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Bobby Fischer Dead

Diogenes said:
What don't you get about " ... on the few occasions that Fischer played Tal, Tal usually beat him. "

..... not being true ?

' Usually ' would mean he beat him more often than not ... Which is obviously not the case ..

I don't care if was in sanctioned competition or not ... He didn't USUALLY beat Fischer ... So it is inaccurate to say so ...

The appeal to pity doesn't count either ...
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Again, I'm having a tough time following you. The tournament record, not counting draws, is 4 wins for Tal; 2 for Fischer. How can you add blitz games? Tal and Bobby played hundreds of blitz games and Tal won most of them, as they were played before Fischer reached his peak. Tal and Petrosian were the best blitz players in the world when Fischer entered the international arena.

Why isn't it accurate to say that Tal usually beat Fischer? I'm not contending that Tal deserves to be ranked higher on the all-time list. When they played against each other, Tal was at his best and Fischer was a rising star.
 
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Diogenes said:
Based on the documented games I could find, he didn't ..

I will take your word for it that Tal beat him in hundreds of blitz games..

O.K. ?


I apologize if I misrepresented you or anyone else .
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No need to apologize. The fault lies with the source that listed two 5-minute games along with serious tournament games. You did nothing wrong.
 
pomeroo said:
Tal and Bobby played hundreds of blitz games and Tal won most of them, as they were played before Fischer reached his peak. Tal and Petrosian were the best blitz players in the world when Fischer entered the international arena.
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Not for long. In 1970, Fischer won the (unofficial) world blitz championships in Montenegro. Fischer crushed the super-class field with 19/22, 4.5 points ahead of Tal. Unbelievable.

I wonder if Fischer was dominated in blitz by any player in the world after ~1965. He was always extremely good in blitz.
 
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Sounds it's like the heavyweight champ bragging because he beat up Mike Tyson when Tyson was 12.
 
Here is an interesting read on Fischers blitz skills..

http://www.bobby-fischer.net/bobby_fischer_speed_chess.htm

An amusing excerpt:

How strong was Bobby? I remember the 1966-67 New Year’s Eve party at our home. At the time Bobby was competing in and winning his final U. S. Championship. Several grandmasters were present, and there was plenty of eating and drinking. By 2 a. m. Bobby wanted to play some chess, and he had in mind a certain strong international master. But Bobby had drunk quite a bit more than his opponent, and he insisted on playing blindfold blitz chess while the opponent had sight of the board. Still, he won effortlessly.
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More serious:
All told, Bobby scored 40 ½ - 3 ½ or 92 percent in two major blitz tournaments – Herceg Novi and the Manhattan tournament – against players ranging from strong masters to world champions. Bobby was treating this elite as masters treat class-rated players in simultaneous exhibitions. What Hans Kmoch said about Fischer’s 11 - 0 sweep in the 1963-64 U. S. Championship – he congratulated second place GM Larry Evans for winning the tournament and Fischer for “winning the exhibition” – could now be said about Fischer’s treatment of world champions and candidates for the world championship.
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Senex said:
I'll give your commie leaning butt an attitude. Let's play a best out of three game chess tournament. I don't know where you live but I don't care if it takes ten years. At some point my Bobby Fischer loving ass will will beat your commie loving ass.

Agreed?
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Good for you Senex. I was considering challenging Checkmite to a few games to "settle" the debate. Of course that won't settle anything seriously, but it's no less serious than the rest of this so-called argument.

Of course anybody who knows anything about chess realizes that if you take two players and match them up it's unlikely that they are close to each other in strength so that a real fight ensues. Chances are the stronger player will blast away the weaker player 9 games out of 10.

I'm rated just over 2000 by USCF. That makes me better than 99% of chess players but I know plenty of people who slaughter me without even thinking about it.
 
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Even in death, Fischer continues his bizarre behavior: Bobby Fischer's final bizarre act

The American chess prodigy's eccentricities didn't end with his death. As Neil Tweedie discovered in Reykjavik this week, the reclusive genius had arranged his own secret 'guerrilla' burial. Now its legality is being questioned

The grave was dug in secret as darkness descended over the white frozen landscape around the village of Hraungerdi, ready for Bobby Fischer's last getaway. Not even the minister whose churchyard it was knew of the funeral planned for the following morning.

Only five people attended the brief service early on Monday, conducted in the half-light before the short Icelandic day had properly begun. Among them was Gardar Sverrisson, Fischer's closest friend of the last few years and the man who had organised the digging of the grave without seeking the permission of Iceland's Lutheran Church or of the state authorities.
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I'm glad this thread is still going.

