David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

He had an inexhaustible appetite for chess work. When the Dane Bent Larsen, eight years Fischer’s senior, acted as his second (supporting Fischer with his chess preparation and analysis) in the Candidates tournament in Yugoslavia in 1959, the sixteen-year-old Fischer would not give him time off, insisting that every spare moment, evenings included, be spent studying openings.

How does a man who lives for chess take defeat? Among Fischer watchers there are, broadly, two schools of thought. One school maintains that he was petrified of losing, that this was his deepest dread, and that his incessant demands about the playing conditions were conscious or subconscious strategies to avoid appearing. This view of Fischer was common in Soviet circles. Lev Abramov, the former head of the Sports Committee Chess Department, wrote an article called “The Tragedy of Bobby Fischer.” Why “tragedy”?

A tragedy in that Fischer was scared to sit next to the chessboard. The most paradoxical thing was that this outstanding, amazing chess player sometimes couldn’t force himself to come to the game, and if he managed to overcome this “disease” he still lacked confidence until he got a good result. I think it was a disease.

Soviet grandmaster and psychologist Nikolai Krogius agrees: “As a psychological type, Fischer resembles the French marshal [Masséna], who was unable to pull himself together before a battle, but who was transformed when the battle began. Napoleon said that [Masséna] demonstrated his talent as a military leader only from the moment ‘when the cannons began to fire.’”

A linked but divergent interpretation is that Fischer was so utterly convinced of his superiority that failure became inconceivable. Thus even the occasional defeat tended to have a shattering impact on his self-esteem. Certainly there is empirical evidence to back up such a claim. The records show that on those rare occasions on which he lost in tournaments, he would perform below par in the following game, too, with his percentage of victories not as high as normal. Recovery from knocks was easier for players whose worldview included their own fallibility. As a boy, if Fischer lost a speed game—in which there is no pause for thought and moves are bashed out rapidly, often in split seconds—he would invariably reset the pieces and demand another; it hinted at a deep psychic need to reconstruct his self-image, the self-image of a winner. Tears often accompanied defeat. He cried in the Candidates tournament in 1959 when Mikhail Tal defeated him. He was seen crying again when he lost to Spassky at the Mar del Plata tournament the following year. When goaded by reporters before his match with Petrosian—“Do you cry after losing?”—the twenty-eight-year-old Fischer countered like a petulant schoolboy, “Well, if I cry, the Russians get sick after losing.”

The most interesting phenomenon about Fischer, however, is not the effect chess had on him, but the effect his chess had on his opponents, destroying their morale, making them feel that they were in the grip of an alien hostile force to whose powers there was no earthly answer. “He’s a chess computer” was a compliment often paid by his admirers. “He’s nothing but a computer” was the disparaging comment of his detractors.

What did they mean? Well, computers do not suffer nerves. They lack a psychological attachment to particular rules or styles of play, and they calculate with both speed and precision. In all these regards, Fischer appeared to his opponents to function like a microchip-driven automaton. He analyzed positions with amazing rapidity; his opponent always lagged behind on the clock. Referring to the future chess computer, Jim Sherwin, an American player who knew Fischer well, described him as “a prototype Deep Blue.” The Soviet analysis showed that even when faced with an unexpected position, Fischer took not longer than fifteen or twenty minutes to make his move; other grandmasters might take twice as long. Nor did Fischer appear to be governed by any psychologically predetermined system or technique. Take just one example, the twenty-second move of game seven against Tigran Petrosian in the 1971 Candidates match. Who else but Fischer would have exchanged his knight for the bishop? To give up an active knight for a weak bishop was inconceivable; it seemed to violate a basic axiom of the game, to defy all experience. Yet, as Fischer proved, it was absolutely the right decision, transforming an edge into another ultimately winning advantage.

Human chess players can often feel insecure in open, complex positions because a part of them dreads the unknown. Thus they avoid exposing their king because they worry that, like a general trapped in no-man’s-land, this most vital of pieces will inevitably be caught in the crossfire. Common sense and knowledge born of history tells them that this is so. An innate pessimism harries them, nagging away, warning them off the potentially hazardous move. Not Fischer. If he believed his opponent could not capitalize on an unshielded king, if he could foresee no danger, then he would permit it to stand brazenly, provocatively unguarded.

Faced with Fischer’s extraordinary coolness, his opponents assurance would begin to disintegrate. A Fischer move, which at first glance looked weak, would be reassessed. It must have a deep master plan behind it, undetectable by mere mortals (more often than not they were right, it did). The U.S. grandmaster Robert Byrne labeled the phenomenon “Fischer-fear.” Grandmasters would wilt, their suits would crumple, sweat would glisten on their brows, panic would overwhelm their nervous systems. Errors would creep in. Calculations would go awry. There was talk among grandmasters that Fischer hypnotized his opponents, that he undermined their intellectual powers with a dark, mystic, insidious force. Time after time, in long matches especially, Fischer’s opponents would suffer a psychosomatic collapse. Fischer managed to induce migraines, the common cold, flu, high blood pressure, and exhaustion, to which he himself was mostly resistant. He liked to joke that he had never beaten a healthy opponent.

Part of Fischer’s destructive impact lay in his demeanor during the game. Tall (six feet two) and confident, he cut an imposing figure. Don Schultz, the former president of the U.S. Chess Federation, says that “just watching him sitting at the board you’d think, Gee, that guy’s going to win.” The fact that Fischer never looked for a draw and rarely agreed to a draw while there was still some uncertainty in the position, increased the mental exertion required to play him.

In Reykjavik to cover the match, the novelist Arthur Koestler famously coined the neologism “mimophant” to describe Fischer. “A mimophant is a hybrid species: a cross between a mimosa and an elephant. A member of this species is sensitive like a mimosa where his own feelings are concerned and thick-skinned like an elephant trampling over the feelings of others.”

There is no doubt that, like a psychopath, Fischer enjoyed that feeling of complete power over his opponent. Like a psychopath, he had no moral compunction about using his power. In a letter to a chess-playing acquaintance about the 1962 Olympiad in Bulgaria, he describes a game he played against the great Mikhail Botvinnik. Ultimately the game was drawn when Fischer fell for a Botvinnik trap (after which, according to Fischer, Botvinnik puffed out his chest, and strode away from the table like a giant). But Fischer had held the initiative for much of the game, and in the letter he is gleeful about the discomfort Botvinnik appeared to suffer, mocking the Soviet for changing color and looking about to expire.

Yet here was a paradox. Chess players are often described as either objective or subjective, those who play the board and those who play the opponent. In the thin air at the summit of grandmaster chess, where each player’s style and opening repertoire are familiar to all, there can be no such precise division; a mixture of the two approaches is inevitable. Within this spectrum, however, Fischer certainly occupied the board end. Fischer relished his opponent’s suffering but did not require it to take pleasure in the game. Indeed, some gibed that from his perspective the only thing wrong with chess was the necessity of having another human being on the other side of the board to play the moves.