Bobby Fischer: The Greatest Chess Master Of All Time

One day Bobby Fischer went for a routine checkup, then everything went wrong. After rounds of doctors, the chess genius was dead, and it was all his fault. He rose through the ranks from a young age to become the king of chess, but amid all his accolades and admiration, trouble was brewing inside his singular mind.

Bobby Fischer was born on March 9th, 1943, in Chicago. His parents were Polish Jews, with his mother Regina meeting his father Hans-Gerhardt in Moscow in the early 1930s. Amidst rising tensions in Russia, Regina separated from her husband and fled to the United States, all while pregnant with Bobby and with his older sister Joan in tow. Upon her son’s birth, Regina was homeless, having been unable to find a permanent residence in the US. Over the next few years, she hustled at different jobs across many different states to support her children. Bobby’s father stayed resolutely back in Europe, all but ignoring Bobby’s existence. His mother worked tirelessly, and as a result, she was largely absent from her children’s lives. Any spare time she did have, she dedicated to communist activism.

In 1949, when Bobby was just six years old, he and his sister Joan learned to play chess from a children’s set their mother bought them. While Joan quickly lost interest, its effect on Bobby was immediate. Soon enough, he was intensely studying the game, and his mother feared he was spending too much time alone. In response, she submitted an ad to a local paper seeking children Bobby’s age to play chess with him. Although the paper never actually ran the ad, they did forward it to chess player Hermann Helms, the so-called Dean of American Chess. Seeing that he likely had a prodigy on his hands, Helms invited Bobby and his mother to the simultaneous exhibition of chess champion Max Pavey. The seven-year-old Bobby acquitted himself well at the exhibition, holding on for an impressive 15 minutes against Pavey and drawing a crowd to watch him.

Brooklyn Chess Club President Carmine Nigro was at the exhibition that day, and he took Fischer under his wing to teach him the next level of the game. Fischer studied under him and other mentors for the next few years. But when he was 13 years old, everything changed. He’d been working day and night on his game for years, but in 1956 his talent exploded, and that summer he became the youngest ever junior champion. But his first brush with infamy was just around the corner.

That October, Fischer attended a tournament in New York City and played against international master Donald Byrne, a man 13 years his senior. The outcome is now known as the Game of the Century. In a bold, even reckless move, the prodigy Fischer sacrificed his own queen and then managed to sweep through Byrne’s defenses to take the win. It stunned the tournament and the world, earning Fischer the Brilliancy Prize and a game that’s still analyzed to this day. But Fischer’s response was surprising. He didn’t see what he did as particularly brilliant; as he put it afterward, “I just made the moves I thought were best, I was just lucky.” The next months, however, proved it was anything but luck.

By 1957, Fischer was a household name among US chess fans. At 14, he earned the rank of master, the youngest player at the time to ever earn the title. Then just months later, he went on to win the US Championship, again becoming the youngest ever to do so. Fischer was on fire, but he was heading toward danger. When he focused on something, the people around him needed to watch out. After conquering America, Fischer now became obsessed with playing in the Soviet Union, which had a fearsome reputation for turning out chess prodigies, and which had a complicated place in his family history. Never one to do things by halves, he begged his mother to write to no less than the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev asking to get an invite to the 1957 World Youth and Student Festival in order to enter the country. When this fell through, he got desperate. In a bizarre and dedicated move, he instead got the American game show “I’ve Got a Secret” to fund roundtrip tickets for himself and his sister Joan in 1958 after he made an appearance on their set.

At long last, Bobby Fischer was on Soviet soil. Within hours, everyone began to regret it. Bobby and Joan arrived in Moscow, and Bobby immediately threw a fit. He insisted that his guide take him to the Moscow Central Chess Club without any delay, and while there, he routed two of the club’s top players in speed chess. As one bystander noted, he crushed almost everyone who crossed his path. But none of this was enough for Bobby. Having vanquished the Soviet Union’s best young masters, he wanted more. He quickly demanded that he play Mikhail Botvinnik, the reigning world chess champion. After the Soviets informed him that this was impossible, Fischer asked for Paul Keres, another highly ranked player. Still, the answer was no.