Checkmite said:
True, the two have nothing to do with each other. However, they are both equally relevant when considering a person as a whole person.
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I'm not disagreeing with you that Fischer was a terrible person overall. I'm disagreeing with the idea that this must prevent or get in the way of those of us who want to study or discuss him as a chess player...or that it should in any way effect our judgement of him as a chess player. A guy can write a great mathematical formula on a chalkboard then go give a racist rant, but I might still want to discuss the formula and I should be able to...theres much to learn from it. And I'm not trying to be insensitive here...remember my example, HP Lovecraft was a known racist and even named his cat "******-man," but as a black person...I don't have any problem with people discussing him AS a writer, and I can do exactly that myself.

You're not understand what I'm trying to say. Perhaps I'm not being clear, so I'll try a different approach.

Let's try to quantify things to make them easier to understand. I'll propose that people, over a lifetime, develop a reputation, and we'll measure that reputation with units that, for the sake of this argument, are called Cool Points.

Bobby Fischer, by winning a World Championship while simultaneously being American (certainly no small feat when it comes to chess, considering it's only been done twice), against the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War, earned an incredible +2500 CPs. However, by turning around and bashing his country (Death the the US, the US must be destroyed, etc), denying the Holocaust, and publically advocating genocide, Fischer earned -2950 CPs. The result is, Fischer's reputation is -450 CPs, an overall negative total. One can certainly acknowledge that Fischer was a good player and consider his achievements when calculating his reputation, but - and this is the underlying theme of my objections here - those achievements aren't enough to get Fischer out of the red.

This applies to Da Vinci as well. Perhaps you're right, and all Da Vinci has is his intellectual achievements. But Da Vinci is different from Fischer, in that he has no huge CP deficit to dig himself out of; those intellectual achievements are not overshadowed by anything atrocious, so Da Vinci skates to the finish line.

And this certainly isn't the first time in history that a person who, after a lifetime of accruing many, many CPs, made a few mistakes (or even a single mistake) which just totally negated them all, and then some.

Now, perhaps one could argue that the CP values I've attributed to Fischer's actions are completely arbitrary. Well, that's certainly true - we're dealing with reputation here after all, of which the observer's personal views and politics are a dependent variable. You could argue that you think Holocaust denial, advocating genocide, and etc. is only worth -300 CPs, putting Fischer clearly over the top. When we simplify things in this way, we find that what we're really arguing over here is whether chess is more important than personal humanity. I feel that it isn't. Your mileage may vary.
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My concern with your CP example is that your lumping things together, in a way that seems to potentially prevent conversation or learning about one area because a person was horrible in another area.

-We can discuss the Theory of Relativity, be fascinated by it and learn from it without having to constantly discuss Incest or be distracted by it.

-We can discuss Da Vinci's inventions without discussing Homosexual Pedophilia (Da Vinci took no interest in women and hired/lived with an apprentice who had been previously been tried for sodomy with older men).

-We can discuss John Von Neuman without discussing rampant sexual harassment in the workplace (his secretaries had to cover the undersides of their desks with cardboard to stop him from trying to look up their skirts).

-We can discuss Alan Turing's computer theories (and my particular favorites, the all-purpose Turing Machine which simulates any computer you could possibly invent, and the Turing Test which immediately short-circuits any theist argument that attempts to claim that you can't prove sentience)...without discussing closeted homosexuality and suicide.

You must allow people to discuss what is interesting to them about a person without trying to force or derail the conversation with unrelated things. Likewise, if that unrelated thing colors your perception of the person in that other area, you should be aware that you're bringing illogical and off-topic bias into the discussion and dragging it down. To be honest, with your unsupported assertions that still attempt to discredit Fischer as a chess player with no support, I think that's exactly what you're doing.

Please give it a rest.
 
Some of the news services are reporting that Bobby's corpse is going to be exhumed to determine whether he fathered a child who might be entitled to his estate.

They're going to check whether he mated, I guess.
 
Brown said:
Some of the news services are reporting that Bobby's corpse is going to be exhumed to determine whether he fathered a child who might be entitled to his estate.

They're going to check whether he mated, I guess.
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If this is confirmed, Fischer will have ended life in a stale mate situation :boxedin:
 
Oh. When I saw the thread resurrected, I thought there was some change in his condition...
 
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