Board games of a wayward genius

Faber and Faber, 14.99

IN THE past few years Bobby Fischer, one-time world chess champion, has re-surfaced occasionally to rant against his country, the United States, in much the same way he ranted against the Soviet Union more than 30 years ago.

The paranoia, boorishness, tantrums and adolescent behaviour already obvious in 1972 when he played Boris Spassky in Iceland in what is still seen as the greatest chess match on record has become almost certifiable.

Yet a book about the chess thug from Brooklyn who blasted his way to the world championship match with the Russian Spassky in Reykjavik with an amazing 19 straight wins over three successive Grand Master opponents won’t struggle to find readers.

For chess players, Fischer is one of the best four or five there have ever been; for some he is the best because his skill as a player might have been equalled, but not his controlled ferocity at the board or his clear intention to crush an opponent mentally; for the general reader, Edmonds and Eidinow convey the breadth and depth of world-class chess without bogging down in too much d4 f6 c4 g6! Check.

Or whatever. As one of the world’s millions of chess players, I know the basic moves and some of the theory, but don’t have the ability of Fischer and Spassky to think a dozen to 20 moves ahead. Beyond that, there is the intuitive feel that the greats have when selecting one of a billion or so possible moves in any given situation, the intuition that allows the best to beat the most powerful computers.

It can be no surprise that the intuition appears in some odd people and Fischer, a prodigy - chess, like music and mathematics throws up precocious genius - and US champion at 15, was one of the oddest. His gracelessness was legendary, as was his lack of interest in and knowledge of anything other than chess. He was 29 when he played Spassky and his social behaviour was that of a badly behaved five-year-old. But what Bobby wanted, Bobby got.

The organisers and the world chess federation tied themselves in knots to give him the chair, board, hall and money he wanted, kicked out the television cameras, drove back the spectators, allowed him to turn up late, anything to keep him in the match.

The mistake made by Spassky was to allow Fischer to dictate his own terms away from the board. Spassky wanted to play and sometimes over-ruled his team simply to get on with a match that was boosted by the media as a Cold War battle for supremacy.

But what also went wrong for Spassky, as the authors point out, was the fact that in spite of the media build-up and calls from Henry Kissinger and President Nixon to Fischer, there was a Cold War thaw in the early 1970s. One result was that the Soviet Union, with its massive chess programme producing a series of champions who had been seen as splendid propaganda, took its eye off the board.

At any time in the 1950s or 1960s Fischer’s antics and demands before and during the match in Iceland would have met the full blast of Soviet team-based diplomatic opposition. But Spassky, never the most convinced of Communists and accused later of being more interested in the biggest prize money chess had ever promised than he was in the hard graft of winning, was too easy-going and made his own decisions.

The result was that after Fischer lost the first two games by default and at one point was heading for a plane home, Spassky only won one more game in the best-of-24 match. Some wonderful games were played, both made rare blunders, the tension never eased, but Fischer won. He never played seriously again. That odd, driven personality had won the title he had set his heart and mind on as a ten-year-old and there was nothing left to do except become more eccentric by the year, a wanderer who surfaces in various countries to rant on phone-in radio programmes.

The courteous sportsman Spassky played world-level chess for another 15 years and now lives happily with his third wife in France. There’s a moral there, but the authors resist drawing it. The detail of the world’s greatest chess match is enough for them.