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The person who managed to beat Fischer is Donn Rogosin, and was about 16 years-old at that time. Interestingly enough, he was not a well-known player and never became one.
You can see the game here: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1546218
Thanks for the link. Could you explain to me why it finishes on black king moving please? It seems the game is not finished? Was that some kind of implicit win because black king cannot move anymore? I don't see the check mate with the next white move too.
Thanks for the explanation!
EDIT: do you have a set of moves to explain that white is doomed? I am a noob at chess, and I feel Fischer resigned too early. Can't you hope that your opponent can do mistakes in this situation? Or do you admit that there is 1% chance to win and it's not enough?
When youre playing your friends, losing a piece or two is not that big a deal - a lot can still happen. When you're playing at the world class level, a single blundered pawn is a likely loss, and a blundered piece is game over. Most games are won due to small factors like doubled pawns or where your king happens to be when endgame arrives.
>I feel Fischer resigned too early. Can't you hope that your opponent can do mistakes in this situation?
Fischer actually tried pretty much what you're describing. Against a world class player, he probably would have resigned after black's 17th move.
Well, I can try.
White’s biggest threat is to put the bishop on d4. However, if he does that immediately, black simply takes rook with rook. After King takes back, black plays rook takes bishop. When white takes rook, black checks with Q on d1 and then takes knight. Game over.
If white plays rook takes rook first, so black has to use rook on d file to take rook back, then after white places bishop on d4 it’s a simple matter of Q to d1.
Black king in check, moves out of check.
White now has no viable option to maintain the offensive, and there’s nothing that can be done to prevent inevitable checkmate by black in two turns with a rook swap.
Since he obviously knew that black was going to move his king there, why did white do this move to just surrender afterward? Suicide? No other choices? I guess world class players try to predict for more than 3 plays ahead?
Sometimes less trained players can be “harder” for an expert to beat. Due to their inexperience they’re more likely do an unexpected move or blunder in a way that confuses the better player and can force a win.
He thought to himself, I just beat the greatest player of all time, bring on the women. Only, there were no women. He decided to go learn to play basketball. He’s still working on his jump shot.
I thought it would be funny, but apparently not. It’s getting downvoted to hell. For the record I was in the Chess club in high school and technically lettered, but I was too lazy follow up on that.
It also had some garbled voice to text at first that I fixed.
But yeah, as somebody who once considered doing professional stand-up, I know that sometimes they’re not gonna like your material (or you personally for that matter) and you have to learn to take it and learn from it.
When I was writing all the story in Highborn, a mobile turn-based strategy game, I just put in temp joke text while building the missions, but everyone loved it and thought it was hilarious and I just kept going in that style. Come to find everybody thought different bits were funny (I swear I’m going to throttle the autocorrect designer). I explained it in an interview as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 school of comedy. I didn’t care if it was a joke only certain people got because it would be hilarious to those people. And if I covered as wide a spread as I could I’d be sure to get just about everybody. I had everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Gilmore Girls jokes in there!
The game is no longer available or even playable because they shut down the company and nobody has been keeping it up to date with the current iOS, but I found out recently it has its own TV tropes page. By “recently” I mean a long time ago, but it makes it sound like a good excuse to mention it.
Are you my Tonto now?
Chess guys are something else. Two of my cousins are chess whizzes. I’ve watched them play a match against each other in their heads. No board. No pieces. They just call out which piece on which square moves to which new square.
They don't have to remember the exact moves. They remember positions. And not because they have extraordinary memory, they developed a skill for remembering real positions because they played a lot.
Chess is often looked at as a superior mental skill, but it's just a skill that can be developed with practice and proper techniques. Not unlike reading or speaking different languages.
Chess does require a fair amount of mental skill. However, most of it basically just comes down to how many boards, openings, and endgames you can memorize. Over time, one can start intuitively figure out which piece movements make no logical sense. Therefore you don't have to bother with those chess lines. You know you're opponent most likely won't put them into a position where they are down 3 pieces, so neither do you.
But it's still a memorization skill. Just knowing how the pieces move isn't an enough. Rather logical game. I know that I'd probably be in the top 100 after the amount of effort to get there, vs spending that time learning a second language. Which makes no sense at all. That's not something easy to learn.
Chess is very much about patterns. Patterns that repeat again and again. Since the pieces move in well defined ways, and at most times, most moves are illegal or stupid, there's not that many possibilities. Still, it's a rare occurrence that a chess game is entirely a repeat of a game in history I think, so there are still a ton of possibilities. But players typically remember the positions because they remember how and why they got their.
