Bobby Fischer Rediscovered / Antiquariat

Though it is over 30 years since Bobby Fischer single-handedly wrested the world chess title from the former Soviet Union, admiration for his beautiful play remains as strong as ever. As Fischer's own My 60 Memorable Games has been out of print for some time and only covered up to 1967, the author has retraced Bobby's chess career from his teenage years in New York right up to his final match with Boris Spassky in 1992, taking a fresh and in-depth look at 100 chessboard masterpieces that helped make him a living chess legend.
International grandmaster Andrew Soltis is a professional journalist and a popular and prolific chess writer. A contemporary of Fischer, he is able to provide an objective, entertaining and qualified review of the American's great contribution to chess.


I first saw Bobby Fischer one night in late 1961. This was well before my first clocked game - in fact, it was not long after I'd learned that chess was played with clocks. The occasion, oddly enough, was my grandmother's first and only visit to New York from Newton, Iowa. My mother decided to shock her by taking a stroll through the bohemian streets of Greenwich Village. Walking ahead of them along Thompson Street I spotted a dilapidated storefront that was labeled "Rossolimo's Chess Studio" and convinced my mother and grandmother to drop in for a minute or two. While the three of us stood a few steps inside the doorway to admire the exotic sets for sale, Fischer walked in. Or, rather, lurched in. He never seemed to move in a routine manner, but as a burst of energy.
He was 18, four years older than me, and his oversized suit made him look taller and more rumpled than his 6-foot-2 and 180 or so pounds. He had come to see Nick Rossolimo, the proprietor of the studio, who, I had heard, was some kind of master. I had never actually seen a master but was well aware of Fischer. He explained to Rossolimo that he had just returned from a tournament at a place called Bled and seemed eager to talk about it. He was relaxed, natural and not at all the prima donna I'd read about.
He was just Bobby. There were four skittles games going on in the cramped studio, but none of the players, who were paying the outrageous sum of 25 cents an hour to play one another, looked up. It struck me that chess was very strange indeed if one of the best players in the world didn't even get a flicker of recognition when sitting a few feet away and talking about his latest success.
The next time I saw Fischer he was playing chess. Not in the same 1600-rated tournaments I was, of course. He was in the U.S. Championship, which had become an annual event, thanks in large part to interest in Fischer. The tournament was held each Christmastime in a Manhattan hotel ballroom. Before each round Hans Kmoch, the tournament director, or one of his assistants would choose which of us young myrmidons would be allowed to operate demonstration boards on the stage. (My friend Russ Garber had learned how the pieces moved only a few months before he handled Fischer's 1963 game with Benko, a.k.a. the 19Sf6!!game.)
Everyone, of course, wanted to work Bobby's board. If you were lucky, he might send you on an errand, in between moves, to bring him back a container of milk - always milk - and some food. I never got the chance. Usually I was assigned to a Sherwin-vs.-Mednis or, if I was lucky, a Byrne-vs.-Benko. But seated at the demo board, you were usually only a few feet from the players, so I got a chance to watch Fischer first hand.
He had quick, large eyes that darted about the board as he concentrated, and distinctive eyebrows that always gave away his surprise when he saw something new in his calculations. And he had extraordinarily long fingers. They cradled his head when he went into a deep think which for him meant only ten minutes. Fischer seemed awkward at everything else, even when signing his name in block letters (he apparently never learned script). But when moving the pieces, he exuded a kind of strange, athletic grace. Moving the pieces may have been his most comfortable form of communication. Years later Angela Julian Day told me of her one meeting with Fischer. She was helping to run the Grandmaster Association office in Brussels in 1990. The great promotional hope of the GMA was their World Cup tournaments, and what was supposed to save the Cup from going the way of all previous chess promotions was getting Fischer to play in it. One night Angie went to what she thought was a social get-together with various GMA dignitaries when she discovered the man seated across from her was Bobby Fischer. But Fischer seemed mute. After several clumsy moments of silence, he pulled out of his pocket a well-worn version of the hand-held game in which you move 15 numbered tiles around a plastic grid that has spaces for 16. Fischer indicated that she
should mix up the tiles, and then time him with her wristwatch. She did. Fischer unscrambled the tiles in a fraction of a minute. His long, nimble fingers worked remarkably fast. In fact he regarded himself as the world champion at this. "And all I could think was 'What a waste,'" Angie Day recalled.
