Excuses, excuses. A bad carpenter always complains about his tools.
Why do Americans like Bobby Fischer?
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Best game of the Fischer-Larsen candidates match was game 1, where Larsen played the French Defense. Really wild game that required incredibly precise calculating by Fischer to secure the win. If memory serves Larsen had both a queen and a rook on the seventh rank and a discovered check but Fischer got out of it with really ingenious play
Game one of the Fischer-Petrosian match was also really interesting. Petrosian employed a "novinka" that had Fischer in a losing position (as white!) but Petrosian lost his nerve and started playing for a draw and lost.
It's like what they say about American football - the only thing the "Prevent Defense" prevents is victory
he is a double edged blade on one side he is a pinical of human creativitiy a window of how God intended the world to be made then on the other hand he is a vivid example of human depravity and the inherant evil of mankind caused by the fall
goldendog wrote:
He was good at spatial reasoning I guess.
In the Wechsler I took, verbal skills were tested, as one of several components. Do great in one and average in others? Maybe you can be a great chess player (or Scrabblist) without being an "IQ genius."
And he had an extraordinary memory, perhaps the only evidence we have is chess related but I don't think that's particulalry surprising - that's what he did. There are countless stories of Fischer recalling every move from games played years ago and then the story of his recalling all 1200 moves of the all his 20 games played in the famous blitz tournament that he won in 1971 against the like of Tal, Petrosian etc. Apprarently he once appeared on Johnny Carson's Tonght show and Carson challenged him to solve a puzzle, the one that has 15 numbered tiles out of numerical order in a square and one has to put them in order. Carson was pretty cocky saying he was himself quite good at this, and he did, in fact, solve the puzzle in something like 45 seconds. He gave a second, out of order puzzle to Fischer and Bobby had it done in less than 15 seconds. Again, none of this confirms the reported IQ of 187 (or 180), but it doesn't make it less plausible either.
--Vic.
Here_Is_Plenty wrote:
I probably risk repeating what other people have put - if it was 8 pages I would have read it all but its 22 so I am going to be lazy. Americans are rightly proud that one of the greatest ever players the world has seen was from their country. He dominated the world at a time when the Soviet teaching system was churning out master after master. The one thing I wish was that he had come through the Soviet system himself as he would have been even better, I think. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
He would have been much less, as he would not have taught himself, free from limits that education puts on studying habits, thought processes. He would have probably bested his teachers, had he grown up in that rigid system...We are blessed that he invoked pure freedom of learning. He is the teacher, and was at 15.
Regardless of Fischer's human flaws, one thing that can be said in his favor is that he caused a resurgence in the growth of chess in the U.S., much as Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong made cycling compelling and the 1980 Olympic hockey team became national heroes. Fischer and the Olympic team overcame the odds and beat the "evil empire" Soviet Union in the Cold War era and the cyclists proved the U.S. could compete with the European elite.
I know I took up the game because of his defeat of Spassky and the first chess book I ever owned was "Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess".
Oct 16, 2012
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#470
Bottom line-I don't think any grandmaster alive or dead could have beaten Fischer in a long match when he was in his prime.
Oh yeah?! Prove it!
I'll bet the guy isn't even fat!
AndyClifton wrote:
Oh yeah?! Prove it!
nobody alive did! and the dead ones hadn't pushed a pawn in anger for yonks!
proven!
Think most of the top 50 players today would beat Fischer easily. Chess and history has advanced a long way from 1971.
( But Fischer still my favourite-player bar none! )
only dude to ever come back from a 20 year break to successfully defend his title!!!
frickin high-five man!!!
Unfortunately he never really did quite come back from that 20-year break...
If Fischer were a child today, he would've been so heavily medicated, I doubt he ever would have played at all. I participated in many games on construction sites back then only because of Fischer's world title. We had to buy clocks so we could play several games on our half-hour lunch breaks.
AndyClifton wrote:
Unfortunately he never really did quite come back from that 20-year break...
very true Andy, and his books were good enough to teach me the game.
Fred's taught me. 
Everyone has an opinion! To me, opinions are useless unless they can be supported by facts. I've met people who knew Fischer. They said he was a nice enough fellow who was driven by chess. As a young boy he played chess in the parks for quarters then brought all his winnings home to his mother who raised him because his father had left her. Let's now talk about a fact that we probably all agree on. He was very creative on the chess board. Therefore, he was a creative person. Dr. C. G. Jung states, "The creative person's life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him - on the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for creation which may go so far as to override every personal desire. The lives of creative people are as a rule so highly unsatisfactory - not to say tragic - because of their inferiority on the human and personal side, and not because of a sinister dispensation. There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire".
Yeah, that one game where he hung the exchange was just an evil-looking thing.