Bobby Fischer dies

[jimsumner]

One of the strangest heroes of the Cold War.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/01/18/fischer.obit/index.html

[billybreen]

Hard to call him much of a hero anymore, though I hesitate to speak ill of the dead. In short, he was completely insane and spent his latter years as a recluse consumed by anti-semitic and anti-American obsessions.

There is such a fine line between chess genius and complete insanity. At some point, Bobby just broke.

[Windsor]

Brilliant chess player, troubled soul. Proof that the line between genius and madness can be very thin. I got interested in chess because of his match with Boris Spassky, which I 'watched' on PBS back in the day.

[JStuart]

Can't remember if it were ghost-written, but he had a book out 'Bobby Fischer teaches chess' in the 70's, which I thought was neat, as it used a programmed text, and worked 'backwards', in that the examples had the reader find the one move to checkmate, then 2 moves to checkmate, allowing one to see patterns in the end-game. Helped my miserable abilities at the time!
JStuart

[Windsor]

Can't remember if it were ghost-written, but he had a book out 'Bobby Fischer teaches chess' in the 70's, which I thought was neat, as it used a programmed text, and worked 'backwards', in that the examples had the reader find the one move to checkmate, then 2 moves to checkmate, allowing one to see patterns in the end-game. Helped my miserable abilities at the time!
JStuart


I had that book as well....it was excellent. A radical approach to teaching chess for the day.

[OldPhiKap]

^ I learned chess from that book, too, back in the day. You read through it on the right-hand pages, flipped it over, and then read it back to front on the right-hand pages IIRC.

Freakish dude on so many levels.

[MikeS]

His case is one of the weirdest I've seen in a while, this is a guy that was an American icon and he turned out to be a guy who hated our great nation. I think he was basically a really smart man who was a nut at the same time.

[dkbaseball]

People who don't remember 1973, or the Cold War for that matter, just can't imagine how big a chess match can be. There was another grand clash of Kulturkampf around the same time -- Bobby Riggs playing Billy Jean King in tennis. Beyond huge.

[jimsumner]

Yep.

In 1958 a Texan named Van Cliburn became a national hero for defeating the Russians in the Tchaikovsky piano competition. That's right. Competitive classical piano.

[accfanfrom1970]

Good ESPN story about it with Jeremy Schapp, talking about how his father Dick Schapp met and befriended a young Bobby Fischer....and clips of Fischer ranting post 9/11 hating America and Dick Schapp who years later made an obviously true comment about how he was a nut. I like the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer" much more than the Bobby Fischer.

[tecumseh]

The film Searching for Bobby Fisher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searching_for_Bobby_Fischer) is a good flick I recommend especially for parents and parents to be. What if your kid was like Bobby Fisher a tremendous talent for chess but total zero in everything else, even to the point of dropping out of high school. Would you allow it, encourage it?

Bobby Fisher like other geniuses I am not sure you can separate his madness from his genius. What got you one got the other.