Bobby Fischer, Troubled Genius of Chess, Dies at 64

Bobby Fischer, the Chicago-born, Brooklyn-bred genius who became one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, died Thursday in Reykjavik, Iceland. He was 64, and had for decades lived in obscurity, ultimately settling in Reykjavik after renouncing his American citizenship.

His death was confirmed Friday by Gardar Sverrisson, a close friend of Mr. Fischer’s. The cause was kidney failure, Mr. Sverrisson told wire services. Mr. Fischer was said to have been ill at home for some time before being admitted to the hospital on Wednesday.

Mr. Fischer was the most powerful American player in history, and the most enigmatic. After scaling the heights of fame, he all but dropped out of chess, losing money and friends and living under self-imposed exile in Budapest, Japan, possibly in the Philippines and Switzerland, and finally in Iceland, moving there in 2005 and becoming a citizen.

When he emerged now and then, it was sometimes on the radio, ranting in increasingly belligerent terms against the United States and Jews. His rationality was questioned.

In 1992, he came out of a long seclusion for a $5 million rematch against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky. The match, in Yugoslavia, commemorated the 20th anniversary of the two men’s monumental meeting in Reykjavik and Mr. Fischer’s most glorious triumph. Mr. Fischer won the rematch handily, but it was a sad reprise of their face-off in the summer of 1972.

In that earlier encounter, Mr. Fischer wrested the world championship from the elegant Mr. Spassky to become the first and, as yet, only American to win the title, one that Soviet-born players had held for more than four decades. It was the cold war fought with chess pieces in an out-of-the-way place.

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as aesthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, wrote in his 1973 book “Grandmasters of Chess.”

The rematch 20 years later drew no such plaudits. By participating, Mr. Fischer defied an American ban on conducting business in Yugoslavia as it waged war on Bosnia. After dispatching Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer dropped out of sight again, partly to avoid arrest on American charges stemming from his appearance. He stayed in touch with a dwindling number of friends in the United States by phone, compelling them to keep his secrets or risk his rejection.

In 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane to Manila and accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months while the various governments and his supporters in the chess world tried to resolve the issue.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely about an international Jewish conspiracy, which he said was bent on destroying him personally and the world generally.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he told a radio talk-show host in Baguio, the Philippines, that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were “wonderful news.” He wished for a time, he said, “where the country will be taken over by the military, they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews and execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”

Even in his years of triumph, Mr. Fischer was volatile and difficult. During the 1972 world championship match against Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer’s petulance, even loutishness, was the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whir of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted that the remaining games be played in an isolated room.

There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½ to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point for each player, a draw a half-point.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August 1972, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television.

All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer — the rebel, the enfant terrible, the uncompromising savage of the chess board — had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when the championship match was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize had been $1,400.

Trouble With Celebrity

Mr. Fischer’s victory was widely seen as a symbolic triumph of democracy over communism, and it turned the new champion into an unlikely American hero. He was invited to the White House by President Richard M. Nixon, interviewed on television, wooed unsuccessfully by commercial interests. Sales of chess sets skyrocketed; so did fees for chess lessons.

But Mr. Fischer was incapable of sustaining himself in the limelight, and by the beginning of 1973, he had withdrawn into the weird, contrarian solitude he maintained more or less for the rest of his life. He turned down huge financial offers to play, among them a bid of $1.4 million from the Hilton Corporation to defend his title in Las Vegas. The dictator Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines and the Shah of Iran offered even larger sums for matches in their countries. Mr. Fischer said the money was not enough.

At the same time, he tithed to the Worldwide Church of God, a fringe church he had become involved with beginning in the early 1960s. (He later abandoned it.) For a time, Mr. Fischer lived in Pasadena, Calif., the church’s home base, or in Los Angeles, where he was said to spend his time replaying chess games and reading Nazi literature. There were reports that he was destitute, though the state of his finances was never clear.

In chess circles, rumors surfaced intermittently that he was about to make a comeback. He invented a new kind of chess clock. He began railing to other chess players that computers had ruined the mystery of chess. He advocated a variation on the game in which pieces on the back rank, at the start, are lined up randomly.

