Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer

Robert James Fischer was an American chess grandmaster and the eleventh World Chess Champion. Fischer won the World Chess Championship in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky of the USSR, in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland. In 1975, Fischer refused to defend his title when an agreement could not be reached with FIDE, chess’s international governing body, over one of the conditions for the match. After forfeiting his title as World Champion, Fischer became reclusive and sometimes erratic, disappearing from both competitive chess and the public eye. His book My 60 Memorable Games, published in 1969, is regarded as essential reading in chess literature.

About Bobby Fischer in brief

Summary Bobby FischerRobert James Fischer was an American chess grandmaster and the eleventh World Chess Champion. Fischer won the World Chess Championship in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky of the USSR, in a match held in Reykjavík, Iceland. In 1975, Fischer refused to defend his title when an agreement could not be reached with FIDE, chess’s international governing body, over one of the conditions for the match. After forfeiting his title as World Champion, Fischer became reclusive and sometimes erratic, disappearing from both competitive chess and the public eye. His book My 60 Memorable Games, published in 1969, is regarded as essential reading in chess literature. In the 1990s, he patented a modified chess timing system that added a time increment after each move, now a standard practice in top tournament and match play. He also invented Fischer random chess, also known as Chess960, a chess variant in which the initial position of the pieces is randomized to one of 960 possible positions. In 2004, he was arrested in Japan and held for several months for using a passport that had been revoked by the US government. He was granted an Icelandic passport and citizenship by a special act of the Icelandic Althing, allowing him to live in Iceland until his death in 2008. His mother, Regina Wender Fischer, was a US citizen, born in Switzerland; her parents were Polish Jews. In 2002, an investigative report backed by detailed and compelling evidence that Bobby Fischer’s biological father was actually Paul Nemenyi, a Hungarian mathematician and physicist of Jewish heritage.

The Philadelphia Inquirer published an article by Peter Nicholas Benson and Clea Clea Benson on the subject of Bobby Fischer and his biological father, Paul Nyiemenyi. The article was based on an earlier version of this article that stated that Bobby’s father was a Hungarian physicist and mathematician. In fact, Nyiemanyi was a physicist of Hungarian Jewish heritage, and was considered to be a master’s master’s student at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied for his master’s degree in nursing. At the time of Bobby’s birth, his mother was homeless and shuttled to different schools around the country to support her family. She engaged in political activism and raised Bobby and Joan as a single parent. In 1949, the family moved to Manhattan and the following year to Brooklyn, where she studied for her master’s in nursing and subsequently began working in that field. At age 14, he became the youngest ever U.S. Chess Champion, and at 15, he become both the youngest grandmaster up to that time and the youngest candidate for the World Championship. At 20, he won the 196364 US Championship with 11 wins in 11 games, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament. He won the 1970 Interzonal Tournament by a record 3½-point margin, and won 20 consecutive games, including two unprecedented 6–0 sweeps, in the Candidates Matches. He became the first official FIDE number-one-rated player in July 1971, his Elo rating of 2785.