THE ROMANCE of the Chess World Championship Match and the World Champions that won them:
There can only be Two.
The Champion to hold the Title he beat all the masters for.
The Challenger on quest for same Title of yore.
Bobby Fischer was the only American Chess World Champion. He was born on March 9, 1943 in Chicago, USA.
Over the chessboard Fischer possessed a clear flowing extremely accurate style reminiscent of his favorite players Morphy and Capablanca, that could be relatively easy to study and understand but so extremely difficult to play against.
In spite of what many chess fans believe, he wasn’t really a ‘born tactical attacker’ like players of the Alekhine-Keres-Spassky-Kasparov grouping. In fact, he went on the record for saying, in a quite obvious manner, that he hated Alekhine’s style. Bobby Fischer played the position first and foremost in the manner of the Morphy-Capablanca manner.
It’s like saying that for:
Alekhine – You don’t know what tactical bolt he’s going to play, and when he plays it, you are shocked and you lose.
Capablanca – You know what he’s going to play, but when he plays it, there’s not much you can do and you lose.
Fischer belonged to the Capablanca group. If the position called for it, he would engage in tactics and attack. If the position called for it, he would engage in positional maneuvers and go into long endgames. He didn’t consciously intentionally maneuver his pieces toward his opponent’s King out of the opening and attack.
Furthermore, he was the most aggressive of this latter group in chess history.
I would describe Fischer’s style as Extremely Positionally Aggressive.
Moreover, Fischer exhibited a separate trait from that of being a positionally aggressive player.
Specifically, Fischer has been until now, the greatest grinder chess history has ever seen. He almost always played on and on and on, setting up problems and traps all the way to the end even in theoretically drawn positions. The end came when his opponents stumbled and lost, or finally drew in skeletal endgames devoid of all further play and clearly drawn. In fact, Fischer was known to play on and on and on to bare Kings.
As an addendum, Fischer was also an extremely rapid player and he dominated the world’s top players in blitz
The most peculiar of all World Champions outside of chess for his adamant views on his own USA government (and he defied US regulations by ‘illegally’ playing an exhibition match against Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992, and died in exile in Iceland on January 17, 2008 after acquiring Icelandic citizenship), Soviets (he lumped all of them together as ‘Russians’ who plotted against him), and Jews (extremely critical although he was born of Jewish parents himself), Fischer left a taint to his otherwise sterling competitive record by defaulting two matches that, after all is said and done, he probably doubted his ability to win – the unfinished 1961 Reshevsky Match and the would-be 1975 World Championship Match with Karpov (which would have been his first World Title defense) – giving rise to more or less permanent notions among some chess pundits that he feared a match loss so much that he avoided finishing or beginning the above chess matches.
Oh, but how the chess world would be so different had Fischer kept on playing!
He would have played a ton of games with Karpov and even played on with Kasparov. For the first time since the Lasker-Capablanca-Alekhine chess geniuses trilogy, there would have been another chess geniuses trilogy- that of Fischer-Karpov-Kasparov.
But after his forfeiture of the 1975 World Championship Match with Karpov, Fischer essentially not only abdicated but never played again. His last serious game was with Spassky at the age of 29 in their 1972 World Championship Match.
In his prime in 1967 to 1972, Fischer totally towered over the chess world as no other player ever has, before or since. He won almost all chess competitions he participated in, often by amazingly big margins.
His incredible 19 straight victories in the Interzonals – Candidates matches of 1970 to 1971, culminating in a wipe-out of two Candidates matches (Taimanov 6 – 0 and Larsen 6 – 0), was such a horrifying slaughter of the world’s top players that it is hardly believable and should have been impossible, save that it actually happened.
It has never happened before or since. Even a chess computer would be hard put to beat such a record! (Send comments and suggestions to mabuhibisaya2017@gmail.com)/PN
