The Hindu : Sport : Fischer dead

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Fischer dead

— Photo: AP

TRUE LEGEND: The brilliant Bobby Fischer, seen in his prime as a chess champion, continued to be an enigma till the end.

Reykjavik: Bobby Fischer, who achieved fame by taking the game’s world championship from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has died, his spokesman said on Friday. He was 64.

Fischer’s spokesman Gardar Sverrisson said Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday. There was no immediate word on cause of death.

An icon

Fischer became an icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union’s Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Reykjavik, to claim America’s first world chess championship in more than a century.

A few years later, he forfeited the title to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it. He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, emerging occasionally to make erratic and often anti-Semitic comments.

He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan.

Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Cold War rival Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.

In July 2004, Fischer was arrested at Japan’s Narita airport for travelling on a revoked U.S. passport and was threatened with extradition to the United States. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland — a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph — granted him citizenship.

In his final years, Fischer railed against the chess establishment, alleging that the outcomes of many top-level chess matches were decided in advance. Instead, he championed his concept of random chess, in which pieces are shuffled at the beginning of each match in a bid to reinvigorate the game.

“I don’t play the old chess,” he told reporters when he arrived in Iceland in 2005. “But obviously if I did, I would be the best.”

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, president of the World Chess Federation, called Fischer “a phenomenon and an epoch in chess history".

Aaron shocked

Our Special Correspondent adds

“I am shocked,” was the response of India’s first IM Manuel Aaron, who played Fischer in the inter-zonal championship at Stockholm in 1962. “He is the greatest player I have ever known…a genius who was never afraid to speak his mind what he thought was right. He was not part of any group but always believed in himself.”

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