In September 1963 1 got a closer look at Fischer when I played at the New York State Open in Poughkeepsie. It turned out to be Fischer's last Swiss System tournament and he won all his seven games. I started out rated around number 40 in the field of 57 players but by the final round had worked up to board three where I had White against James T. Sherwin. When I resigned around move 60, there didn't seem like much to say, and besides there was no time to post-mortem if I was going to catch my car ride back to New York. But on the following night there was some event at the Marshall Chess Club that attracted a throng. Sherwin showed up and asked if I wanted to look over the game. I was shocked. After all, he outrated me by more than 500 points and had just proven it. We headed to the back room, to the "Capablanca table," to analyze. My second surprise came when Fischer materialized and sat down on my side of the board. Several other masters looked on, peering over one another's shoulders, at the position. Sherwin had been working on this opening (1 e4 c5 2 Nf3 Nf6 3 e5 Nd5) for months and had spent more than 20 hours on it. But no one had allowed him to show over the board what he'd found until I had the previous day. Even Fischer avoided the issue, playing 3 Nc3 against Sherwin in the previous year's U.S. Championship.
Sherwin presented the moves with a flourish, particularly 15 ... Bg1, his TN. He really did make moves he was proud of by pushing the piece with his pinky, as Fischer described in the first pages of My 60 Memorable Games, But when matters got interesting, around move 17, Fischer stopped the show by asking, "Whadya got on this?" and moved a White piece. Sherwin had an answer but it was demolished by a few quick Fischer follow-ups. This happened again a move later in the game, and then again. After the fourth time that he'd refuted a Sherwin move, Fischer asked, "You spent 20 hours on this?"
I witnessed Fischer in action several more times over the next few years. For example:
- Shortly after his great 11-0 triumph in the U.S. Championship, when he demonstrated his win over Robert Byrne in the front room of the Marshall, next to the bust of Frank Marshall, and joked about how the Soviets would try to ridicule his play.
- When he returned to the "Capablanca table" in 1965, playing opponents long-distance because the U.S. State Department wouldn't let him play them face-to-face in Havana. Despite the bizarre setting, he remained approachable, willing to chat about his last game, about what went wrong and what went right.
- When he would show up, usually late at night, at the Manhattan Chess Club, or at the Times Square dive called The New York Chess and Checker Club but known among games players as "The Fleahouse" Fischer would give outrageous time odds in blitz games to masters. Or just chat about chess. When that was the subject he was always just Bobby.
It seems incredible now, but no one in New York's small chess community seemed to think it the slightest bit odd that perhaps the greatest player in history was among us, periodically disappearing and then reappearing again when he was ready to play chess. Once, when he had vanished for several months, it was passed through the grapevine with matter-of-factness that Fischer had confined himself to a Midtown hotel room from which he wasn't going to leave until he perfected his play in rook endgames.
How Fischer earned a living was a mystery. He had asked for and gotten the astronomical sum of $250 for each simultaneous exhibition he gave. But after 1965 he rarely gave simuls. Al Horowitz, who began the New York Times chess column in 1962, told me that the Times had offered Fischer $15,000-plus a year for a regular column, even a ghostwritten column. Whether that was true was unclear, to use the traditional annotator's hedge, because Horowitz was somewhat unreliable. Fischer told other people that he was paid $300 a month for his monthly column in Boy's Life, the Boy Scout magazine.
And there were always rumors about a book. I knew his first book, Bobby Fischer's Games of Chess, a gossamer collection of his games from his first U.S. Championship and Interzonal. He also contributed some ideas, but chiefly his name, to Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, which earned more than twice as much for him as any of his other books. But Fischer had been working for years on his magnum opus, which was supposed to be called Bobby Fischer's Best Games of Chess. He first said it would appear after "my match with Botvinnik." When that didn't come to pass, he added more games and it was retitled My 50 Memorable Games. But by 1966 there was still no sign of it.
Accounts of its fate percolated through New York chess circles but the only thing that was certain was that Fischer decided against publishing after the manuscript was already set in metal type. The Fischer hangers-on I knew said he didn't want to give up his openings secrets or be caught in an analytical error so he bought his way out of the contract. Larry Evans, whose role in the book is surely more than anyone admits, said Fischer reversed himself in 1968 and decided to go ahead with the now-60-Memorable-Games. "The world's coming to an end anyway," Bobby explained.
When the book appeared in 1969, Fischer had been invisible for months. By that time I was a 2400 player and even got to play a few boards away from him in a Manhattan Chess Club - Marshall Chess Club team match in
November 1968. The closest contact I had with him in the next year was odd and quite indirect, at the World Student Olympiad in Dresden. Just before one round I had to borrow a pair of shoes from teammate Bernard Zuckerman. They fit my Size 12 feet nearly perfectly. "They're Bobby's," Zuckerman explained. "He gives me some of his old clothes." (That afternoon I played Fischer's favorite 6 Bc4 against the Najdorf Variation and won the prettiest game I ever played.)
