Transcription
Hey, Thoughty2 here. Some people are born to do one thing, and one thing only. Lionel Messi was meant to be a footballer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was made to write music, and Albert Einstein was born to change our understanding of the universe. Robert James Fischer? He was placed on planet Earth to play chess. The man was quite simply a phenomenon.
He broke every record in the book during a meteoric rise to the top of his sport... game. Well, sport, but also game. Look, I don't know what it is, but he was good at it... so good that at the peak of his powers, American prodigy Bobby Fischer single-handedly took on the might of the Soviet chess machine—a state-sponsored juggernaut that had monopolised international chess for two and a half decades—and won.
In doing so, he demonstrated a level of dominance over the world's strongest players that had never been seen before and hasn't been seen since. But Fischer didn't only have to contend with his grandmaster opponents; he also battled his own inner demons. Having scaled the dizzying heights of the chess equivalent of Mount Everest to become the undisputed best player on Earth, Fischer threw it all away as his growing paranoia and distrust saw him all but abandon the game he'd dedicated his life to.
As his behaviour grew more and more erratic, he eventually found himself a fugitive from the law and an exile from the country he'd brought such glory to. This is the remarkable true story of Bobby Fischer—arguably the greatest genius chess has ever seen. Based on genes alone, Fischer was always going to be bright. His mother, Regina, held a PhD in medicine and spoke seven languages fluently, and his father, Herman, was a biophysicist.
Or at least, the man people *thought* was his father was a biophysicist. It turns out there's an extremely good chance Bobby was actually the product of an affair his mother had with Hungarian mathematician and physicist Paul Nemenyi. Either way, it's safe to say 'nature' was on his side, though things were a bit complicated on the 'nurture' front. Bobby was technically homeless when he was born in 1943, and with his parents separated, he and his sister Joan were brought up by their mother.
Regina was a complex woman—extremely politically active, she was routinely investigated by the FBI for her suspected communist links. Bobby was never particularly close to his mum, and when he was just 16, she left him to live on his own in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods in Brooklyn as she pursued her medical career—but I'm getting ahead of myself. The story really begins when Bobby was just six years old because that's when he discovered the game that would change his life.
It was his sister who bought the chess set, and the two of them learned how the pieces moved from the instructions included in the box. To begin with, it was a bit of fun, but over time Bobby's thoughts turned to chess more and more often. Within a year, what had started out as a hobby had turned into an all-consuming obsession. At least, it had for Bobby—his sister had largely lost interest, leaving him with no one to play with.
Not that he minded all that much—he just played with himself. Not like that. It was two years later that Bobby Fischer first showed up as the faintest of blips on the US chess radar. Noting her son's passion for the game but a little concerned about how much time he was spending playing alone, Regina placed an advert in a local paper seeking possible opponents—and ideally friends—for Bobby.
What she got was even better—he was invited to take part in a match against one of the strongest players in the US at the time, Max Pavey. It was to be a so-called simultaneous exhibition, with Pavey demonstrating his prodigious skill by playing against a large group of players at the same time. If you're expecting this story to start with a miracle victory against a chess master, I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you—Pavey put Bobby away in about 15 minutes.
But while it was an easy victory, the self-taught seven-year-old had acquitted himself remarkably well. So well that the president of the Brooklyn Chess Club, also present at the exhibition, decided to take Bobby under his wing, offering a little tuition and introducing him to his club. It was the break Bobby had needed to take his game to the next level.
And, surrounded by skilful coaches and strong players, he began to improve at an almost unbelievable rate. He won his first tournament at the age of nine and was soon more than a match for most players at the club, the majority of whom were decades his senior. In the summer of 1956, when Bobby was just 13, he scored his first major victory, becoming the youngest US Junior Chess Champion in history.
It was an incredible achievement by any measure, but Fischer was just getting started. Later that same year, he was invited to play in an elite-level competition featuring the 12 strongest players in the US at the time. Bobby was by far the youngest player in the field and hugely inexperienced compared to his opponents, which is probably why he only managed to finish eighth.
But he didn't come away empty-handed—he was awarded the so-called 'brilliancy' prize for winning his game against International Chess Master Donald Byrne. Today, that victory is known as the Game of the Century. It was an attacking masterclass in which a 13-year-old Fischer, playing as black, sacrificed his queen before unleashing a devastating mating attack on white's king.
More than 60 years later, it remains one of the most studied and admired chess games in history. It was fast becoming clear that Fischer was more than just a strong young player—he was something truly special. Fischer was competing with men decades older than him who'd dedicated their lives to chess—and he was winning. By the following year, he was US Chess Champion—the youngest in history at just 14, a record that still stands to this day.
He would go on to play a further seven US Championships over the next decade, winning every single one of them. By 15, Fischer had earned himself the title of Grandmaster—once again, becoming the youngest person in history to achieve the feat. His dedication to the game of chess was mind-boggling. He studied almost non-stop and played whenever he got the chance.