Fischer’s Soviet trip began to take a sour turn. Just after asking to play Botvinnik and being told no, Fischer threw out a vicious insult. Angry like a spoiled child who couldn’t get the toy he wanted, he sneered that he was tired of these “Russian pigs” right in front of his hosts. To make matters worse, the Soviets spying on their guest found a postcard of his that said, “I don’t like Russian hospitality and the people themselves.” Before long, his comments got around to the Russian newspapers, causing something of an international incident, with everyone worried about what might happen next. Bobby and Joan went to Yugoslavia, where Bobby played more publicized chess games but also got out of Moscow’s hair.

When he was almost exactly 15 and a half years old, Fischer continued on his unprecedented trajectory and became the youngest Grandmaster. Half a year later, he made a momentous decision: as soon as he reached 16, he dropped out of high school to focus on chess, later explaining in an interview, “You don’t learn anything in school.” He did still tend to his education, he just did it in a way that was totally focused on chess. Incredibly, Fischer taught himself multiple foreign languages, including Russian, for the express purpose of reading chess periodicals from around the world.

In 1960, at a tournament in Buenos Aires, Fischer recorded a rare competitive failure, finishing far behind two other players. For Fischer, it would have been a humiliating loss, with the whole chess world wondering if he’d lost his touch. The truth, at least according to his competitors, is much more salacious. At the time, Fischer was 17, a snappy dresser, and apparently full of hormones. According to some fellow players at the tournament, Fischer had his first intimate experience with a woman during the competition, and the distraction contributed to his loss. Afterwards, Fischer made himself a bitter promise. He reportedly said he’d never mix women and chess together ever again, a promise that at least one person close to him says he kept.

Fischer faltered once again in the Candidates Tournament in Curaçao in 1962, finishing in fourth place out of eight when he had been the favorite. This time, Fischer claimed the tournament’s Soviet players had colluded to stop him from winning. After a string of tournament successes around the world, Fischer achieved an astonishing 11-0 win in the 1963-64 US Championship. To this day, it remains the only perfect score in the history of the tournament and is one of only about 10 perfect scores recorded in high-level chess. Then he went for the Soviets.

In 1971, Fischer competed against Soviet Grandmaster and concert pianist Mark Taimanov in the quarterfinals of the Candidates matches. The Soviets were desperate not to lose to Fischer, who had treated them so poorly before, and Taimanov spent hours poring over a Soviet dossier on Fischer’s game style. Even so, Fischer was favored to win, but no one could have predicted how brutally it unfolded. By the fifth game out of six in their meeting, Fischer had won the previous four sessions, and the atmosphere was incredibly tense. To make matters worse, Taimanov had come into this game with two seconds who were both Grandmasters. Fischer, meanwhile, was utterly alone and thought it was both hilarious and humiliating that his opponent felt he needed that much assistance.

In the end, Fischer beat Taimanov in a resounding 6-0 victory. The Soviet government, furious at Taimanov’s loss, kept him off the chess team, took away his stipend, and banned him from traveling for two years. Bobby Fischer’s personal Cold War was just heating up. The World Chess Championship of 1972 between Fischer and the defending Soviet world champion Boris Spassky would become the defining moment of Fischer’s career. Fischer had long been particular about his chess playing, especially with the Soviets, and he refused to play in Spassky’s chosen location of Reykjavik until the committee upped the prize money. After his enormous hot streak, Fischer had now gained a reputation as the Einstein of chess, and he was more than happy to act the part. As such, his diva demands grew; in particular, he required that the 1972 Championship game have one particular Staunton chess set made at Jaques of London.

In preparation for the match, Fischer did his part to meet the moment, focusing intensely on his physical fitness ahead of the tournament. In interviews, he noted how he frequently played tennis, went swimming, and practiced boxing, all to improve his brain power when it came to the chessboard. Due to the ongoing Cold War, the “Match of the Century” between the American Fischer and the Soviet Spassky became a media sensation. It’s been a long road for Fischer to this game, and it’ll be a long match at the end of that road. Both he and Spassky have to play 24 games. The match could last up to two months, each game runs to five hours—the most intellectually exhausting battle known to the mind of man.

The match got off to an embarrassing start for Fischer, who lost the first two opening games, the second by declaring a forfeit. His reasons for forfeiting raised eyebrows. Although Fischer had appeared to enjoy the media attention outside the game room, he now said the gaming conditions inside, with cameras in every corner, were distracting him. Throughout his decision to forfeit, which took some time, Fischer was erratic and, according to a friend, not very coherent. Indeed, Fischer was apparently paranoid about the entire match, believing that the Icelandic Chess Federation, as a supposed communist front, was conspiring against him to make him lose. With the match sitting at 2-0 for Spassky, it looked as though Fischer might leave Iceland and abandon the match entirely. Reportedly, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger rang him up and encouraged him to stay in the match for America’s sake.

