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Chess genius Bobby Fischer dies
18/01/2008 14:57 - (SA)
Reykjavik - Bobby Fischer, the troubled chess genius who achieved fame by taking the game's world championship from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has died, his spokesperson said Friday. He was 64.
Fischer spokesperson Gardar Sverrisson said Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday. There was no immediate word on cause of death.
US-born Fischer, a fierce critic of his homeland who renounced his US citizenship, moved to Iceland in 2005.
The Chicago-born, Brooklyn-reared Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Cold War rival Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.
An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer became an icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
But his reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it. He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan. Fischer won, but the game was played in violation of US sanctions imposed to Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Yugoslavia.
Former Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov said Friday that Fischer's ascent of the chess world in the 1960s was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game.
"The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.
- AP
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