A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an I.Q. of 181 — Mr. Fischer was a demanding personality (charismatic to some, merely infuriating to others) who seemed to feel that his prowess in chess entitled him to exorbitant privilege. He demanded loyalty from his supporters, concessions from his opponents, special treatment from tournament organizers and unalloyed respect from the world at large.

It was an outlook that became ever more skewed. In the end his self-involvement was his undoing, isolating him from all but the most obsequious chess-world worshipers.

Introduction to the Game

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. While his father was variously listed as Gerard, Gerhard or Gerhardt Fischer, a German-born physicist, there is also credible evidence that his father might have been a Hungarian émigré who worked in a naval research laboratory.

He and his wife, the former Regina Wender, divorced when Bobby was 2. Shortly thereafter, the elder Mr. Fischer left the United States for good, and Bobby and his older sister, Joan, were reared by their mother, a Swiss-born registered nurse and schoolteacher.

Regina Fischer moved her family first to California and then to Arizona before settling in a Brooklyn walkup, where Bobby grew up. The strong-willed Mrs. Fischer, who would become a forceful advocate of pacifist causes, had an uneven influence on her willful son. When he was a teenager, she tried to dissuade him from concentrating solely on chess. But she also helped raise money for him to compete in tournaments.

Mrs. Fischer was Jewish, and her son developed a hatred of Jews that became more virulent as he grew older. But mother and son evidently kept in touch over the years, and when she died in 1997, Mr. Fischer was said to have been distraught. His sister died soon afterward, and acquaintances of Mr. Fischer speculated that the two losses further taxed his fragile hold on rationality. He never married, but had a daughter, Jinky Ong, in 2000 with a companion, Justine Ong, in Manila. The child is his only immediate survivor.

It was his sister, Joan, who bought Bobby, then age 6, his first chess set and taught him the basic moves. By 8 he was taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club; by 12 he was holding his own among America’s strongest players, who gathered at the Manhattan Chess Club and the Marshall Chess Club. His adult opponents called him “the Boy Robot” and “the Corduroy Killer,” for his unwavering wardrobe and insatiable will to win.

In 1956, when he was 13, Mr. Fischer became the youngest player ever to win the United States Junior Championship. The same year, at the Lessing J. Rosenwald Trophy Tournament, the most important invitational tournament in the country at the time, he created his first masterpiece in defeating the international master Donald Byrne. The Chess Review called it “The Game of the Century,” as it is still known today.

The next year he not only repeated as winner of the United States Junior Championship but also captured the first of his eight United States Championships, becoming at 14 the youngest person ever to hold the title. No less impressive was the manner of his victory — in 13 games against the best players in America, he had a score of 8 wins, 5 draws and no losses.

The next year he became, at 15, the youngest person until then to attain the rank of grandmaster, the game’s highest designation of skill. He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, but, indifferent to classes because they took time away from chess, he dropped out at 16.

Aggressive, and ‘Brilliant’

At the chessboard he was renowned as a pitiless attacker. “I love to see them squirm,” he said of his opponents. From early on, he buttressed his penchant for original thinking with monumental study and he became known for his mastery of the game’s literature.

He favored strategies like the King’s Gambit, an opening maneuver in which White sacrifices a kingside pawn to get a quick attack. It had long been dismissed as too risky and romantic. But Mr. Fischer used it in spectacular fashion during the 1964 United States Championship in a game against the grandmaster Larry Evans. It was part of perhaps the greatest tournament performance ever, in which Mr. Fischer won 11 games, losing and drawing none. “He blew the chess world away,” said the chess teacher and writer Bruce Pandolfini.

The 1964 tournament also produced another of his legendary games, this one against the grandmaster Robert Byrne.

“It was one of his brilliant counterattacks,” recalled Mr. Byrne, who would go on to become the chess columnist for The New York Times. “He was playing Black, and he made a deep sacrifice, so deep that I did not understand it. It was a very profound combination, very beautiful.”

Mr. Byrne ended up resigning the game while he was still materially ahead. The result was so unusual that it confounded grandmasters analyzing the games for spectators.

