Bobby Fischer

Whatever Bobby’s pathology might have been, it is most likely irrelevant to his dedication or achievement in chess. He worked harder and better than his contemporaries, and raised the standard of necessary preparation to the point where talent became a lessor factor in competition.

Alekhine & Capablanca didn’t study for 18 hours every day. This doesn’t mean that Fischer was robotic, but that “brilliancy” could come from studying tens of thousands of positions to enable creativity in a new position.

He changed the way chessplayers think, and the way chessplayers change the way they think.

But I’m just babbling. I am shocked at how few serious chessplayers there seem to be in the blogosphere.

I’m disappointed that some blogs and are making a lot of his paranoid ravings.

I don’t get it either. A very, very eccentric fellow had some crazy and noxious ideas. This is news…how?

6:Or I’ll ask this? How would we have felt if Michael Jordan had retired after his first ring, or Tiger Woods retired after winning all 4 Majors once each? I think there is a lot of resentment toward Fischer. He wasn’t playing for us.

Fischer is a weird story, but I don’t think he was so crazy, just different. Played his sport twenty years, hit the top, and quit. The fact that most people can’t do that is their problem.

Fisher-Spasky was in 1972? Man, I’m old…
I remember in Argentina waiting for the result of the day game on the radio. My father, an unrepentant communist hoping for a Spasky win that would demonstrate the superiority of Socialism. I also remember my grandfather, a former communist turned anti-communist, making what at the time for me (I was 10) was the weirdest comment: “In America there are not many chess players because people with a filled stomach don’t play chess”.

Is there anything in the literature that makes a meaningful attempt to figure out what Fisher actually understood about the game? And I don’t mean “Bobby Fisher Teaches Chess”!

Fisher’s book 60 Memorable Games would appear to be what you are looking for . . .

The Bobby-Fischer-Approach to Chess Cadogan Chess by Elie Agur, while not by a GM, long had a great reputation as the definitive study of Fischer’s style.

BOBBY FISCHER

He was a tower of strength that few could match.
He over leaped his bounds.
He was a harbinger of dreams for our future in chess.
He was a loose branch to which chess itself was the tree.
Leaves lay fallen all around.
It wasn’t the browning of the leaf that caused it to fall:
It was the tone of the season.
Such a season that life bestowed.
Such a life represented (preceding “75”) the best that chess had to offer.
Such an epitaph represents me and perhaps even you.
A great branch has fallen, but not the bulk of the tree.
I marveled at his strength; winched at his weaknesses,
as my mind took over where his left off.

Long Live Fischer
Rachel Pugh

One thing that really stuck in my mind about Fischer was hearing that as a child, or perhaps teenager, he learnt Russian so as to be able to read Russian chess magazines. For someone like me – for whom learning languages was a form of torture – I just couldn’t imagine what it would be to care enough about something to want to do that.

…they knew how smart he was, but couldn’t get through to him

Smart? What about that Daniel Tammet guy Kieran (iirc) wrote about a while ago, the guy who can learn Icelandic language in, like, two hours and spit out, like, 500 digits of Pi without a pause. Anyone calls him ‘smart’?

I’m just curious if Fischer is a similar phenomenon or something completely different.

How do we qualify the difference in a Jew making anti-semitic comments, as against a gentile?

Not meaning to dwell upon his paranoid ravings but in answer to Chris, bob and martin on why this part of his life has received attention, here is a glimpse of the extensiveness and vileness of the many public comments of this profoundly disturbed man in his later years.
so he became an official enemy and he himself went along with it and but I don’t think he was so crazy, just different are not apt characterizations to say the least.

For a summary read this 2002 article from The Atlantic. For more first hand evidence look here—this one is a transcript from one of many radio interviews on Filipino radio (this one was 1999). (You will want to scroll quickly to the bottom of the page and turn off the worl’d most annoying music embed.)

They didn’t contact my lawyers. nothing. the fucking Jews want to destroy everything I’ve worked for all my life. There as no Holocaust. The Jews are liars. it’s time we took off the kid gloves with these parasites.

Bobby Fischer: This is the Jewish mentality. These are a criminal people. They torture their prisoners in the worst way. It’s even illegal! They don’t even deny it hardly. Jews were always bastards throughout history. They are liars, they are the worst pieces of shit in the world. They mutilate their own children.
Pablo Mercado: all right.
Bobby Fischer: Fuck the Jews.

Please read them yourself if you suspect I have taken them out of context. I am sorry that he came to this and don’t post the ravings of a deranged man with any joy, but I don’t feel that it is right to leave it at ‘poor, old misunderstood’ Bobby Fischer.