The only time I faced Fischer over the board was in August 1971. The Manhattan Chess Club had just moved to new quarters they made three more forced moves before going out of business in 2002 - and a speed tournament was arranged to mark the occasion. This was during one of Fischer's press-friendly periods, and the organizers allowed photographers a short period to work the room. I was paired with Fischer in the first round. The result was a huge photo in the next day's Times: We're playing a 6 Bc4 Najdorf, of course, and he's waiting for my 11th move. About thirty fans are watching, some standing on chairs to get a better view. Around move 30 Fischer blundered away his queen for a rook and pawn. It was an easy win but I knew I'd never win it. Fischer's presence paralyzed me. Instead of trying to promote a pawn, I tried to blockade his, and lost miserably. I put up no resistance in the second game.
The last time I saw him was Sept. 21, 1972, "Bobby Fischer Day" in New York, a celebration at City Hall three weeks after the match ended. There were the usual speeches, including brief (scripted) remarks by Bobby. Later there was a reception in the Blue Room, a ceremonial hall usually reserved for special occasions. Fischer and I chatted about the news coverage of the match in New York. He seemed relaxed, natural - still just Bobby.
Thirty years later, I looked at Fischer's games for the first time since they were played. What struck me is that they fell into two categories. Some were, in fact, overrated. But many more were underrated - if known at all. And his originality, so striking at the time, had been lost with time. It seemed to me Fischer deserved an entirely new look.
The more I played over the moves again, the more it occurred to me that Fischer's chess was shaped by a single goal - to beat the Soviets. I guess that shouldn't be surprising. Strategy in chess - as in war, business, election campaigns and sports - evolves for a practical reason: Great innovations aren't created for the sake of science. They're created for the specific aim of defeating the strategy that made other guys successful. Alexander the Great and his father didn't invent the Macedonian battle phalanx because of some lofty desire to improve battlefield theory. They did it to crush the Persians.
The Soviet style that Fischer faced had come about in much the same way. The Russians, Ukrainians, et al wanted to defeat the dominant style of the 1930s - the material-driven, endgame-oriented strategies that had served Capablanca, Flohr and Fine so well. They developed a sharply different set of priorities, beginning with the initiative. Black was entitled to it as much as White and he could start the struggle for it as early as the opening, even if he has to give up material - such as in the celebrated "Soviet Exchange sacrifice" - or incur positional weaknesses, such as backward pawns or giving up bishop for knight.
Fischer, it struck me, was a reaction to this reaction. He adopted many of the Soviets' weapons, like the King's Indian and the Najdorf Sicilian, but with the eyes of a Classical player. And he liked to grab material. "I don't know who is better, Bobby, but I offer a draw," Vlastimil Hort said after 44 moves at Siegen 1970. "I don't know who is better either but I have an extra pawn," Fischer said in refusing. He was, in the words of one Russian admirer, the perfect harmony of position and material. If the Soviets were the antithesis of the 1930s' thesis, Fischer was the new synthesis. It's a dialectic that would have pleased Marx.
I found certain recurring themes in Fischer's games. Among them:
- "To get squares, you gotta give squares," as he put it. He understood that in order to win you had to control certain crucial points of the board and that often meant you had to concede others. This is particularly evident in Games 2, 56, 57,60, 61,86, and 92.
Ugly moves aren 't bad. Although he could be as dogmatic as Steinitz, Fischer had an instinct for moves that few other grandmasters would consider. For example, 19 Nxe7+ in Game 2, 13 Qe2 in Game 11, 13 ... Ng4 in Game 27, 5 Qe2 in Game 30, 13 a3 in Game 66, 11 ... Nh5 in Game 96 and giving up a fianchettoed bishop for a knight on d4 in Games 40 and 79.
- Material matters. Fischer played great sacrificial games but almost all of them occurred before he was 21. He was basically a materialist, a materialist who had a deeper understanding of the exchange value of pieces than almost any other player. His handling of a bishop-versus-knight middlegame or queen-versus-two-rook endgame was remarkable, as was his appreciation of how great the winning chances are in rook-and-bishops- of-opposite-color endings.
- Technique has many faces. Few players are equally good at obtaining and realizing an advantage - they are quite different skills - but as Mark
Dvoretsky pointed out, Fischer was the exception. His trademark was the timely conversion of one kind of advantage to another, as in Games 6, 7, 25, 28, 35, 40, 50, 55, 57 and 95.
What would have happened if Fischer had continued to play? What would we have learned from his games with Karpov and Kasparov? How would he have countered new weapons such as the Kalashnikov Sicilian, the Trompowsky Attack, and the many anti-Sicilian attacks that became popular from 1975 on? How would he have coped with faster time controls? Would he have been able to compete alone in an era of entourages and teams of seconds? How would he have fared against computers like Deep Blue? How different would chess be today if he had stayed?
We will never know. All we have left is the games.

