The Chess Mind

Q: What do these three have in common?

A: They're all still alive. Reeeeeally. Or at least maybe - see here. [HT: Boylston Chess Club blog]

We continue to commemorate the career of Bobby Fischer, the late world chess champion, with a look at a win from the middle period of his career. By 1966 he was clearly near the top, but there was a strong case to be made for players like Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, and (by decade’s end) Bent Larsen, too. What was clear is that he was an extremely powerful player on the rise, and that power was seen in a mighty way in the Second Piatigorsky Cup in Santa Monica, California. The event was a double round-robin starring many of the best players of the day, and after the first cycle Fischer’s score was a dismal 3½-5½, leaving him 9th out of 10 players.

At this point, Fischer demonstrated his greatness as a player and turned everything around. In the next 7 rounds, Fischer scored 6½ points to pull into a tie for first with Spassky. They drew each other in the next round, but then Spassky won his last round game while Fischer could only draw against Petrosian. Thus Spassky won first place in the tournament, but Fischer’s fantastic comeback left no doubts about the threat he posed to Soviet hegemony. It took him six more years before he could break through against Spassky and win the title, but performances like this one showed that his time was coming.

As you probably guessed, we’ll take a look at one of Fischer’s games from this tournament. In round 11, he faced the “little Botvinnik”, Hungarian grandmaster and many-time Candidate Lajos Portisch. Portisch, like Fischer, was always very well-prepared in his openings, but wasn’t as good at improvisation. That cost him, as the non-standard position that arose from Fischer’s Nimzo-Indian led to a situation where Portisch followed the “rules” and got into trouble. Generally speaking, two rooks are stronger than a queen, and that’s the material balance Portisch eagerly pursued straight out of the opening. What counts, however, is how well one can coordinate one’s forces, and Fischer’s assessment proved superior, and he went on to win a strategic masterpiece.

If a player of Portisch’s exceptional caliber can seriously misassess such a position, we can too! It’s therefore in our interest to take a careful look at this game. Material imbalances like this one come up from time to time, and it’s rare that we study them in advance. So this is a wonderful opportunity to learn something new, while simultaneously taking an appreciative look at one of Fischer’s many beautiful contributions to our game. I hope, therefore, that you’ll join me tonight – Wednesday night – at 9 p.m. ET – see you then!

(Directions for watching the show live (for free) can be found here.)

Between Corus coverage, chaperoning on Saturday and playing on Sunday, it has been a tiring weekend! But now it's time to resume blogging, and we begin with the latest Fischer remembrance to come to my attention. Frank Brady, author of the well-known Fischer biography Profile of a Prodigy, is interviewed on NPR about the late world champion.

HT: John Duffy

(Note for parents/teachers of young children: the interview has a very brief off-color moment.)

Both are on the Chess Cafe website. The first, by Hans Ree, is especially interesting: At the Kibbutz with Bobby. Ree offers a reminiscence of his time with Fischer at the 1968 tournament in Netanya, Israel. [HT: Brian Karen.] Less colorful, but still perhaps worth your time if you're relatively new to Fischer's games and career, is Tim Harding's Bobby Fischer, 25 Years On. This article offers a brief overview of his results in world championship cycles, followed by light coverage of three of his games.

That's the title of a nice article in Drexel's "The Smart Set", about an Icelandic bookstore Fischer frequented during his last years. Worth reading.

HT: Brian Karen

Here's a brief video interview with former world champion Anatoly Karpov, taken by ChessVibes at the Corus tournament. It's fairly short, but he has some brief comments about Carlsen and the Corus tournament, Fischer's passing, and "handshakegate". (If I recall correctly, he too has had some non-handshake games, but the interviewer didn't bring that up. It might have proved entertaining had he done so, but he was right to refrain. I don't believe he and Kasparov ever abstained from shaking hands, but I think he did abstain on several occasions involving Korchnoi and other Soviet defectors.)

With the passing of the 11th World Chess Champion, the legendary Robert James Fischer, it's appropriate to spend some time commemorating his great career and contributions to the game. We'll start this week with the game that launched him on the world stage, his win as a 13-year-old over the very strong master Donald Byrne, from the 1956 Rosenwald tournament.

