“The thing that strikes me about [Bobby] Fischer’s chess is that it’s very clear. There are no mysterious rook moves or obscure manoeuvrings. He’s very direct. There’s a great deal of logic to the chess. It’s not as though it’s not incredibly difficult – it is incredibly difficult. It’s just that when you look at it you can understand it – afterwards. He just makes chess look very easy, which it isn’t.”
— Nigel Short, British grandmaster, once ranked third in the world
A fascinating and lengthy article about a new biography of Bobby Fischer. Highly recommended! Although I am not a chess whiz, by any stretch of the imagination, Fischer has always been fascinating to me, and I love to hear other chess players talk about him. I love hearing experts referring to other experts, even if I have no idea what they are talking about, and have to squint to attempt to understand.
The article I linked to is ostensibly a book review, but there are only a couple of paragraphs near the end that actually touch upon the biography in question. For the most part, it is a well-written and thoughtful timeline of the extraordinary life of Bobby Fischer.
I just read the piece this morning, and thought of the R.I.P. post I wrote when Bobby Fischer passed away, so I thought I would post it again.
The greatest pleasure [in winning] is when you break his ego – that’s where it’s at.
— Bobby Fischer to Dick Cavett
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
Fischer playing Fidel Castro.
I held out for about 30 moves, and when I resigned, it was with flags flying and bands playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” I went down with honors. The game took about 15 minutes, of which 14 were mine.
– Edward Rothstein
A couple years ago, I read Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time , the story of his famous chess match against Spassky which reflected (like the 1980 hockey game in the Olympics) the Zeitgeist of the entire Cold War, being fought on another kind of battlefield.
The book is very good on explaining the shattering effect that Fischer had on his opponents:
The most interesting phenomenon about Fischer, however, is not the effect chess had on him, but the effect chess had on his opponents, destroying their morale, making them feel that they were in the grip of an alien hostile force to his powers there was no earthly answer …
Fischer appeared to his opponents to function like a micro-chip driven automaton. He analyzed positions with amazing rapidity; his opponent always lagged behind on the clock…Nor did Fischer appear to be governed by any psychologically predetermined system or technique. Take just one example, the twenty-second move of game seven against Tigran Petrosian in the 1971 Candidates match. Who else but Fischer would have exchanged his knight for the bishop? To give up an active knight for a weak bishop was inconceivable; it seemed to violate a basic axiom of the game, to defy all experience. Yet, as Fischer proved, it was absolutely the right decision, transforming an edge into another ultimately winning advantage.
Human chess players can often feel insecure in open, complex positions because a part of them dreads the unknown. Thus they avoid exposing their king because they worry that, like a general trapped in no-man’s-land, this most vital of pieces will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. Common sense and knowledge born of history tells them that this is so. An innate pessimism harries them, nagging away, warning them off the potentially hazardous move. Not Fischer. If he believed his opponent could not capitalize on an unshielded king, if he could foresee no danger, then he would permit it to stand brazenly, provocatively unguarded.
Faced with Fischer’s extraordinary coolness, his opponents assurance would begin to disintegrate. A Fischer move, which at first glance looked weak, would be reassessed. It must have a deep master plan behind it, undetectable by mere mortals (more often than not, they were right, it did). The US grandmaster Robert Byrne labeled the phenomenon “Fischer-fear”. Grandmasters would wilt, their suits would crumple, sweat would glisten on their brows, panic would overwhelm their nervous systems. Errors would creep in. Calculations would go awry. There was talk among grandmasters that Fischer hypnotized his opponents, that he undermined their intellectual powers with a dark, mystic, insidious force. Time after time, in long matches, Fischer’s opponents would suffer a psychosomatic collapse. Fischer managed to induce migraines, the common cold, flu, high blood pressure, and exhaustion, to which he himself was mostly resistant. He liked to joke that he had never beaten a healthy opponent…
In Reykjavik to cover the match, the novelist Arthur Koestler famously coined the neologism “mimophant” to describe Fischer. “A mimophant is a hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. A member of this species is sensitive like a mimosa where his own feelings are concerned and thick-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others.”
