A Genius, A Mastermind, A Maverick, A Psycho, An Eccentric, and arguably The Greatest Chess Player Ever – one epithet wouldn’t suffice to describe Bobby Fischer. A school dropout with an IQ of an astonishing 180, he became US Chess Champion at the age of 14!! This was the guy who ended the Soviet domination of Chess and perhaps may have been the harbinger for Chess to become popular world-wide (all while he kept becoming more and more notorious).

Every sport produces a rebel. A rebel whose mind is wired completely different compared to their peers and one who gives two hoots to what the world thinks of him. If Tennis has John McEnroe, Football has Zinadine Zidane. It used to be a Herculean task for the organizers to make Bobby participate in a tournament. He demanded humungous prize amounts and stipulated hundreds of conditions which often ran into paragraphs and pages. Conditions unheard of before like, children should not eat chocolate while watching the tournament (because the wrappers produce rustle), the size and color of the squares on the chess board, that he should be allowed to wear dark glasses (so that the opponent can’t see his eye movements), to the extent that even the lavatory seats must be at a height that he wanted them to be!! – things if implemented would truly create the ‘Perfect Conditions for Playing Chess’.
He had a lot of objections with the format of Chess itself – the player playing with White pieces always begins the game giving that player a very slight positional advantage. To eliminate this advantage, Bobby proposed randomizing the positions of all the pieces behind the pawns. Then there would be 960 different starting positions for the chess pieces forcing the player playing White come out of his pre-prepared opening variations. Also, it’s very common that a better player may sometimes lose to a weaker player because of Time Pressure (while playing with a Chess Clock with each player given say 2 hours of play time). He patented an electronic Chess Clock which adds a few seconds to ones kitty after a player makes his move – a gem of an idea. This has now become an accepted international standard and is called the ‘Fischer Clock’.

He did crazy things like ‘bunking’ the inaugural ceremonies before tournaments, turning up late for the rounds and running away god-knows-where in between the tournament. He once called Garry Kasparov a ‘Dog’ ! He was also chased by the FBI for he was to be captured for some petty offences like tax evasion, and violating US sanctions (he played a tournament in Yugoslavia, which was under US sanctions) etc. The world didn’t knew where he used to live, whether he was alive or not, for more than 20 years since he won the World Championship after crushing the then soviet Champion Boris Spassky! The day he won the world championship title he even went to the extent of joining the Doomsday Cult – the Church of Worldwide God. There is a rumor that he once came online anonymously on the Internet and defeated Nigel Short, another chess prodigy, badly in a series of online chess games! He even appeared on radio sometimes in praise for 9/11 and addressing United States and Jews in all the possible abusive words including the f-ones!! He was once arrested for a short time in Pasedena, California and was made to face extremely uncouth police officers and underwent third degree of physical torture. He could never go back to US because he had a death penalty in his name.

I am quite poignant to write the article in the past tense as this ‘King of Chess’ got check-mated in life on January 17, 2007 due to a kidney failure. It’s quite saddening to the Chess World that we can no longer hear any more of his fascinating idiosyncrasies.