Though it was a prestigious event, Fischer's participation was not "on the merits", as it were (his rating in 1956 was a not exactly whopping 1726!), but because he had won the U.S. Junior Championship earlier in the year. So although he was clearly on the rise, I'm sure he was still looked upon as an outside in the de facto U.S. Championship. He didn't win the event, but he finished with a very respectable -2 performance. And then there's the game with Donald Byrne...

To say that the game was brilliant is to understate things, though Hans Kmoch's label "Game of the Century" may go a bit too far. He's right in spirit, though: this was a stunning debut by the youngster. Not only was it a great game, but it was a promise of much more to come, a promise that was fulfilled - at least in chess - over the years to come. So I think this is an appropriate way to begin our tribute to Fischer's career, and I hope you'll join me tonight (Wednesday) night at 9 p.m. ET on the playchess.com server as we examine this game.

(The shows are free, and you can find more information about watching here.)

Links and a picture here.

This is the best summary of his career I've seen, with some little stories thrown for good measure.

Link.

That's what Icelandic GM and Fischer friend Helgi Olafsson suggested.

HT: Brian Karen

For your viewing pleasure, here are two Fischer videos: one starring him, the other about him. The first, on YouTube (HT: Brian Karen), shows him at 15 years of age on the game show "I've Got a Secret"; the second, from chess.fm (choose Day 6, "Fischer Remembered"), is a compilation of players' reactions at Wijk aan Zee (the latter includes some especially interesting comments from Anand).

It's hard to distill the best of Bobby Fischer's chess, as he played so many wonderful games. Still, I've selected some of my favorites, which you can replay via the link below.

1. Donald Byrne - Fischer, Rosenwald 1956. The so-called "Game of the Century", this put Fischer, just an expert at the time, from "future talent" to the "uh oh...heaven help us" category. Just 13 at the time, his 11...Na4!! and 17...Be6!! revealed a brilliant tactician on his way to beating the world.

2. Fischer - James Sherwin, U.S. Championship 1957. This game from his first U.S. Championship featured a beautiful combination he included in Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. (Or did he? Rumors have swirled around that he didn't actually write the book.)

3. Paul Keres - Fischer, Candidates Tournament 1959. Playing Black in Round 1 of the Candidates against one of the favorites, he wins - and more or less refutes Keres' ingenious new idea in the process.

4. Fischer - Efim Geller, Bled 1961. Fischer had a poor overall score against Geller, but this game is an absolute crush. Geller, like Keres in the preceding game, had prepared a novelty, but Fischer mangles it on spec.

5. Fischer - Lajos Portisch, Stockholm Interzonal 1962. A virtuoso rook ending by Fischer, on his way to the first big international triumph of his career.

6. Fischer - Julio Bolbochan, Stockholm Interzonal 1962. This is one of several games where Fischer, on the White side of an Open Sicilian, manages to achieve a good knight (on d5) vs. bad bishop (on e7) middlegame, and he wins this in style. Fischer attacks his poor opponent all over the board until something finally gives, and it does. (Note: I covered this game on a recent ChessBase show; interested viewers can look that up in the playchess.com archives.)

7. Fischer - Miguel Najdorf, Varna Olympiad 1962. A very impressive demolition of the Polish/Argentinian great; made even more impressive by his prediction that he'd win in 25. (He went one better, winning in 24 moves.)

8. Fischer - Pal Benko, U.S. Championship 1963/4. Not a very difficult game (the Rf6 motif so beloved of chess fans was found by the 12 year old Tal 14 or 15 years earlier), but it's such a fan favorite I'll include it anyway.

9. Robert Byrne - Fischer, U.S. Championship 1963/4. The gem of the championship, which he won with an 11-0 score. Byrne didn't see what was coming until very near the end, and apparently the commentators thought that it was Fischer who resigned!

10. Fischer - Lhamsuren Miagmasuren, Sousse Interzonal 1967. Fischer would often trot out the King's Indian Attack against lesser opposition, and games like this one might encourage you to take it up as well.

11. Fischer - Leonid Stein, Sousse Interzonal 1967. A very hard-fought win against one of the world's best (and most luckless) players at the time. It's the last game in Fischer's My 60 Memorable Games, and a fitting coda to that collection.