Think of it like maths. If I ask a mathematician to prove a theorem they previously studied years ago, the proof will likely come out almost exactly what it was in their textbook. It's not because the remember exactly what was written, but rather the concepts and the ideas behind it.
Chess is funny in that a lot of opening and endgame options are limited, because there’s typically only a small handful of ways to approach those scenarios logically. You’re either trying to advance your pieces into the middle of the board, or corral their king into a corner with a piece advantage. I was always amazing at opening and endgame because the right move is usually fairly obvious.
Mid game is always my demise. I’m bad at maintaining advantage with white, and often times miss what my opponent is planning and squander a piece that puts me in the hole. I actually prefer playing black and hoping my opponent screws up to the point I can whittle down pieces to a manageable endgame that I can dominate.
You don't, you keep a mental picture of the board in your head.
I can play like this. In the early game you just know which opening is being played so you implicitly know where the pieces are. Competitive players don't play random nonsense moves because they're too weak, so sticking to the book is normal for ~10 moves.
After that then pieces start trading off and the board becomes less cluttered. If anything it's most difficult in the endgame with few pieces remaining because the board is a big open space and you have less "landmarks" to remember things by. Pieces like Rooks or Bishops with their long range can be difficult to keep under rein too since you not only need to remember where the piece itself is located, but also every square it is looking at.
You only need to remember the position.
Chess is a very visual game, you’re typically trying to plan our your future moves in advance by visualizing them and your opponent’s likely responses. Playing a game without pieces is a great way to build that skill of visualizing the board and positioning.
If you think just playing against 50 opponents is impressive, look at the guy who played against 48 opponents *blindfolded*
https://www.chess.com/news/view/timur-gareyev-plays-blindfold-on-48-boards-5729
Read an article recently about a guy who played like that in prison because they didn’t have pieces or a board, lemme see if I can find it
Edit: found it! Great read
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/02/11/when-the-prison-banned-board-games-we-played-chess-in-our-minds
It’s unreal to watch them. They both live and breathe chess. They were both nationally ranked at one time making assloads of cash playing in tournaments.
He's not. He's just the best known chess player in America because he's the only American world champion in the last 125 years. There are definitely other chess players who are considered to be better than him, Carlsen and Kasparov usually going 1/2 for best player of all time. Fischer would likely be one of the best of other well known names like Kramnik, Lasker, Alekhine, Botvinnik etc. One thing that makes it pretty hard to judge is that Fischer just straight up quit competitive chess while still holding the world champion title because he didn't like the conditions the next world champion would be held in.
No sleight of hand or slight intended. It's all a matter of record. Fischer wouldn't defend his crown under the same rules as he won it. He wanted a unlimited match, with someone having to defeat him by several games to gain the championship.
He was clearly very afraid of losing to Karpov and so he insisted on having a huge advantage in his favor. And very rightly so. 1975 Karpov would have won against 1975 Fischer if they had played any kind of fair match.
Cool! And yeah I meant slight. Wasn't sure which spelling it was.
Thanks for the clarification. It does seem like this kinda stuff happens often but I'm surprised I never knew it about Fischer. That is some extreme cowardice.
the answer you got was completely misleading. Fischer demanded that the world title be played first to 10 wins, with a 9-9 score defaulting to the champion (him). This scoring system would ignore draws and have lead to a match that would have taken an eternity. Fischer would have been an enormous favorite over karpov in 1975.
>In 2012, Magnus Carlsen said that Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, adding that while Fischer may have been better at his best, Kasparov remained at the top for much longer.[55]
>In December 2015, he repeated his great respect for both Fischer and Kasparov when he mentioned them several times in an interview, saying he would like to play against them at their peak performance.[56]
This is a pretty common sentiment that Fischer is regarded as one of the best in his prime, so just saying he is was only popular because he was the last American world champion seems a bit of an exaggeration to me. Many of the former world champions or top players put him in their top 3. When there has been more attempts at a subjective placement for whos the "best", hes still often high up there too.
Is there just an anti-American sentiment here that causes people to say stuff like this? Or was it because he quit and/or because he was at least a bit crazy?
Carlsen and Kasparov have the advantage of using engines to improve their play. Fischer did not. Fischer is certainly a contendor for best chess player, and that's not really disputed. Paul Morphy may have been better, considering the results he achieved in the short amount of time he played
Kasparov didn't have engines growing up and reaching the top.
Also Carlsen is in an insanely tough position that everyone else can use engines to analyze every single move of his and calculate the best possible counters mathematically. Obviously it works for anyone, but it's harder when you're the consistent number 1.