Andrew Soltis New York, 2003

Hersteller Informationen

Name	Batsford (Anova)
Adresse	151 Freston Road London W10 6TH Großbritannien
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E-Mail	rbatley@anovabooks.com

Verantwortlicher Importeur:

Verantwortlicher Importeur

Name	Schachversand Niggemann
Adresse	Schadowstraße 5 48163 Münster Deutschland
E-Mail	info@schachversand.de
Internet	www.schachversand.de

Vor rund elf Jahren, anno 1992, erschien im Beyer-Verlag eine Partiensammlung Bobby Fischers unter dem Titel „Fischers Vermächtnis". Für die Autoren Jerzy Konikowski und Pit Schulenburg stand es außer Frage, dass ihr Buch als eine Art schachlicher Nachruf zu verstehen war. So hieß es irgendwo im Bereich der Einleitung, dass das Objekl ihrer Betrachtung nie mehr eine Schachpartie spielen werde, eine Prognose, die die meisten Kenner der Szene seinerzeit vermutlich bedenkenlos unterschrieben hätten. Fakt war indessen, dass das einstige Enfant terrible der Schachwelt sich im gleichen Jahr noch einmal ans Brett setzte und zwar im jugoslawischen Sveti Stefan gegen seinen ehemaligen Widerpart Boris Spasski, gegen den er sich zwei Jahrzehnte zuvor im WM-Match durchgesetzt und somit als bis dato einziger westlicher Spieler nach dem 2. Weltkrieg den höchsten Titel der FIDE errungen hatte. Für Überraschungen jeglicher Art war der heute 60-jährige Schachweltmeister der Jahre 1972-75 eben jederzeit gut. Andrew Soltis, Weggefährte Fischers aus früheren New-Yorker Tagen und bekannter US-Großmeister, hat, wenn man den Buchtitel wörtlich nimmt, die Schachlegende Robert James Fischer „wieder entdeckt" und stellt ihn bzw. sein schachliches Schaffen dem interessierten Publikum vor. Insgesamt sind es 100 Partien aus dem Zeitraum 1956-1992, die Soltis ausgewählt hat und in sehr ausführlicher, auf diversen kompetenten Quellen fußender Kommentierung seiner Leserschaft präsentiert. Das Buch beginnt einleitend mit einer Vorbemerkung des Autors einmal zu Fischers Schachstil und zum anderen zu seinen persönlichen Begegnungen mit dem Maestro, sei es am Brett oder außerhalb desselben. Im Anschluss daran folgen die erwähnten 100 Partien, wobei Soltis jeweils zunächst eine kurze schachhistorische Hintergrundschilderung vorschaltet, sodass der Leser auf das Geschehen gewissermaßen eingestimmt wird. Der Reigen beginnt mit der Glanzpartie Donald Byrne - Fischer, die letzterer im zarten Alter von 13 Jahren spielte und die er in einem wahren Opferrausch zu Ende führte.