Moving Beyond Eccentric

Mr. Fischer had always been brash, but by the early 1960s his self-regard had ballooned. He told Harper’s magazine that women could not be great chess players. Mr. Byrne recalled that at a tournament in Bulgaria in 1962 he suggested to Mr. Fischer that he see a psychiatrist. Mr. Fischer said a psychiatrist ought to pay him for the privilege of working on his brain.

He began making outlandish demands on tournament directors — for special lighting, special seating, special conditions to ensure quiet. He complained that opponents were trying to poison his food, that his hotel rooms were bugged, that Russians were colluding at tournaments and prearranging draws. He began to fear flying because he thought the Russians might hide booby traps on the plane.

He played less and less, withdrawing from competition for months at a time, fueling gossip that he was afraid to lose, but always returning to play at a level no one could equal. At one point, before the Spassky match in Reykjavik, he won 20 consecutive games against grandmasters. He also completed “My 60 Memorable Chess Games” (1969), a classic collection that remains required reading for serious players.

He earned his shot at the world champion, Mr. Spassky, when he soundly defeated another Russian, Tigran Petrosian. Now, in Reykjavik, Mr. Fischer had a world stage, and he seized the spotlight with his 6-foot-2 frame — broad-shouldered, angular and fit in bespoke suits — casting an imposing shadow.

He was imperious and, to some, insufferable. In the days before the match, he threatened to not show up and delayed his departure from New York. He insisted on television coverage, then refused to play for the cameras because he said he could hear them. He lost the first game on a blunder, then forfeited Game 2; then he threatened to withdraw entirely unless Mr. Spassky agreed to move play to a small room, away from the audience.

“He drove the organizers of the tournament to despair,” Fred Waitzkin wrote in “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” his 1988 book about the chess world, which became the basis for a 1993 movie.
In the end, though, Mr. Fischer was brilliant in Reykjavik, and when it was over, he was a legend: the American who beat the Russians at their own game.

During the match he had allowed a reporter for Life magazine, Brad Darrach, to spend time with him. Mr. Darrach produced a favorable article for the magazine but followed it with a biography, “Bobby Fischer vs. the Rest of the World,” which portrayed Mr. Fischer as a monomaniac and a monster.

Mr. Fischer brought suit, and after a long battle, he lost. By then he had received a fresh blow from the chess establishment. The International Chess Federation (known by its French acronym as FIDE) stripped him of his title in 1975 when he refused to play the rightful challenger, Anatoly Karpov, under federation rules. His life had begun its downward spiral. After an unsuccessful lawsuit against members of the Worldwide Church, he was apparently broke and homeless.

“The rare accounts of his situation all mention cheap rooms in Pasadena and L.A., months of his crashing on former friends and days spent riding the orange city bus between L.A. and Pasadena, analyzing chess games on his pocket set,” Ivan Solotaroff wrote in Esquire magazine in 1992.

Chess players generally think that Mr. Fischer agreed to the 1992 Spassky match for the money. But the opportunity to reassert his primacy was apparently attractive as well. The games were played in a surreal atmosphere in Sveti Stefan, a resort in the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro, just a few miles from the bloody warfare then raging in Bosnia. The $5 million purse was put up by a Serbian wheeler-dealer named Jezdimir Vasiljevic.

Although the match was unsanctioned, a banner was put up proclaiming it to be the world chess championship. At a press conference, Mr. Fischer held up a letter from the Treasury Department warning him that his participation in the match, considered an economic project, would constitute defiance of American sanctions against Yugoslavia. He would be subject to fine and arrest, he was told. In front of more than 150 reporters, he spat on the letter and ranted on against Jews and Russians.

Decades after Mr. Fischer faded into his oblivion, stories of Fischer sightings were traded as currency by chess players, and the debate — how would he have fared against Garry Kasparov, the great champion of the 1980s and 1990s? — echoed at tournaments and in chess publications.
“After 1972, we lost so many great pieces of art,” said Mr. Pandolfini, the chess teacher, “hundreds of masterpieces he would have created if he had stayed a sane being. We feel the great loss. All chess players do.”

Bruce Weber New York Times 19 January, 2008.

Graham Bowley also contributed reporting.