RIP: Bobby Fischer!

[thewayne]

Huh. I didn't know what was going on with him, last I heard he was in an immigration tussle with the US. Apparently he died in Reykjavik, Iceland, where he defeated Spassky in '72 to become the world chess champion. He did a re-match in Yugoslavia in '92 and sort of became a criminal as at the time Americans weren't allowed to travel there. He moved around a bit, settled in Japan, where he was arrested in 2004 on immigration violation charges. It seems I heard about Iceland offering him citizenship, but the story fell off my news radar at that point.

He was absolutely brilliant at chess, but kind of screwed up otherwise as a person. He was strongly anti-Semitic, even though he was a Jew, might have had some mental health problems. Strange person. I never met him (I've met Karpov and Kasparov), and I really wasn't interested in meeting him.

One chess-symmetry thing is there are 64 squares on the chess board, and he died at the age of 64. A chessie to the end.

The story


If you want to see how twisted his mind was, take a look at his home page.

Comments

[joecthulhu.livejournal.com]

He did get Icelandic citizenship, and it is my impression that the US kind of let the matter drop at that point. It is obvious that he had some manner of mental illness. It's a bad combination when you have problems and the clout to prevent anyone from helping you.