Insider wissen natürlich, dass Bobby diese Partie nach seinen eigenem Maßstäben nicht allzu hoch einschätzte, da er sie in seiner berühmten Partiensammlung „Meine 60 denkwürdigen Partien" erstaunlicherweise außen vorgelassen hat. Den Schluss der Anthologie bildet die 11. Partie aus dem erwähnten Revanchematch gegen Spasski, welche nach den Worten des Verfassers im Übrigen gleichfalls das Prädikat „memorable" verdient. Außerschachliche Informationen beispielsweise zu Fischers umstrittenen politischen Ansichten oder zu seinem Dasein der letzten drei Jahrzehnte sucht man in unserem Buch vergeblich, wie überhaupt in Sachen kritischer Töne Fehlanzeige vermeldet werden muss. Wen dies nicht stört und wer überdies der englischen Sprache einigermaßen mächtig ist, wird bei der Lektüre entdecken oder auch „wieder entdecken", dass Bobby Fischers Partien von einzigartiger Klarheit, Logik und Präzision geprägt waren und sich insofern außerordentlich gut für denjenigen eignen, der Schach verstehen und die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse nutzbringend anwenden will.

E. Carl, Rochade Europa 08/2003


Im Jahr seines 60. Geburtstags beschäftigen sich gleich mehrere Pumit dem elften Weltmeisder Schachgeschichte, Robert J. Fischer.
Zu Beginn des Jahres in Ausgabe 2/2003 konnten wir Ihnen bereits die schöne und völlig überarbeitete Neuseines Klassikers "Meine 60 denkwürdigen Partien" vorstellen. Eihübsche Ergänzung hierzu hat Andrew Soltis im englischen Batsford-Verlag herausgebracht.
Darin zeigt und kommentiert Soltis 100 von Fischers schönsten Partien, wobei sich die Überschneidung mit Fischers Buch in Grenzen hält: nur 28 Partien sind in beiden Büchern enthalten. Die hier vorgestellten Pardecken die Spanne von Fischers berühmter Partie gegen Donald Byrne 1956 bis zum sogenannten Revanche-Kampf in Sveti Stefan 1992 ab.
Neben einigen weniger bekannten Meisterwerken Fischers aus seinen jüngeren Jahren darf sich der Leser vor allem auf die 32 Partien aus der Zeit 1968-1992 freuen, die in "Meine 60 denkwürdigen Partien" nicht berücksichtigt werden konnte.
Die Partien allein machen das Buch natürlich bereits schon sehr empfehdoch auch die Kommentare von Soltis wissen zu gefallen. Zwar geht er nicht ganz so ausführlich wie Fischer auf die Partien ein, dafür kommentiert er in angenehmer Ruhe und Objektivität
Außerdem sind seine Ausführungen in den Eröffnungsphasen interessant, wo er auf andere relevante Fischer-Partien eingeht und so auch die Entwicklung von Fischers Repertoire veranschaulicht. Die kurzen Einführungen zu jeder Partie runden den angenehmen Eindruck dieses schönen Buches ab.
Die 288 Seiten sind recht kompakt bedruckt und bietet damit eine Menge lesenswerten Materials, das keine beAnsprüche an die Englischkenntnisse des Lesers stellt.

Schachmarkt 4/2003