Bobby Fischer has died at the young age of 64. For those chess lovers and people who admired him, he will be missed. I’ll remember him as a brilliant mind in chess and civil a disobedient cool guy…
We’ll miss you.
He was a Holocaust denying anti-Semitic nutcake. He won’t be missed by me.
IBM reports that Deep Blue is sad…
I first knew his name from the chess column he used to write in Boys’ Life. Does anybody remember that? I never see it mentioned in any news report on Fischer.
He won’t be missed.
Most people are probably glad.
Kasparov once said that Fischer was further ahead of the other players of his generation than anyone else ever. That’s a really great way to measure any accomplishment.
How much is my copy of “60 Memorable Games” worth now?
Sure, he was insane, but he was also an inspiration. When I was a little kid and too young to understand all of the political and anti-semitic stuff going on with him, and just knew him for his chess stories, Bobby Fischer was the coolest thing ever. RIP.
I think there’s not much doubt he had one hell of a personality disorder. I’m sorry for his death, just for the sake of his chess. He turned in some phenomenal performances in his time, such as brushing Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen aside as irrelevant annoyances (6-0 in a World Championship Candidates match, twice!), and chess is the poorer for his disappearance from the competitive scene when he still had many good years in front of hi.
This weekend I will be playing the musical “Chess” in memory.
As a kid, Fischer was who young chess players looked up to, our parents standing idly in the background shooshing us because he was such a nutcase, but there are still people like myself that remember those fonder times.
The brilliant chessplayer of the 1960s and his incredible run to the world championship in 1972, we’ll miss. But we’ve missed that Fischer for over three decades, ever since he didn’t show up to defend his championship in 1975.
But of the Fischer who used his fame as a platform for anti-Semitic rants and who called the attacks on September 11, 2001 “wonderful news,” I say good riddance to bad rubbish.
I agree with that.
I hope this is not too much of a hijack, but what’s up with this?
“Fischer claimed it would bring the fun back into the game and rid it of cheats.”
That’s a quote from a CNN obit describing Fischerandom, his new brand of chess whereby the back row is randomly shuffled prior to a match.
How does one cheat at chess, either regular chess or Fisherandom?
People can cheat at chess, especially now with computers, but I think that fischer was probably just using “cheats” as a sort of crazy perjorative.
He thinks that opening preparation has strangled a lot of what people love about chess, and probably has some reason to believe that people who have prepped with computers or something are “cheats”.
I don’t know if you could get a good rationale for a lot of things he says.
The coaches can send their player coded messages during a match by giving him different flavors of yogurt, stuff like that.
Horrible guy but as a young chess player he was a god. I stll remember playing over all his games at the time of the Fischer-Spassky match. Pure genius. He and Mikhail Tal were the heroes of my chess playing youth.
Ave atque vale, Bobby. I hope that the memory of the person you became will fade away leaving only that bright burning moment of your youth when you became one of the greatest players in the history of chess.
Fischer thought that a lot of games were pre-arranged move-for-move, for example from the Karpov-Kasparov matches. Random would prevent this; since the players would not know the starting position prior to the game, they could not play a pre-arranged set of moves.
To explain what he meant, I need to give a little background:
Fischer was a brilliant chess player but a lonely, sad man.
He faced the might of the Soviet Union, which had invested heavily in chess to gain national and international fame. In a typical international tournament, Fischer would face four world-class Russian players. They would often agree short draws amongst themselves (to give themselves a rest day), but go all out against Fischer. It wouldn’t matter which Russian finished above Fischer, as long as at least one did.
So Fischer felt the World was against him.
He also had no diplomatic skills, so if tournament conditions were not ideal (such as poor lighting), his justified complaint might lead to an argument, feeding his feelings of persecution.
Now onto why Fischerandom might reduce ‘cheating’:
The opening moves in chess have been analysed since the current rules were settled (about 500 years ago).
For professional players, it is important to analyse your own openings (looking for mistakes and improvements) and also to be well-briefed on your rivals opening choices in their published games.
This is very hard work, especially since you are not allowed memory aids in chess!
In Fischer’s time, the games and analysis was published in books and magazines. Now the Soviets paid their very top players to play, but also paid for top quality trainers and analysts. So every time Fischer played a new opening move in a game, it would be analysed throughly by a team of Soviet analysts.
Fischer didn’t trust many people, so did all this work himself. He felt that this was a massive disadvantage and called it ‘cheating’.
Now if you don’t know what the exact opening position is going to be (as per Fischerandom), then all your opening analysis is redundant and so it reduces ‘cheating’.
P.S. Nowadays all top games are recorded on computer, and there are databases containing millions of such games, all neatly organised. So a tournament player today will spend an hour or to studying his opponent’s recent games before playing. In between events, the player will spend hours each day looking ofr improvements. :eek:
This is based on a single incident in the bitterly contested Karpov - Korchnoi match:
On the 25th move of game 2, a waiter delivered a tray with a glass of violet colored yogurt to Karpov. After the game Leeuwerik sent a letter to Schmid protesting the yogurt. ‘It is clear that a cunningly arranged distribution of edible items to one player during the game, emanating from one delegation or the other, could convey a kind of code message’. Although the letter was almost certainly tongue-in-cheek, Baturinsky took it seriously and suggested that the binoculars Leeuwerik used during the game might also convey a coded message to Korchnoi.
By the time a waiter delivered another tray holding yogurt to Karpov on the 17th move of game 3, the first incident had been blown out of proportion by both Baturinsky and Leeuwerik. A few days later the jury met and agreed that Karpov could receive a beverage at a fixed time and that Schmid would be notified before the game if it would not be a violet colored yogurt.
There have been recent suggestions that Topalov’s coach signalled him during a recent Dutch event.
All extremely unlikely, in my opinion. 
Have you got a cite for this?
Karpov was the darling of the Soviet establishment; Kasparov was seen as a ‘rebel’. The players were real rivals - it’s implausible that they would have co-operated on anything like this.
When you look at grandmasters through history, few of them lived long, happy lives. What’s up with that? Perhaps “normal” people cannot play chess at the highest level, and so those who do are abnormal.
A sad life.
–edited for typos–