Bobby Fischer: life, best games and the 1972 Reykjavik match

Bobby Fischer (Chicago, 1943 – Reykjavik, 2008) was the eleventh world chess champion and the only American to win the official title. He took it in 1972 by beating Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, in the most famous match in history, after a prodigy's career that began with the "Game of the Century" at 13. Three years later he gave the title up without playing and all but vanished from public life, but his way of playing —clear, precise, uncompromising— is still a model.

Who Bobby Fischer was

Robert James Fischer was born on 9 March 1943 in Chicago and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He learned the rules as a child from a set his sister had bought, and within a few years he was spending his days in Manhattan's chess clubs analysing games.

Nobody of his generation rose so fast:

• At 14 he won his first US Championship, the 1957/58 edition. He went on to win eight, a record.
• At the 1958 Portorož Interzonal he qualified for the Candidates and earned the grandmaster title at fifteen and a half, the youngest in history at the time.
• In the 1963/64 US Championship he scored 11 out of 11, the only perfect score in the history of that event.

Through the 1960s he was one of the best in the world, but he kept running into the Soviet school, which dominated the Candidates tournaments, and quarrelling with organisers over playing conditions. Several times he withdrew from events or simply did not turn up. In 1969 he published My 60 Memorable Games, one of the most widely read chess books ever written.

The Game of the Century: Byrne – Fischer, 1956

On 17 October 1956, at the Rosenwald tournament in New York, the 13-year-old Fischer had Black against Donald Byrne, one of the strongest players in the country. The opening became a Grünfeld by transposition and the position caught fire almost at once. On move 11 Fischer offered a knight on a4; on move 17 he gave up his queen:

If White takes the queen with 18.Bxb6, Black runs through a series of checks with knight and bishop that wins back more than was given: a rook, two bishops and a pawn for the queen, with the white king left without shelter. The game ended in mate on move 41, every black piece coordinated against the lone king.

Hans Kmoch called it "the Game of the Century" in Chess Review, and the name stuck. Over the years people pointed out that Byrne did not play his best —11.Bg5 is an inaccuracy— but that does not take away what makes it instructive: a 13-year-old saw that a piece is worth what it does, not what the table says. That is exactly the idea behind the guide to chess piece values. For the opening itself, the Grünfeld Defence guide explains how Black attacks the centre with pieces.

The road to Reykjavik: 1970 and 1971

What Fischer did in 1970 and 1971 has never been repeated. He won the 1970 Palma de Mallorca Interzonal with 18.5 out of 23, three and a half points clear. Then came the Candidates matches:

• Against Mark Taimanov in Vancouver: 6–0.
• Against Bent Larsen in Denver: 6–0 again.
• Against former champion Tigran Petrosian in Buenos Aires: 6.5–2.5.

Winning twelve games in a row against world-title candidates —players from the world's top ten— has no equal in the history of those matches. On the FIDE list of July 1972 Fischer reached a rating of 2785, 125 points ahead of Spassky in second place. To get a feel for what a gap like that means, see the guide to how chess Elo is calculated.

The match of the century: Fischer – Spassky, 1972

The world championship match was played in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the summer of 1972, at the height of the Cold War: one American against the champion of the superpower that had held every title since 1948. It started badly. Fischer lost the first game by grabbing a poisoned pawn with his bishop on h2, and failed to turn up for the second over a dispute about the cameras: 0–2.

Then he won the third, and the match changed hands. Game six is the one people remember. Fischer, who nearly always opened 1.e4, played 1.c4 and steered the game into a Queen's Gambit Declined:

This is the Tartakower Variation, one of Spassky's favourite defences. Fischer won with clean positional play: pressure on Black's central pawns and a kingside attack that arrived without any spectacular sacrifice. The story goes that Spassky joined the applause at the end. The Queen's Gambit guide explains where those structures come from.

Fischer won the match 12.5–8.5 —seven wins, three losses and eleven draws— and on 1 September 1972 he became world champion.

The abandoned title and the silent years

Fischer never played a single official game as champion. To defend the title against Anatoly Karpov in 1975 he demanded a match to ten wins, draws not counting, and that he keep the title if the score reached nine all. FIDE accepted the first condition but not the second; with no agreement, he resigned the title and Karpov was declared champion without playing.

He disappeared for almost twenty years. In 1992 he resurfaced to play an unofficial rematch against Spassky in Yugoslavia, which was under a United Nations embargo, and won it by 10 wins to 5. The US government accused him of breaking the sanctions and issued a warrant for his arrest. He lived abroad, was detained in Japan in 2004 and the following year Iceland granted him citizenship. He died in Reykjavik on 17 January 2008, aged 64.

His life away from the board had very dark episodes, including public statements of hatred that nobody should defend. Separating the player from the person is not excusing the person: it is recognising that his games still teach.

Fischer's style

If Tal is the model of chaos —see the guide to Mikhail Tal— Fischer is the model of clarity. His games make sense: every move has a purpose and the pieces head for squares where they work.

• A short, deep repertoire. With White, almost always 1.e4; with Black, the Sicilian Najdorf against 1.e4 and the King's Indian or the Grünfeld against 1.d4. He knew those positions better than anyone.
• Technical precision. He converted small advantages with frightening ease, and played bishop-against-knight endings like a textbook.
• Playing every game to win. He hated short draws and looked for positions where his opponent had something to solve on every move.
• Preparation. He came to the board having studied the lines and his opponent in depth, in an era without databases or engines.

What he left to modern chess

Beyond the games, Fischer changed the way chess is played:

• The increment clock. In the late 1980s he patented a clock that adds a few seconds after every move; it was first used in the 1992 rematch. Today almost every tournament uses his system, and it is the reason nobody loses a won position just by running out of time.
• Chess960. In 1996, in Buenos Aires, he unveiled a variant in which the back-rank pieces start in a random order —960 possible positions— so that talent beats memory. It now has its own world championship.
• Professionalism. His fights over prize money and decent conditions helped turn elite chess into a profession.

How to study Fischer

The most useful thing is to play through his games on a real board, covering the next move and trying to guess it. His plans are clear enough for a club player to follow and good enough to teach you something in every game. If a decision does not make sense to you, you can ask about that exact move in Ask the GM.

At AcademiaTal, Tactical masters: from Morphy to Shirov pays tribute to Fischer alongside Morphy, Steinitz, Tal, Kasparov and Shirov. For his favourite weapon with Black there is Sicilian Najdorf in Depth: Six Main Systems, and for the opening of the Game of the Century, The Grünfeld Defense: Ideas, Lines and Current Games. All of them are included in the subscriptions.