> Is it possible that his weirdness came upon him gradually, and he was pretty
> much “normal” in those early years? I didn’t hear anyone decrying his craziness
> until he went into seclusion.
The typical ages of onset of schizophrenia are 20 to 28:
Fischer won the world championship when he was 29:
My impression is that his weirdnesses were relatively mild until after winning the championship. His case sounds typical of many people with schizophrenia. He had some symptoms in his twenties, but he didn’t really have major problems until he was in his thirties.
Self loathing is quite common, as a gay man it used to be very prevelent among the gay community to hate yourself. I don’t see why it should be any different for a Jew to hate Jews, there are lots of gays that hate gay people.
If you look you probably can find a lot of others.
I do find these wild unsupported references to ‘crazy chess champions’ depressing.
This is the SDMB and we deal in cites.
Paul Morphy was a incredible chess prodigy but this was in an age when professional chess players were viewed merely as ‘disreputable’ gamblers.At one time he even had a girl refuse to marry him because he was “a mere chess player.”
He gave up chess at the age of 26, having played brilliant attacking games which were completely against the orthodox style of chess at that time.
He wanted to be a lawyer, but this never happened.
Many years after he gave up chess and failed as a lawyer, he did indeed start to behave weirdly.
There is no evidence that this had anything to do with chess and it is reasonable to assume that his disappointments in life might have caused the problems.
Wilhelm Steinitz did not ‘challenge God to chess matches (and claimed to win them)’. This story only surfaced decades after his death by a writer who gave no cite for it.
There is another unsupported story that Steinitz once said “Even God couldn’t give me pawn and move odds”, which is certainly arrogant but not crazy.
Probably the rumours spread from the second part to the first.
He did suffer a mental breakdown near the end of his life. He died a pauper (as I said earlier, chess at that time was not considered a worthy profession and it was hard to make any money, even for the World Champion.) Again this, plus old age is far more likely to be the root of any mental problems, rather than his chess career.
You finish with the comment that ‘Compared to some of them, Fischer was just cranky.’
Who exactly did you have in mind?
Jose Capablanca attended Columbia University and was made an honorary Ambassador to represent Cuba.
An annual Capablanca Memorial tournament has been held in Cuba since 1962.
Anatoly Karpov collects stamps to relax from his illustrious chess career.
Garry Kasparov speaks several languages, is a fantastic speaker (at my school, he gave both an incredible training day to top chess juniors and later lectured the History Society) and is a contributing Editor to the Wall Street Journal.
It is unwise to rely so much on ELO ratings, which show a slight relentless inflation over time.
Fischer was a voracious reader of chess magazines in those ‘pre-computer chess database days’. He succesfully took on the Soviet Union’s many top Grandmasters. The Soviet Union had poured money into chess, rightly deciding it would bring international prestige. (China is now doing the same.)
Kasparov uses computers to study all his rival’s games and to check all his games.
I wouldn’t like to separate the two - and if Morphy had access to chess databases, I reckon he’d worry both of them.
