Robert James Fischer (Bobby Fischer)

Robert James Fischer was born on March 9th, 1943, in Chicago, Illinois. At age 6, he started to learn the game of chess after his sister bought him a chess set. Robert practiced chess a lot, playing at a lot of chess clubs, such as the Brooklyn Chess Club and the Manhattan Chess Club. A brilliant, highly competitive player who lost himself in the game, Fischer earned a place in the record books at age 14 when he became the youngest player to win the U.S. Chess Championship. Then in 1958, at 15, he became the youngest international grandmaster in history by placing sixth at a tournament in Portoroz, Yugoslavia (now Slovenia). Bobby was very good at the game, making headlines in 1972 when he defeated the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky at the Iceland World Championship. 

But not all good things happened to Bobby, in the mid-1970s, he refused to play against Anatoly Karpov, his World Championship title challenger, and so his championship spot was stripped by the International Chess Federation.

And even worse, in July 2004, Fischer was detained at a Japanese airport for trying to leave the country with an invalid passport and he was jailed for several months. He was eventually granted citizenship by Iceland and moved there in 2005.  

Bobby Fischer died on January 27, 2008, in Reykjavík, Iceland, the same place he had defeated Spassky 30 years earlier, that day, we lost a great figure in chess, not just a chess player, but an inspiration for all the other World Champions who came after him.

R.I.P Robert James Fischer(1943-2008)

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