I’m going to crush Najdorf and Larsen! Petrosian doesn’t have a chance. Just wait until I get to play Spassky!”

That’s fascinating, considering the crosstable from the tournament (a very uneven performance by Bobby):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piatigorsky_Cup

In the double round tournament, Fisher lost and drew with Spassky (the tournament winner), lost and drew with Larsen, lost and won with Najdorf, and drew twice with Petrosian.

#11.
A. the first 2 being?

B. an evening spent studying the Poisoned Pawn Sicilian teaches me…well, the Poisoned Pawn Sicil[ia]n. An evening spent reading Zizek, on the other hand, teaches me…that the words ‘and therefore, obviously,’ will always be followed by a paragraph i don’t understand at all.
I’d prefer to read this with the joke in the second half replaced by something more convincing, in which case what we would have would not necessarily be statements about chess and philosophy respectively, but statements about how they are currently conceptualized. One should bear in mind in making this comparison that there was no substantial attempt to conceptualize chess until the 19th century. And in many ways biology stayed at about the same level as chess theory till the 1950’s, with a considerable head start. Obviously (almost) chess theory doesn’t have a magic bullet like DNA in it to be discovered, so the challenge is greater.

I find the process of development of chess theory more interesting than the theory itself, particularly when compared to the way the various natural sciences have developed. And because it is narrowly defined and has limited objectives, it could make a nice case study.

Thanks to 10, 11, 13, 14 and anyone else who has something to add in this vein.

Some comments on some comments:
Re:#23. The Rene Chun Atlantic Monthly article is actually truly horrendous. My letter to The Atlantic correcting some of Chun’s more egregious blunders was printed a few months later – I don’t remember is it’s available online.

Re: #28: Thanks for the thoughtful comment. My answer to your first question (the two books better than ’60 Memorable Games’ is ‘Zurich 1953’ (Bronstein), (when I read this as a teenager, my rating went up almost 300 points in 6 months – and it was already high enough that such massive jumps weren’t supposed to happen), and ‘Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy’ (Watson) – by far the most thoughtful analysis of how the game has changed over the past 30 years.
Regarding your second question: I was (unfortunately) serious about philosophy paying better! I guess that what I was trying to say with the second part of that comment is that after reading philosophy (especially the Foucault/Agamben/Butler/Zizek/Badiou nexus) I feel like I’ve learned something about ways to think about the world, and after reading Informant or NIC I don’t. Although struggling through Badio’s Being and Event last summer I was occasionally reminded of the incredibly complex endgame analysis done by Averbakh or Dvoretsky.

One conceptual similarity between the two fields that I will point out – when I first got my Master title (for non-chessplayers reading this, ‘Master’, ‘International Master’ and ‘Grandmaster’ are actually official titles) I wrote an article (not available online – this was pre-internets) about how I’d always assumed that Masters were near-omniscient, but now I was one all I’d learned was how much I didn’t know yet! Philosophy’s the same way, of course – each text I read makes me want to read 5 more.

I wrote an article (not available online – this was pre-internets) about how I’d always assumed that Masters were near-omniscient, but now I was one all I’d learned was how much I didn’t know yet!

Same thing happened to me upon earning my black belt.

I think that GM-level chess players, and pro-level go players, aren’t playing the same game as us patzers. Really, not even the same game. It seems to me that by the time you get to be that good, you’re playing a meta-game: would I really rather play this sort of endgame or that sort; and you’re making those decisions as early as the opening.

He was a great chess player but Fritz is better, so much for that. #19, Fischer, too, had a phenomenal memory, even by chess grandmaster standards; he was like a human tape recorder for foreign languages, for example. I don’t know how smart he was really but to judge from his curiosity (he had none except for chess) and from interviews he gave in the 60s and 70s, he was very stupid as well as unbelievably shallow.

Fred Lapides–Fisher’s antisemitsm resembles that of John Forbes Nash–insanity got the better of him. His public statements like those you quote were digusting and horrifying, but they do not represent someone in their right mind talking.

Ther are few sadder spectacles than watching a great mind self-destruct in this fashion . . .

#37: No, not at all. The bad parts of the Chun article were every time he talked about chess or chess tournaments, and it was those errors that my letter to The Atlantic sought to correct.

It seems pretty likely to me that Fischer had Asperger’s syndrome, and probably suffered manic/depressive and psychotic episodes, as many people so affected do. Learning chess and multiple languages at a young age is a giveaway.

