Analysis by GM Gulko

Bobby Fischer – R.I.P.
C H E S S
By Boris Gulko and GaBriel schoenfeld
January 25, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/70166

Bobby Fischer, who died this week at the age of 64, was the greatest American player ever, and also the most tragic, a gloomy real-life version of Luzhin, the chess genius in Nabokov’s novel, The Defense, who suffers a mental breakdown during his quest for the world championship.

Fischer’s brilliance was on display at an early age. In 1956, all of 15 years old, he won the U.S. championship. Over the course of the next decade and a half, he mercilessly crushed one great player after another. In 1972, he became world champion, emerging victoriously over the Russian Boris Spassky in a match in Reykjavik, Iceland, that was the most spectacular in the history of the game. But Fischer’s triumph was the beginning of his own seemingly systematic self-destruction. Being American, he became anti-American. Being Jewish, he became, anti-Semitic. Being the consummate chess genius, he abandoned chess. It was only some two decades later that Fischer returned to chess to play a re-match with Spassky. But the venue was Yugoslavia, then under U.S. sanctions. In short order, Fischer was indicted for violating American law. Facing trial and imprisonment in the U.S., the mentally unstable genius wandered around the globe giving half-mad and wholly mad interviews. Now his body and soul fittingly rest in Iceland, the country of his triumph.

Fischer’s encounter with Donald Byrne in 1956, played when Fischer was 14 years old, has been called “the game of the century.”

Full analysis by GM Gulko can be seen here.