12. Fischer - Dragoljub Minic, Vinkovci 1968. Fischer famously pronounced that he had busted the King's Gambit...and then went on to play it several times, a few years later. This was the last of his wins with the opening.

13. Milan Matulovic - Fischer, Vinkovci 1968. This is a companion piece to the Bolbochan game mentioned above. (I presented this game in that same ChessBase show, so you'll get a 2-for-1 if you track it down.) There, with White, he exploited the d5 square to get a good knight vs. bad bishop scenario; here, he prevents White from using the d5 square, and ends up with...a good knight vs. bad bishop scenario.

14. Fischer - Samuel Schweber, Buenos Aires 1970. The game is justly famous for Fischer's stupendously creative combination, starting with the semi-bizarre 18.Rg3. Whether or not that move is genuinely good, the idea is magnificent.

15. Fischer - Wolfgang Unzicker, Siegen Olympiad 1970. A terrific technical game, with Fischer using the clean 4-3 kingside majority in the Exchange Ruy to good effect. Note the move 14.f5, a concept originally introduced in the famous Lasker-Capablanca game from St. Petersburg 1914. It gives up the e5 square - at least temporarily, but in exchange White creates a kingside bind and gets the kingside pawns rolling.

16. Fischer - Ulf Andersson, Siegen (exhibition game) 1970. Fischer plays a Hedgehog with colors reversed, before that system really existed, and invented an attacking idea that's now considered a typical plan.

17. Fischer - Mark Taimanov, Candidates match (game 4) 1971. Fischer's love of bishops was well-known, and the ending of this game is the textbook example of a bishop showing its supremacy over a knight in an endgame with an open center and pawns on both sides. Probably the nicest game in Fischer's 6-0 rout.

18. Fischer - Bent Larsen, Candidates match (game 1) 1971. The first game of their match was a war, and when Fischer won it the remaining five games were a snap - another 6-0 rout.

19. Boris Spassky - Fischer, World Championship match, game 21 (Reykjavik) 1972. The last game of the match wasn't otherwise memorable, but it made him the world champion.

20. Fischer - Boris Spassky, Sveti Stefan (match, game 1) 1992. The first game of their second match had fans wondering what kind of chess he'd play after 20 years. While his play in the match had its ups and downs, this game proved there was still brilliance in that rusty mind.

21. Fischer - Boris Spassky, Sveti Stefan (match, game 11) 1992. While many of the games from the second match saw the players dispute old-fashioned opening lines, here Fischer played the Rossolimo and gave it a Romantic twist, sacrificing his b-pawn to blow the position open. He went on to win a beautiful, swashbuckling game.

22. Boris Spassky - Fischer, Sveti Stefan (match, game 30) 1992. Fischer closed out the match with a convincing win, repulsing Spassky's over-eager attacking play. This was his last competitive game.

You can replay the lot of them, with my comments, here.

Needless to say, Fischer's passing has been observed both inside the chess world and out.

Among chess sites, you might want to check out the following:

1. Mark Crowther of TWIC.
2. Video statements by various Wijk aan Zee participants.
3. ChessBase, which includes many pictures and links - both to their previous articles on Fischer and to comments of the world press.
4. Mig's Daily Dirt, which includes a statement by Kasparov.
5. Susan Polgar's blog (many posts).
6. FIDE (the International Chess Federation) promises an announcement, but there's nothing of note as of this posting.
7. From the United States Chess Federation, there's a press release and an article by Jennifer Shahade.

I'm sure this only scratches the surface of what has been written about him in his passing, and readers are welcome to provide further links of interest. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, quite a few bloggers and other prominent sites have relatively little to say. In part this is due to his having hardly played in over 30 years, and in part due to the horrible things he has said about Jews, the United States, and other chess players. I confess to a similar ambivalence about the man as well, but I will do my best to concentrate on his legacy as a chess player.

From Chess Today:

According to a BBC report, Robert James Fischer has died in Iceland, aged only 64. He had health problems for quite some time. Many considered Fischer as the greatest chess player ever. His 1972 match against Boris Spassky gave chess a huge boost in the west and encouraged millions of people to learn chess.

More about Fischer, and links to other reports and tributes, as they show up.