He even taught himself basic Russian so that he could read Soviet chess books and magazines. He was actually still a schoolboy at this point, of course, but it's fair to say he didn't take his non-chess education particularly seriously. Fischer dropped out of the school system at 16—the earliest he could legally do so—to focus on his chess full time.
(By the way, in a completely unrelated and totally random bit of trivia, it turns out Bobby Fischer went to school with Barbara Streisand and Neil Diamond. Streisand has even admitted to having a crush on the future chess champion, who she considered a genius even then. As it happens, she was right—Fischer's IQ was later measured at over 180, which is astonishingly high).
Even at this early stage of his career, there were signs that all was not well with Fischer. He was temperamental and prone to making outlandish demands of tournament organisers. When those demands weren't met—and they often weren't—he simply didn't show up. He also had a bad habit of speaking his mind, which wouldn't necessarily have been a bad thing, but unfortunately, Fischer's undeniably beautiful mind was home to some rather ugly ideas.
Despite the fact his mother was Jewish, Fischer was a fierce antisemite for most of his adult life—a prejudice that would later become an obsession—and he's on record as having said some truly unforgivable things, particularly as he got older (more on that later). It was sad, really, because when he let his chess, rather his mouth, do the talking, Bobby Fischer's eloquence was unparalleled.
His combative approach to tournament officials had a severely detrimental effect on his career in the 60s, and he went long stretches without playing any competitive chess at all. To give you an idea of how stubborn he was, on one occasion he started a prestigious tournament, then withdrew halfway through while in the lead because of a scheduling dispute. Not only did he forfeit a probable tournament win, the decision directly prevented him from challenging for chess' ultimate prize—the World Championship—for several years afterwards.
Despite frequently pushing the self-destruct button, Fischer did eventually get his shot at the World Championship in the early 70s. The timing was perfect, too, because Fischer was coming into the form of his life. He earned the right to play the World Champion at the time—Soviet Grandmaster Boris Spassky—by winning the Candidates Tournament, during which he annihilated Grandmaster Mark Taimanov 6-0 in the quarter-finals, then repeated the feat by sweeping Danish GM Bent Larsen 6-0 in the semis.
Scorelines like those basically don't exist at the top level of chess, where the majority of games between strong players end in draws. Fischer had already been on a ridiculous winning streak going into the Candidates tournament, and after winning his first game against legendary Soviet GM Tigran Petrosian in the final, he'd won a total of 20 games in a row against the world's best players.
If you follow chess, you'll know how absurd that number is—at the time, former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik described it as a miracle. If you don't follow chess, let me just put it this way—nobody has come even remotely close to matching that kind of winning streak in the modern history of the game, and there's a very good chance nobody ever will. It should have been impossible. It was impossible. But Bobby Fischer did it anyway.
It's hard to put into context just how insane Fischer's performance was during this period, but let me try. Norwegian Grandmaster Magnus Carlsen is the best chess player on Earth today. He's a five-time World Champion and is head and shoulders above any other player in the world. Most people agree that by the time he retires, he'll have earned the right to call himself the best chess player ever.
Carlsen currently sits a whopping 60 rating points ahead of the second highest ranked player in the world, teenage sensation Alireza Firouzja—it's a huge margin that accurately reflects Carlsen’s dominance over the rest of the field. But here’s the thing. Bobby Fischer was the highest ranked player in the world in the early 70s, and, after his 20-game winning streak, he was *125* rating points ahead of his closest rival, the man he would soon face in the World Championship match, Boris Spassky.
As I said, Carlsen is on track to become the greatest chess player in history, but there are close to 20 players within 125 rating points of him right now. Of course, it's a different era and direct comparisons are difficult. But the point is this—at no point in chess history has a player been so much better than his rivals as Fischer was in the early 70s. It was like he was playing a different game.
Despite the ratings gap, the 1972 World Championship match wasn't a foregone conclusion by any means. Just like Fischer, Spassky is widely regarded as one of the best chess players ever, and at the time he also happened to be one of the few players in world chess with a favourable record against the American—they'd only played on five occasions, but Spassky had won three of them, with the other games ending in draws.
Spassky also had another huge advantage on his side—he was backed by the state-sponsored Soviet chess machine that had brought so much success in previous decades. He went into the match with a whole team of extremely strong grandmasters working on his behalf, analysing Fischer's games, writing reports, probing for weaknesses, and preparing lines of attack designed to catch Fischer off-guard. Fischer had none of that—just the help of his ‘second’, American grandmaster William Lombardy.
The chess world was buzzing in the buildup to the match. Not just the chess world, actually. For the first—and possibly only—time in history, chess was front page news, helped by the fact the Cold War was in full swing at the time, adding a layer of political intrigue to the USA-USSR face-off. But before the match even got underway, Fischer was up to his old tricks, arguing over where it should be held and demanding that the prize fund be significantly increased.