Even so, Fischer made one more stipulation in order to continue: he demanded that the third match be played in a private back room away from the cameras. Spassky, not wanting to win by default, agreed. From that third game on, everything changed for Fischer. He staged a comeback with a newfound confidence. After the 21st game, he was declared the victor and became the 11th World Chess Champion and an American hero. Yet amidst all these accolades, all was not well behind closed doors.

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After winning the World Championship, Bobby began to change in disturbing ways. For one, he retreated from the spotlight and played no competitive matches for the next three years. Then in 1975, he was pushed to play against rising challenger Anatoly Karpov for the world championship title. Fischer now insisted on an updated win system for his upcoming match with Karpov. FIDE, chess’s international governing body, agreed to meet some but not all of his requests. But this wasn’t good enough for Fischer. In the end, he refused to compete in the match and forfeited his title by default to Karpov.

The 1972 World Championship was both the best thing to ever happen to Bobby Fischer and the worst. Afterward, he had nothing left to prove to anyone, and so he began to cut himself off from the world. For the next 20 years, he didn’t play another single competitive game. Grandmaster Peter Biyiasas played against Fischer in private countless times during this period and only walked away feeling confused. As he put it, “He was too good. He honestly believes there’s no one for him to play, no one worthy of him. I played him, and I can attest to that.”

In 1988, Fischer entered a relationship with German chess player Petra Stadler after his former opponent Boris Spassky introduced them to each other. Although the relationship lasted two years, Petra punctuated their breakup with a betrayal. In 1995, she came out with a tell-all book about him, “Bobby Fischer: How He Really Is.” In 1992, Fischer finally agreed to emerge from isolation to play Spassky in a revenge match in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Even though the country was under UN sanctions, this was a big problem, and the US made it clear that Fischer’s participation in the match would be illegal and sent him an official order not to go. During the first press conference for the match, Fischer stunned the room into silence with one act: he spat on the order in front of everyone.

He would go on to win the game with Spassky, proving to everyone his genius was still with him. But after witnessing Fischer’s incendiary press conference, the US government made good on their threats. They put out a warrant for his arrest effective as soon as he finished the match. Not calling their bluff, Fischer fled first to Budapest and then later to the Philippines. Incredibly, Bobby Fischer was now a fugitive.

In 2002, The Philadelphia Inquirer published an investigative report into Bobby Fischer’s parentage and put forth an explosive theory: his father wasn’t Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, but rather the Hungarian mathematician and one-time child prodigy Paul Nemenyi. Not only did the brilliant Nemenyi likely have an affair with Bobby’s mother in 1942, but he was also interested in Bobby’s upbringing and paid child support until he died in 1952.

After two years living in the Philippines, Fischer moved to Japan. Then, on July 13th, 2004, while attempting to take a flight back to the Philippines, Japanese authorities arrested him in the airport at the behest of the US government. Fischer said they put him in a windowless, smoky cell where he didn’t see natural light for days at a time. It also drove him to re-evaluate his life. He ended up marrying his partner at the time, chess player Miyoko Watai, from prison on September 6th, 2004. During this time, Fischer, terrified that he’d be extradited to the US, sent a letter to the government of Iceland requesting citizenship. Eventually, this was granted by the Icelandic government, in part thanks to his 1972 match with Spassky that had put Iceland on the map.

From then on, Fischer was determined to live a reclusive existence once more. Yet his legacy wasn’t so simple. Despite his own Jewish heritage, Fischer became virulently anti-Semitic as time went on, engaging in all kinds of paranoid conspiracy theories about Jews. By the end of 2007, Fischer was only 64 but was suffering from degenerative kidney failure. He died on January 17th, 2008, and it was all his fault. “I learned in New York here.” “What age?” “Six.” “When did you start to get serious about chess?” “Well, I was maybe seven.” Originally, he only had a urinary tract blockage but refused, perhaps because of his paranoia, to have surgery or even to take medication. He was buried in a small Christian cemetery near an Icelandic village, having spent over 15 years in exile.

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