Bobby Fischer: from prodigy to pariah (2011) | Hacker News Reader

Bobby Fischer: from prodigy to pariah (2011)

theguardian.com

72 pointswallflower28 comments

"...Garry Kasparov, Fischer's only rival for the title of best-ever player..."

That's not quite right. Both Kasparov and Fischer are definitely among the best players ever, but the list of contenders for the top spot is definitely longer than that. One might easily include Lasker, Capablanca, Alekhine, Botvinnik, Tal, and a couple of others.

It's not really possible to say who the best player of all time is; some of the plausible candidates never played each other in their primes. One can estimate of course based on intervening games, but I'm not ready to put a lot of confidence in a model that has to judge how the Lasker of 1910 would fare against the Fischer of 1972, extrapolating over a span of more than sixty years.

Best human player.

Isn't Deep Blue the best player? Or some computer since?

I think Komodo is currently the strongest chess engine, although the open source engine Stockfish is pretty close.

I mean, relatively speaking these players were strong for their time but the science of chess analysis makes it difficult to imagine a situation in which history's best players would stand a chance against their modern counterparts. We have so much more public information about what lines of play are promising and others which are... not so much.

Well you are entitled to your opinion but it is very likely you are wrong. The consensus among very many strong chess players,and historians is that the mantle of 'greatest player ever' is a toss-up between GK and RJF. This is based on many factors: peak rating,percentage wins/losses, fighting spirit and aversion to draws, quality of the opposition, quality of play, raw talent, statistical analysis of elo ratings, their contribution to theory and other factors. The phrase is not a whim of the reporter.

I am saying what I am saying for good reason. Back when I was active in chess (a decade or so ago), I read all kinds of articles and books about the great heroes of the game. There was general agreement in the chess community about who the dozen or so greatest players were, but no particular agreement on who was the very best. In a typical discussion, the cults of Fischer and Kasparov would always make themselves heard, but there were also advocates of Lasker and Capablanca, and some oddball who would insist on Morphy.

But perhaps things have changed. Got a pointer to a solid writeup on the issue?

I saw a good one once I think on ChessBase. I'll search for it.

I've been pissed off at Fisher for over 60 years!

In kindergarten or first grade my father taugh me how to play chess. A few months later, I beat him, and he never played me again, and I didn't play any more for quite a few years. My parents had been frightened that I would become a Bobby Fisher-like chess monster. It still rankles, even thought they may well have been right.

Have you seen the movie "Little Man Tate"? You might appreciate it.

A great, troubled man. It saddened me that I was the only person in the theater when the recent movie came out. As crazy as he was, I still think he deserves our respect.

Marketing my have been an issue. My father and I would both have been interested, and this is the first either of us have heard of it. He spends a great deal of time on chess computing forums so I have no idea how this one slipped by us. Tobey Mcguire?!? 'Pawn Sacrifice' is probably the biggest budget chess movie in 2 decades!

I thought it was a very well-made movie. You're right it probably was marketing. I really hope the film "the Queens gambit" can be made someday. That was going to be Heath Ledger's next project before he passed away.

The story of Morphy dying surrounded by women's shoes is apocryphal.

That one is an urban myth of sorts i believe

I've listened to a few interviews with Josh Waitzkin and I have to say, not impressed with him as a human being. In his case, he is highly intelligent, but it doesn't escape the fact that he's kind of a lousy human being. Go listen to his interview with Tim Ferriss for example; he talks like he's robotically trying to figure out how to sling vocabulary words together to sound smart. At once point (paraphrasing here), he says something like: "we have create a sense of agency for the kids". Not long after, I stopped listening.

Just listening to him describe his life, he's a very self important type of person.

He seems to have had that in common with Fischer then.

What's wrong with that quote? It seems like thr normal jargon of psychology.

I wish this "chess makes you crazy" line would just die. If anything, chess kept Fischer sane. Chess gave Fischer focus and forced him to interact with people. He only truly went off the deep end after he stopped playing.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LSWau3pTyIg

Have there been many great, mentally ill Go players?

The mystery of HN front page... a 2011 article from the Guardian about a known topic not related to technology.

I for one enjoyed reading this story. Interesting that the story diverges from the movie that was recently made in which it is Spassky that wanted to move to a different location as a result of noise generated by the ventilation system

May it always be thus.

I've learned there's always a(n associative) trail of comments (sometimes from more than on thread) leading to such apparently random posts.

My understanding is that if it's in the front page, the community has decided it's interesting and a cool read, so no need to complain.

Sometimes that's true, sometimes it's just an uptick of submissions for the same url (multiple submissions count as upvotes) because it's popped up somewhere else such as reddit.

A famous wunderkind shunned by all because of his "politics" (read: flaming bigotry)? It's pretty much HN catnip.

I know HN seems like a technology news site - it even has "news" in its name! - but it's not.

  > anything that gratifies one's
  > intellectual curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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