The start of the match was delayed by two days as Fischer refused to play, but luckily, a wealthy British investment banker donated a large sum to bolster the prize fund, and a venue was eventually agreed upon—Reykjavik, Iceland. If anyone had been under any illusions about whether Spassky could match Fischer, they were quickly dispelled—Spassky beat the seemingly unbeatable American in the very first game of a scheduled 24.
He won the second game too, but this time thanks to a forfeit after Fischer, surprising nobody, refused to play. There was huge media attention on the match, and Fischer felt the massed TV cameras recording the game for worldwide audiences had put him off. He demanded that the second game be moved to a more private location. When it wasn’t, he didn't show up.
The match would probably have ended right there had Spassky not intervened. In an admirable show of sportsmanship, rather than simply take the title and move on, the Soviet champion asked that Fischer's demands be met so the match could continue. The rest is history. Despite being 2-0 down, which would typically be seen as a huge deficit in the finely balanced world of chess, Fischer won seven of the following 19 games, losing only once and drawing 11 times—it was a crushing victory that saw Fischer crowned the 11th World Chess Champion.
His performance throughout was so remarkable that after a particularly brilliant win in game six, even Boris Spassky stood to applaud his opponent along with the fans. Considering his playing strength at the time, there's every reason to believe Fischer could have dominated the sport for years—perhaps even decades—to come. But nobody ever got the chance to find out just how far he could have gone.
In 1975, he was due to defend his world title against the young Soviet grandmaster Anatoly Karpov. But once again, Fischer issued a string of demands prior to the match, some of which were fairly reasonable, others of which… not so much. When only some of the demands were met, Fischer once again walked away, this time forfeiting the title. He wouldn't play another competitive game of chess in public for the next 20 years.
Say what you want about Fischer, the guy really knew how to hold a grudge. He practically became a recluse, and not an awful lot is known about his movements over the following decades, though he did himself get involved with a doomsday cult called the Worldwide Church of God. The group believed the world would end in 1975, but when that year came and went with a notable lack of apocalypses, Fischer—along with many other members—moved on.
His first competitive game after two decades in the wilderness was a rematch with Spassky held in 1992 in Yugoslavia. Fischer won with relative ease, but along with a huge paycheque, he also got himself into trouble with the law. At the time, there was a United Nations embargo against commercial activities in Yugoslavia, and the match was deemed to be a violation.
Fischer knew full well what he was doing was illegal—during a live news conference in the buildup, he took out a cease and desist letter sent to him by his own government and spat on it in front of the world's press. The US's response was equally emphatic, though a little less unhygienic—a warrant was issued for Fischer's arrest. Not keen to face the fallout that awaited him in America, Fischer would never return to his homeland, living instead in Hungary and Japan, though he did almost get himself deported after being arrested for travelling on an expired passport in 2004.
The incident saw him imprisoned in Japan for nine months, during which time his old foe Boris Spassky made a personal plea for then US president George W. Bush to intervene in the case. When that failed, Spassky offered to join Fischer in his cell on the condition that the two were given a chess set. Ultimately, Fischer managed to persuade the government of Iceland to offer him full citizenship, and he lived out the rest of his days in Reykjavik, the site of his great triumph over Spassky.
He died there in 2008 at the age of 64. Understandably, Fischer is still idolised by many as one of the true greats in the history of chess. A genius and an enigma in equal measure, Fischer played the game in a way that had never been seen before. But it has to be said that being really good at something isn't an excuse for doing or saying terrible things, and Bobby Fischer was certainly guilty of that at times in his life.
You don't have to dig deep on the internet to uncover some genuinely abhorrent quotes about Jews, women, America, and basically anything else that ended up in his crosshairs. By the end of his life, he was utterly convinced the world was run by an evil Jewish conspiracy and that the US government was out to get him. He also thought modern chess matches were all fixed and that computers had killed the game.
In what may be his most famous outburst, just hours after the World Trade Centre terror attacks in 2001, Fischer gave a phone interview applauding the acts of the terrorists and celebrating the death and destruction they'd caused. Understandably, considering his erratic and paranoid behaviour and his extremist views, many people believe Fischer suffered from some form of mental illness. It certainly seems possible, but he was never formally assessed, so nobody knows for sure.
The people who knew him well—and there weren't many—mostly seem to agree that he was misunderstood and misrepresented by the press, though it has to be said that many of the worst things to come out of his mouth are a matter of public record. Setting aside the controversy for a moment, there’s no denying that Fischer was a genuinely remarkable chess player.
Gary Kasparov won the World Chess Championship six times, and Magnus Carlsen currently sits on five wins. It's testament to just how great Fischer was at his best that his name is uttered alongside those legends of the game despite his relatively short career and single World Championship victory—you’ll struggle to find many all-time best chess player lists that have Fischer outside of the top three.
He may not have played for long, but at his peak, he was simply untouchable. In a sport where draws are the expected result, Bobby James Fischer blasted world-class opponents off the board like they were children. Whatever you may think of the man he became, there's no denying he was made to play chess.
Thanks for watching.