was born on March 9, 1943, in Chicago, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, in a modest household with his mother Regina, who worked as a nurse. He taught himself chess at six using a small set he found at a candy store. By eight, he was playing at the Brooklyn Chess Club. By ten, he was already a phenomenon, capable of defeating strong adult players with a confident aggression that veterans found both astonishing and unsettling. His mother, concerned about the intensity of his obsession, arranged for him to see psychiatrists, who reported nothing abnormal — other than a child who was, in one evaluator's words, "simply very gifted and very serious."

In 1957, at fourteen years and four months old, Fischer won the United States Chess Championship — the youngest player ever to hold that title. The following year he became an International Grandmaster at fifteen, breaking Samuel Reshevsky's record for youngest American GM. He played in his first World Championship Candidates tournament in 1959 and finished last, but his play was of such originality that the Soviet chess establishment began to take serious notice. Within three years, his opening novelties and tactical innovations were being studied at the highest level worldwide.

Through the 1960s, Fischer competed at elite levels while growing increasingly eccentric, erratic, and difficult to manage. He withdrew from tournaments over minor disputes. He made demands about lighting, chairs, and camera placement that organizers found outrageous. He accused the Soviet players — who did, in fact, sometimes agree to short draws against each other to preserve energy for games against him — of conspiring to keep the world title from him. What looked like paranoia was often, infuriatingly, correct. His 1971 Candidates matches were historic: he eliminated top Soviet players Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen by scores of 6–0 and 6–0, the most dominant performances in chess history up to that point.

The 1972 World Championship match against Boris Spassky became a global media event, watched by millions in countries that had never previously cared about chess. Fischer's preparation was meticulous and his chess was inspired; his behavior was volatile to the point of catastrophe. He lost the first game outright after failing to show up on time, forfeited the second game in a dispute about cameras. Then he played perhaps the greatest chess of his life and won the match 12.5–8.5, becoming World Champion and, briefly, America's most celebrated athlete.

He never played another official game. In 1975, FIDE could not meet his demands for the title defense against Anatoly Karpov, and he forfeited the championship. He disappeared into a private life that grew darker over the decades, marked by increasingly extreme views, anti-American and antisemitic statements, and years of self-imposed exile. A 1992 rematch with Spassky in Yugoslavia violated US sanctions and led to a federal indictment. He died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008, at sixty-four, having never played competitive chess for thirty-three years. The game had lost its greatest and most troubled genius.