His antisemitic rantings are quite likely the product of the associated psychosis, and no doubt seemed to him quite reasonable. Had he been born 30 years later, he quite probably would have been properly diagnosed and treated, and would have lead a reasonably normal life. Would he still have been a chess master? Who knows?

In any event, hooray for Iceland.

“We are horrified when public personalities make vastly less offensive remarks, yet Fischer is excused.”

I don’t give a damn if someone says something offensive, all that matters is that we’re able to agree that it’s offensive. Beyond that the response becomes more about insecurity and irrational fear than reason, as if racism, or insanity, were an infectious disease that could be caught. Another reason to hate the terminology of “memes.” Still if you want to follow such a passive logic, the only way to inoculate yourself against disease is by being exposed to it.
The point is to understand Fischer. Embarrassment is a symptom of humanity, but defending it is silly.

I have heard that he died of kidney failure, a complication of an unspecified illness that he had refused to be treated for. Is there any additional information on the net?

Back in 1966 I had a summer construction job outside the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica during the playing of the 2nd Piatigorsky Cup.

Woudn’t have got that today, Jim Harrison, don’t have the right surname, si sabes lo que quiero decir.

Re: #30 (with Redux to #28)

Philosophy pays more? REALLY? So does delivering newspapers. Please forgive me, but although you seem less artificially transcendent (to be polite) than “aa”, and -to be sure- given the limits of my edumacation (Studied Kant with Tonelli and Chess with Lombardy, in terms of the subject matter at hand), the only thing I agree with is 66% of your Chess Book ranking. Beyond that,you BOTH clearly need to go to the Cadillac Ranch for a month. I’ll foot the bill.

“I definitely agree with you that a Foucaultian archaeology of chess would be a fascinating study!”

OMG. Give me a break. Ask for Myra at the Cadillac. She’ll “deconstruct” whats ailing you.

“A Foucaultian aerchaeology of Chess”. I don’t need any more humor for 2008. This will keep me laughing for the entire year….

Since I don’t watch much television, I stumbled across an article on the net that said Bobby Fischer had died on Thursday. I discovered this on three days later on Sunday. Fischers passing brought me back to my youth. Having learned the game at 10 from an uncle I gave it up a short time later. Then 9 years later I read about a dynamic American player who was going to play a Russian master. I was curious and learned chess notation and bought a book by Fred Reinfeld and delved more deeply into the game and subsequently followed the great match in Iceland. Fischers my Sixty Memorable Games was my next book and the mans love for the game showed all through this book. So,love for something beautiful is what Fischer inspired in me and I still play and love the game. Why he became hatefull is a mystery and I believe sincerely that the man was ill. He railed against the U.S. and Jewish people for no apparent reason. He had to be mentally unbalanced to do this, because the mere fact that many Jewish folks shared his love for this game could not possibly have made him hate them, so, I honestly believe it was mental problems that caused his apparent anger.

Celebrity is a deeply weird condition, but one of its strangest aspects is that a given celebrity oftens ends up being remembered the least for the very thing that made him famous in the first place. So in many of the various writeups on the recent death of Bobby Fischer, less space is devoted to his brilliance as a chess player than to the long pathetic endgame that was his life following his 1972 faceoff against Boris Spassky in Reykjavik.
The rest is here.

“There is a fine line between genius and madness.”

Bobby Fischer was a chess genius who was so strong he fought the entire Russian chess machine and his own demons to excel and set new standards in the field. His brilliance, creativity and strength in all areas of the game are to be treasured.

I was a teenager in the seventies; to me he seemed like the combination of all my favorite players: Harry Pillsbury; the devastating attacks of Paul Morphy; the great attacking style of Alexander Alhekine (without the drinking); the psychological determination and great positional play of Emanual Lasker (“the best move is the one which most unsettles the opponent”); and the easy, casual excellence — especially in the endgame — of Jose Raoul Capablanca (though Capa never trained or studied seriously, and Bobby showed that hard work REALLY paid off).

He clearly was mentally imbalanced. But one can separate great talent from other, obviously negative aspects of their personality.

I compare him, in a fashion, to Pete Rose – – great baseball player, but deeply flawed by betting on the game and then denying it forever. Or Michael Ray Richardson – – terrific basketball player who could not get his drug problems under control.

And of course, John Nash – – great physicist whose mental illness led him to anti-Semitic rantings.

In contradistinction, I refer to Henry Ford. Clearly a business genius, yet also an unrepentent anti-Semite. No mental illness here. He is one I do NOT forgive!

I want to remember the chess genius, and my heart goes out to him for the many years he suffered — tormented by his demons, often quite lonely, and who knows how happy?

Rest in peace – – baruch dayan emes.