Robert Fischer

World Chess Champion

There are tough players and nice guys and I'm a tough player.

    -- Robert Fischer, quoted in Frank Brady's Profile of a Prodigy

 

Books About Fischer

"Bobby" Fischer, as he is commonly known, was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. Fischer learned the moves of chess with his sister at age six. He lived in a number of cities around the United States as a child, but he became a master chess player while living in Brooklyn, New York, surrounded by the cream of America's chess talent at the time. He was aided in his rise to becoming a chess master by an extraordinary chess teacher, Jack Collins.

After only two years of serious study and play, Fischer won the U.S. Open as a fourteen year old in 1957. Shortly afterward he won the U.S. Closed Championship, a feat he was to repeat all seven times he participated. He compiled a record perfect 11-0 score in the 1963-64 U.S. Championship. Fischer dropped out of formal education after only two and a half years of study of Brookyln's Erasmus High School (where one of his classmates was Barbara Streisand).

Fischer became a grandmaster after qualifying as a World Championship Candidate from the Portoroz Interzonal in 1958. Fischer's dominating victory in the 1962 Interzonal in Stockholm marked him clearly as a potential world champion.

Fischer's career saw him involved in a number of controversies, including:

In the minds of many, Fischer cemented his claim to being the greatest player in history with his march to the world championship title beginning in 1970. On the way to the title match, Fischer:

In what might have been the most highly publicized chess match ever, Fischer then defeated Boris Spassky for the World Championship in a 1972 Reykjavik, Iceland match. Fischer was aided in his march to the title by many, including his administrative second, Col. Ed Edmonson, another member of the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame.

After refusing to defend his title through an official match, and living in a self-imposed exile for 20 years, Fischer won a rematch against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia in 1992.

Robert Fischer was a Charter Member of the Chess Hall of Fame in Washington, DC.

Other Views of Fischer

As with Steinitz, Fischer's genius has often been concealed by controversies away from the board. Like Lasker, Fischer has raised chess to new financial heights despite frequent retreats from serious play. And, like Capablanca, Fischer is recognized by millions of non-players and has won the game many new enthusiasts.

--GM Andrew Soltis, in Golombek's Encyclopedia of Chess, New York, 1977.

The beauty of his games, the clarity of his play, and the brilliance of his ideas have made [Fischer] an artist of the same stature as Brahms, Rembrandt, and Shakespeare.

--IM David Levy, in How Fischer Plays Chess, New York, 1973.

Chess is not to him a means to an end, a subsidized sport, a forum for testing philosophic hypotheses, or an outlet for baser emotions. To Fischer, chess is an end in itself.

--IM Anthony Saidy, in The Battle of Chess Ideas, 2nd Edition, 1975

Even as a boy, Bobby was his own man. He knew what he wanted, he felt that he knew what was right, and he made his own decisions. Once convinced of something, his integrity, pride and absolute independence ruled out any compromise. Once he made up his mind there was no changing it. Many often had a go at it; Ethel and I never did. And even when the general consensus was that he was dead wrong, it turned out more often than not that he was right. As the heart has its own reasons, so has genius.

--Fisher's early coach Jack Collins, in My Seven Chess Prodigies, New York, 1974.

Since all these books [about Fischer] so distort what I consider to be the true Bobby [I've become skeptical about chess biography]. [A] hundred years from now no one's going to have the slightest idea what Bobby Fischer was like because very few people today have a true idea of him.

--Ed Edmondson, Fischer's "administrative second" on his road to the title in Chess Life, February 1977.