Former Chess Champion Fischer Dead At 64
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JediMaster on Sat, 01/19/2008 at 1:28pm.
Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a cold war hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his Amercian citizenship, has died. He was 64. Fisher died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday of kidney failure after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson said Friday. Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph. As a champion, he used his eccentricities to unsettle opponents, but Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was soon eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies. "Chess is war on a board," he once said. "The object is to crush the other man's mind." Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion from Russia, said Fischer's ascent in the chess world in the 1960's and his promotion of chess worldwide was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game. REYKJAVIK, Iceland (Associated Press)
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