A Second Hand Conjecture

The king is dead (Persian).

Robert James “Bobby” Fischer died Thursday, January 17th, in Reykjavik, Iceland, after a bout with an unspecified illness. He was 64.

To refer to Fischer as a master player of chess is to say nothing of the man. Yes, he was good. Chess, played at it’s highest level, typically requires an automatic recognition of position only gained from the experience of the engaged playing of game after game after game. Yet as a young boy and a teenager, Fischer whomped players decades older than him, with many thousands more games under their belts. Along with an IQ estimated in the 180s, Fischer gave himself totally to the sixty-four squares from the time he was a child. He gave his entire ego, for better and worse, to the point that when he wasn’t playing chess he was studying chess, and when he wasn’t studying chess he was thinking about chess, and when he wasn’t thinking about chess, he wasn’t really Bobby Fischer.

As the result of his relatively brief competitive career as a Grand Master, chess itself was changed forever. He took a centuries-old opening strategy for white and made it his own, destroying opponents with his new variations. And while hundreds of years of study and play led most modern players at the highest levels of the game to conclude that black is best played with the goal of overcoming white’s first move advantage to achieve a draw, Fischer developed systems of play designed for black victory. Figuring that every possible chess game played to theoretical perfection would result in a draw, Fischer recognized that sheer quality of play versus an opponent determined victory, not starting position. Fischer was famous for making all manner of fickle demands of the chess tournaments in which he competed. The 1972 World Chess Championship—when Fischer became the first and so far only American world champion after defeating Russian world champion Boris Spassky—had barely started when he demanded that he and Spassky finish the tournament in a back room beyond the view of the public and television cameras. Although many attribute these demands to obsessive compulsion, most can also be explained as attempts by Fischer to eliminate any possible distraction that could affect his quality of play.

Fischer’s impact on chess went beyond the new strategies named for him. He also developed and patented a chess clock which favored higher quality play by adding an increment of additional time for players following each move. Today the Fischer Clock is widely used in tournament play.

Later in his life Fischer tired of traditional chess:

“The old chess is too limited. Imagine playing cards, black jack for example, and every time the dealer has the same starting hand you have the same starting hand. What’s the point?”

He responded by developing a variant of the game itself called Fischer Random Chess, or alternately Chess960, which randomized the starting position of the high-power first rank pieces, forcing the game to be played based on the understanding of moves and position instead of memorized “book” openings.

In 1975 Bobby Fischer was stripped of the World Chess Champion title after refusing to defend it against challenger Anatoly Karpov when International Chess Federation (FIDE) officials wouldn’t concede to all 64 of his “non-negotiable” conditions. During the rest of his life he would only briefly return to competitive chess, and thus Citizen Fischer never transcended the competitive success of his youth.

Following his death, much will inevitably be made about his erratic and politically controversial later life, a sadly familiar story of sublime genius shot through with paranoid delusion. Taken in it’s entirety, his life will most likely be remembered at best as that of a tragic hero, lived across years of unprecedented brilliance and an all too mundane, ugly mental descent.

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