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RIP: Bobby Fischer!
Jan. 19th, 2008 10:00 amHuh. 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.
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.
