On This Day in History: January 2
Brooklynite is World Chess Champion
by Brooklyn Eagle
MANHATTAN — In Manhattan on January 2, 1960, 16-year-old (Robert James) “Bobby” Fischer won one of his eight U.S. Chess Championship tournaments. Bobby was born in Chicago on March 9, 1943. His mother, a registered nurse, and father, a biophysicist, separated when Bobby was two years old and his older sister was seven. Bobby’s mother moved to Brooklyn with the children while studying at New York University for a masters degree in Nursing Education. It was in Brooklyn that the legend of the world’s greatest chess player began.
Bobby grew up in Flatbush on Lincoln Place and attended Community Woodward School. In May 1949, Bobby and his sister Joan learned how to play chess with a set given to them as a present. He, 6 and she, 11, learned the moves from the instructions that came with the set. Even as a 6-year-old, Bobby became increasingly fascinated with chess and enjoyed successfully solving its complexities. By age 7 he was so thoroughly absorbed with it his mother became worried. “Bobby isn’t interested in anybody unless they play chess and there just aren’t many children who like it,” she once said. She also placed an ad in the Brooklyn Eagle inviting other children of Bobby’s age to come play chess with him.
Bobby joined the Brooklyn Chess Club, whose president was Carmine Nigro. For the next few years Bobby rarely missed a Friday evening class. Like so many other Brooklyn celebrities, Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School.
In 1953, Bobby Fischer played his first chess tournament at the Brooklyn Chess Club Championship. He was 10 years old and placed fifth. In 1955 Bobby scored 4½ — 3½ in a Washington Square Park Swiss tournament. In May he scored three points in the U.S. Amateur Championship at Lake Mohegan, NY. He joined the Manhattan Chess Club in June, 1955 and soon won the class-C championship and the class-B championship. He was often given the opportunity of playing against the club’s finest masters.
In 1959 Bobby dropped out of school to become a professional chess player. His academic records indicated an IQ of 180 with an incredibly retentive memory. After many other winning games and championships in various tournaments in the U.S. and abroad, Bobby won the U.S. Championship in 1960 with 7 wins, 4 draws, and no losses. All in all Bobby won the U.S. Championship title 8 times. In 1969 Bobby finished writing his book “My 60 Memorable Games.”
Fischer didn’t stop with the U.S. Championship. On October 26, 1971 he became the first U.S. chess player to make his way through the elimination matches for the World Chess Championship. Fischer defeated Tigran Petrosian of the USSR in Buenos Aires, Argentina, thus qualifying for competition against Boris Spassky, the world champion, in 1972.
In 1972, Americans became interested in chess because of Fischer’s antics in Reykjavik, Iceland.
Fischer and the defending world chess champion, Boris Spassky of the USSR, argued for months about details leading up to the showdown. During play, Fischer made demands of match officials that kept him in the headlines for months. The competition ran from July 11 to September 1.
Here is the full story.
Bobby Fischer, one of the few people in the world who can make it into the news regularly without doing anything. I guess he’s kind of the chess equivalent of the US Congress.
Not much of a story. Anyone interested knows all this. I’m pretty sure bobby didn’t win 20 games in his 1992 rematch with Spassky. Not really worth looking up though. 180 pt IQ also sounds wrong, though I’ve heard it before. It’s hard to score so high
when you have little formal education and by all accounts were pretty much interested in chess only at the time.
Still he did thrill us at the chess board at the time. I think now we have to move on though.
There are a lot of “what might have been” stories in chess – Capablanca Alekhine rematch, Lasker Pillsbury match, Morphy Staunton match, Reshevsky Botvinnik match, Spassky Fischer rematch in 1973 etc. etc. etc. but Fischer remains for the group of fans who remember the heady days of 1970-1973, the biggest “What might have been” – had he continued to play and had matches regularly and ended up retiring to a house which looked like a rook.
Too bad he quit so early. If he stayed around the world would never heard of Anatoly Karpov and it would have taken utill the mid 1990s for Kasparov to even be competitive.
Who cares about a Morphy-Staunton match? If you want to see a massacre, go to any Miami Dolphins game.
does anyone what is happening RIGHT NOW with Bobby Fischer ? i ead in chessvibes that he is very ill … do you have informations ???
This original story in the Eagle [see link] is full of factual and date errors and is very poorly written. It never should have been copied here.
To anyone in NYC:Did ChessInSchools ruin?evict the Manhattan Chess Club? That’s the rumor….
Greatest Chess Player ever. Period.And No! I am not an american.
He’s crazy for cocoa puffs!
Of course Fischer is the greatest
chess player ever, and I am an
American. However, in this photo,
he just looks like the hapless
principal from Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off.
Well, so much for him by now. A great chess player, more then a controversial person in all other respects.