There is no doubt that, like a psychopath, Fischer enjoyed that feeling of complete power over his opponent. Like a psychopath, he had no moral compunction about using his power.
The lengthy obit in the New York Times is well worth-reading in its entirety but an excerpt will suffice:
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.
Frank Brady, Fischer’s biographer, wrote:
[Fischer] empathizes with the position of the moment with such intensity that one feels that a defect in his game, such as a backward pawn or an ill-placed knight, causes him almost physical, and certainly psychical pain. Fischer would become the pawn if he could, or if it would help his position, marching himself rank-by-rank to the ultimate promotion square. In these moments at the board, Fischer is chess.
When asked by The Washington Post before the Spassky match if he were “on edge”, Fischer replied: “I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves.”
The Boris Spassky / Bobby Fischer match, 1972.
Another excerpt from Bobby Fischer Goes to War, describing a moment in the first game of the Spassky/Fischer match in Iceland:
Then, on move twenty-nine, Fischer did the unthinkable. Picking up the remaining black bishop in the long fingers of his right hand, balancing it with his thumb, index, and middle fingers, he stretched out his arm and in one movement plucked off the rook pawn with his two smaller fingers while installing the bishop in its place.
This was inexplicable. In playing Bxh2 – bishop takes the king rook pawn – Fischer had fallen into a standard trap. At first glance, the undefended white rook pawn looks as though it can be safely pinched by the black bishop. At second glance, one sees that if the pawn is taken, white’s knight’s pawn will be advanced one square, leaving the black bishop helplessly stranded. White can capture it with nonchalant ease. Even for the average club player, the recognition of such a danger is instinctive.
Fischer was the chess machine who did not commit errors. That was part of his aura, part of the “Bobby Fischer” legend, a key to his success. Newspapers reported a gasp of surprise spreading through the auditorium. Spassky, who had trained himself not to betray emotion, looked momentarily startled. Those who have analyzed the match were equally dumbfounded. “When I saw Bobby play the move,” wrote Golombek, “I could hardly believe my eyes. He had played so sensibly and competently up to now that I first of all thought there was something deep I had overlooked; but no matter how I stared at the board I could find no way out.” Nor could Robert Byrne and Ivo Nei, who analyze the game in their book on the match: “This move must be stamped as an outright blunder.” The British chess player and writer C.H. O’D. Alexander’s verdict is similar: “Unbelievable. By accurate play Fischer had established an obviously drawn position … now he makes a beginner’s blunder.” A television pundit on the US Channel 13 reckoned it would go down as one of the great gaffes of all time. The Los Angeles Times thought it could be explained only as a “rare miscalculation by the American genius.” In Moscow, the correspondent for the Soviet state newspaper Izvestia, Yuri Ponomarenko, located the move’s source in sheer greed. Bondarevskii commented that the move was “a vivid example to smash the myth of [Fischer] as a computer.” Anatoli Karpov, the twenty-one-year-old Soviet star in the making, had a psychological theory involving both players: Spassky was afraid of the American and had sought to prove to himself that he could always draw with the white pieces. Fischer, annoyed, attempted to disprove this. “So he sacrificed a piece without rhyme or reason.”
Years later, in twenty pages of exhaustive analysis, British grandmaster Jonathan Speelman concluded that even after Fischer captured the h pawn, totally accurate play could have earned him a draw. And to be charitable to Fischer, perhaps he recognized this intuitively. But that is hardly an explanation. For such a gambit had only a downside, offering no chance of victory. At best, with extreme care, it gave him the same result – a draw – that he could have achieved without any effort at all – indeed, probably simply by asking for one.
The game was adjourned after five hours, with Fischer’s position in a hopeless mess.
Given this description of just one move during the game, it is not surprising that Arthur Koestler (blistering critic of Stalinist Russia, journalist, novelist, all-around brilliant Orwellian thinker), who covered the Spassky/Fischer match, wrote of his experience in Iceland: “Funny to be a war correspondent again after all these years.”
Miguel Najdorf, Argentianian grandmaster, said of Fischer: “Fischer wants to enter history alone.”
And so he has.
