Portrait of a Genius As a Young Chess Master

As exasperating as he is talented and as determined as he is eccentric, Bobby Fischer promises to become the game's most respected and least understood champion.

RUSSIA'S traditional hold on World Championships in chess is about to be challenged by the United States in the person of an eighteen-year-old boy from Brooklyn named Bobby Fischer. Bobby has been United States Chess Champion for four years. He won the title at the age of fourteen, the youngest player ever to do so. He has since successfully defended his title three times and has won virtually every major chess title in the country.

In an international tournament at Bled, Yugoslavia, last summer, he astonished the chess world by defeating Russia's Mikhail Tal in his only game against this former World Champion. The present World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, did not participate in the tournament. Fischer is aching to play Botvinnik. "I know that I deserve to be World Champion and I know I can beat Botvinnik," he has said. "There's no one alive I can't beat."

Fischer may have his chance early in 1963 when the triennial chess World Championship will be played. He will first have to win two preliminary international tournaments, the Inter-Zonal and the Candidates, in 1962. Many of America's leading chess authorities agree with Lisa Lane, the twenty-four-year-old Women's Chess Champion of the United States. "I'm sure that Bobby can beat Botvinnik," she has said. "There's never before been a chess player with such a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the game and such an absolutely indomitable will to win. I think Bobby is the greatest player that ever lived."

John W. Collins columnist for Chess Life and Chess Review and one of the country's most highly respected chess annotators, has written: "Bobby is the finest chess player this Country ever produced. His memory for the moves, his brilliance in dreaming up combinations, and his fierce determination to win are uncanny. Not only will I predict his triumph over Botvinnik but I'll go further and say that he'll probably be the greatest chess player that ever lived."

Frank Brady, business manager of the United States Chess Federation, the governing body of American chess, has said: "Russians have held chess World Championships in all but three of the past thirty-four years. Bobby is the man who will break that chain. Definitely. Maybe not in 1963, maybe not even in 1966, but eventually, for sure."

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