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Bobby Fischer Chess Master/Genius Dead
Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer 1972
Chess is “thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance.”
Stefan Zweig, Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer,
from his novella The Royal Game.
Bobby Fischer, reclusive American world chess champion died on Thursday, January 17, 2008 in Reykjavik, Iceland of kidney failure. He was 64 years old.
Bobby Fischer is considered to be one of the most formidable players of the game. At age 14 Fischer won the United States Open Championship for the first time. This is a chess title Fischer went on to win seven times more.
When Fischer was 15 he became the youngest person to ever hold the title international grand master.
He became the iconic symbol of the Cold War when in 1972, during a series of meetings, he defeated the Soviet world champion Boris Spassky. Fischer becamethe first American to win the title in more than 100 years. It has been more than 30 years since an American has held the top chess player title.
Spassky and Fischer 1992
Sadly it was Fischer’s desire to commemorate his 1972 defeat of Spassky, and the lure of $5 million, when he chose to accept the invitation to play a 1992  match in Yugoslavia against his old opponent Boris Spassky. It was this act that seemed to mark the beginning of the end.
By accepting and participating in the match Boby Fischer was defying a U.S. government ban on conducting business in Yugoslavia as it waged war on Bosnia. Once again Fischer defeated Spassky.  Following the match, to avoid being detected and arrested for his defiance of a federal American law, Fischer went underground
He was detained, and arrested in 2004 after Japanese officials said he was trying to leave the country on an expired U.S. passport. He was later jailed for nine months.
Known in his youth as “the Corduroy Killer,†to his chess advesaries , the toll of the events of the past ten years, the death of his mother and sister, confinement in prison due to defiance of the law, along with Fischer’s love of the game may possibly suggest those events are the cause of his deteriorating mental and physical health ending finally with his death.
Bobby Fischer never married. He is survived by his young daughter, Jinky Ong, born in 2000 in Manila the Philippines and her mother his companion Justine Ong.
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