Bobby Fischer

Early life and the school testing

Robert James Fischer was born March 9, 1943, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother Regina Wender Fischer was a Jewish American with a complicated family history including time spent in the Soviet Union. His legal father was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, though his biological father is now generally agreed by biographers to have been Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian-Jewish physicist. Regina raised Bobby alone after separating from Hans-Gerhardt in 1945.

The family moved to Brooklyn, New York, in 1949. Bobby learned chess at age 6 from his sister Joan. By age 9 he was studying chess seriously. By age 13 he had played the "Game of the Century" against Donald Byrne at the Marshall Chess Club - a game that featured one of the most celebrated tactical sequences in chess history and is still taught in chess pedagogy worldwide.

He attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where school testing in the late 1950s reportedly produced his Stanford-Binet score of approximately 187. The score figure is cited across multiple biographies but the original testing record is not publicly archived. Fischer dropped out of high school at age 16 to focus on chess full-time, a decision that has been variously characterized in biographies as showing total dedication or as showing serious concerning behavior.

U.S. Championship and the road to the World title

In 1957 Fischer won the U.S. Open at age 14 - the youngest player to do so. He won the U.S. Championship in 1957-58 with a perfect 11-0 score - the only player ever to win the U.S. Championship perfectly. He went on to win every U.S. Championship he entered (eight in total) through 1967.

At age 15 he became the youngest grandmaster in history at that point, breaking a record that had stood for decades. The age record was later broken by Judit Polgár and then by male players, but Fischer's 1958 achievement was central to his early reputation.

Through the 1960s Fischer steadily climbed the FIDE rating list while becoming increasingly difficult to deal with on the tournament circuit. He was the strongest player in the world by published rating from the mid-1960s onward but did not consistently play in the events that the chess establishment scheduled, particularly the Soviet-organized matches and tournaments that the Soviet chess hegemony of the period was built around.

The 1972 Reykjavik match and the World Championship

In 1971 Fischer played the Candidates matches to challenge for the World Championship, defeating Mark Taimanov, Bent Larsen, and Tigran Petrosian - all by margins that were considered impossible for matches at that level. The Taimanov match was a 6-0 sweep; the Larsen match was 6-0; the Petrosian match was 6.5-2.5. The aggregate dominance of these matches has never been replicated in the World Championship cycle.

In 1972 he played Boris Spassky for the World Championship in Reykjavik, Iceland. The match was framed by the global press as a Cold War proxy event - the American challenger against the Soviet champion - and received unprecedented coverage for a chess event. Fischer won 12.5-8.5. The match's strategic and psychological history is the subject of a substantial literature in its own right.

After winning the title Fischer effectively withdrew from public chess. He refused to defend the title against Anatoly Karpov in 1975 under FIDE's match-format rules, and FIDE forfeited the title to Karpov by default. Fischer never played a competitive game under FIDE auspices again, with the exception of his 1992 rematch against Spassky.

Withdrawal, the 1992 Spassky rematch, and exile

Through the late 1970s and 1980s Fischer lived a largely private and increasingly difficult life. He was in and out of the Worldwide Church of God, an unusual religious organization to which he had given substantial sums of money. He had no professional chess engagements through this period and made increasingly erratic public statements.

In 1992 he came out of retirement to play a rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia. The match violated United States sanctions against Yugoslavia at the time, and Fischer was placed under federal warrant on his return. He never returned to the United States. The match itself was won by Fischer 17.5-12.5; the prize fund was 3.35 million dollars.

He lived in exile for the rest of his life - first in Hungary, then Japan (where he was detained in 2004 over the warrant), and finally in Iceland, which granted him citizenship in 2005 in part as a gesture of recognition for his 1972 contribution to Icelandic cultural history. He died in Reykjavik in January 2008 of renal failure, at age 64.

Chess legacy and Fischer Random

Fischer's technical contributions to chess theory include opening innovations that are still studied (the Fischer-Sozin Attack in the Sicilian Defense, the Fischer-Petrosian Endgame), and a fundamental contribution to chess-clock design: his 1988 patent for a digital chess clock with delay and increment, which is now the global standard in serious tournament play.

In 1996 he proposed Fischer Random chess (now also called Chess960), a variant in which the starting position of the back-rank pieces is randomly chosen from 960 possible arrangements that preserve castling rules. The variant was designed to reduce the role of opening memorization in elite chess. Chess960 has become a regular event on the elite competitive circuit and is widely played online.

His legacy in chess pedagogy is enormous: his Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess (1966) has been an introductory chess book in continuous publication for nearly 60 years. His 60 Memorable Games (1969) is widely considered the best annotated games collection by any World Champion.

Timeline

• 1943Born in Chicago, Illinois.
• 1949Family moves to Brooklyn, New York.
• 1949Learns chess at age 6 from sister Joan.
• 1956Plays the "Game of the Century" against Donald Byrne at age 13.
• 1957Wins the U.S. Open at age 14 and the U.S. Championship with a perfect score.
• 1958Becomes the youngest Grandmaster in history at age 15.
• 1971Defeats Taimanov, Larsen, and Petrosian in the Candidates cycle.
• 1972Defeats Boris Spassky 12.5-8.5 to become World Chess Champion.
• 1975Forfeits World Championship title rather than defend it against Karpov.
• 1988Patents digital chess clock with delay/increment.
• 1992Plays 1992 rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia, violating U.S. sanctions.
• 1996Proposes Fischer Random (Chess960).
• 2004Detained in Japan on the U.S. warrant.
• 2005Granted Icelandic citizenship.
• 2008Dies in Reykjavik, Iceland, of renal failure at age 64.

Frequently asked questions

Comparable scorers