Bobby Fischer, The World Chess Champ

Bobby Fischer playing 50 opponents simultaneously in 1964. He won 47 of the matches, drew 2 and lost 1

September 1, 1972 — Bobby Fischer became the USA’s first and only world chess champion on this day when he defeated the title holder Boris Spassky of Soviet Russia.

Some chess experts say that Fischer was the greatest player ever. To this day, his games are studied, and he has been likened to a computer with no noticeable weaknesses. One Russian grandmaster considered him to be “an Achilles without an Achilles heel.”

While growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Fischer began playing the game at the age of six, taught by his older sister, Joan. He competed in his first tournament aged nine and was a regular in New York’s chess clubs by 11. At the age of 13 he took on 21 chess experts simultaneously and beat them all.

Also at the age of 13, he won against one of the best players in the United States, professor Donald Byrne, in a match that was coined "The Game of the Century."

Fischer dropped out of Erasmus High School at the age of 16 to concentrate on the game full time. His life was chess and anything else was a distraction to him. He was determined to become a world champion.

From 1957 to 1967, he won eight US championships and in the process earned the only perfect score in the history of the tournament – 11-0 – during the year of 1963-64.

Born in 1943, Fischer was raised by a single mother, Regina Fischer, who was Jewish, fluent in six languages and had a Ph.D. in medicine.

According to Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Nicholas, who, spent years researching Fischer's life, Regina told her children their father was a German biophysicist, Gerhardt Fischer. She divorced Gerhardt and he disappeared from their lives when Bobby was a toddler.

However, FBI documents unearthed by reporter Nicholas, suggest Bobby Fischer's real father was Paul Felix Nemenyi, a Hungarian physicist. Regina became pregnant with Bobby when Gerhardt was out of the country, and Regina was studying in Colorado at the same time Nemenyi was teaching there. The mystery persists.

The Soviet Union had dominated the Chess World Championship since 1948 and saw its unbroken record as proof of its intellectual superiority over the West. Then in 1972, Russian world champion Boris Spassky faced Bobby Fischer in a match publicised as a Cold War confrontation. It attracted more worldwide interest than any chess championship before or since and in cities across America shoppers stopped to gaze at screens in big stores as the game was televised.

Fischer did not even bother to show up for the second game in the championship series but he went on to win in a contest that some experts described as “electrifying.” Spassky himself gave Fischer a standing ovation.

German chess grandmaster Karsten Müller wrote: “Fischer, who had taken the highest crown almost single-handedly from the mighty almost invincible Soviet chess empire, shook the whole world, not only the chess world, to its core.”

No one knows why but Fischer then stopped playing competitive chess and dropped off the scene for the next 20 years except for an unofficial rematch against Spassky in 1992. Fischer won.

The rematch was held in Yugoslavia and Fischer never returned to the US, living in a number of countries, including Hungary, Japan and the Philippines. He made headlines in his later years, not for chess but for making bizarre and anti-Semitic outbursts, including denying the Holocaust and praising the terror attacks of September 11.

While in Iceland, Fischer, the most famous and controversial chess player of all time, died on January 17, 2008 at the age of 64 – the same number of squares as on a chessboard.

Published: August 25, 2023
Updated: October 25, 2023