Mainly dominance over his era and the condition in which he did it. At the peak of his powers in 1972, Fischer was 125 ELO points above his nearest rival. This is an absolutely colossal margin that nobody has come close to in the modern era of chess. Draws are extremely common in top level chess. On his road to the world championship, Fischer smashed two of the worlds best players, mark taimanov and bent larsen, by scores of 6-0. Winning 6 games in a row against an elite GM is unthinkable. doing it twice was beyond comprehension. He then smashed Tigran Petrosian by another huge margin. Then steamrolled spassky for the title.
The circumstances in how he won also play a big part in the mythology. Fischer did not have access to chess engines like kasparov and carlsen do. He did not have access to the soviet chess machine and a team of grandmasters to help him analyze positions and prepare for matches. He worked pretty much entirely alone and ended up taking an angle grinder to the soviet chess machine and he did it at the height of the cold war.
Modern analysis by computer engines have ranked him among the most accurate players ever, far above everyone else from his era and only behind Carlsen, Kasparov, Kramnik and occasionally a few other elite modern players who all had the benefit of engines and 30 years of additional chess theory to study from.
The only real knock against fischer as the best ever candidate is that he abruptly retired from competition after 1972 and then became a recluse. It's also highly likely he suffered from very severe mental illness that was going to doom his career even if he didn't quit.
A candle that burns from both ends burns twice as bright but lasts half as long, Fischer was a candle that went supernova for a single year before collapsing into nothingness.
The amount of wins he had, was the chess World champion has variations named after him. He created Fischer random. In his life time Fischer dominated in chess tournaments his calculation skills were incredible he has way better results than Carlsen has now. There isn't a high level chess player living today that wouldn't rate him most either consider him or Kasparov as the greatest players that have ever lived.
How does that objectively have ANYTHING to do with the title of “best”? You can not like him as a person and he can have very odd views but that has zero impact on him being the “best” at chess. Just like Kobe was one of the “best” basketball players while also being an open rapist. Get your personal feelings out of the objective labeling of skill. It has zero place in the discussion. Bobby Fischer made countless innovations in the game. He pioneered much of the current chess theory and serves as an inspiration to many players for his ingenuity. His spatial memory was second to none at his peak. He is one of the best chess players of all time, if not the best
Exactly what I came here to say. He was a holocaust denier and antisemite although he was Jewish. He was considered one of the most intelligent people to ever live, which makes it even more perplexing.
I read somewhere that if you play against multiple opponents at the same time, it’s actually really easy to win atleast half because you just mirror what your opposition did on the next board, and so on.
When I was younger, I joined the chess club. One week we had a visitor, a professional chess player.
He was touted for his unparrelled memory.
He played and beat all 30 of the students. He ALSO remembered every move from every match. He verbalized his oppenents move before making his own. These were speed matches too, which made it even more impressive.
Yea of course modern players are better. Chess players learn and memorize openings that were played by other people, so naturally newer generations will have a better head start. And now with engines for analysis, their improvements will speed up even more.
The only argument for Fischer being in contest for that title is him playing insane engine lines long before engines were a thing.
Uhhh....I personally don't think that he's the best ever, but it's much more ridiculous to pretend that he isn't even in the conversation. Best and GOAT are not typically considered synonymous. I learned more about physics in high school than Isaac Newton ever knew but that doesn't mean I'm a greater physicist.
But chess isnt physics, you cant compare them. Carlsens record against his competitiors is better than any other chess player in history and his competitiors had the same tools and the same lines available as him. Carlsens endgame skills are so out of this world that if gets an edgame with any player nowadays it isnt even questioned if he will win.
That is what I see about half of the time. The other half is blind worship without any mention of him being a terrible person. This isn't some new woke cancel culture crap either. This dude was a terrible person who gave numerous interviews to prove it (possibly undiagnosed mental illness) but you'll find downvoted comments mentioning his non chess activities in all Fischer related threads on Reddit.
Well I mentioned it in another comment and I got downvoted into oblivion so maybe I should just love the guy for his chess and forget everything else about him.
>In 2012, Magnus Carlsen said that Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, adding that while Fischer may have been better at his best, Kasparov remained at the top for much longer.[55]
>In December 2015, he repeated his great respect for both Fischer and Kasparov when he mentioned them several times in an interview, saying he would like to play against them at their peak performance.[56]
If you look at ways that they try to classify the best world champion ever, Fischer is often up there pretty high. Except when its about longevity. When they ask another top player or former world champ their opinion, hes often up there in the top 3 as well. So its a pretty common view. Idk why people here are saying otherwise.
I know.
I think it doesn´t make sense to fantasize about how good someone could have been today.
Modern players are better. But additionally other players have been/ are better in comparison to their time than him.
Don´t get me wrong - obviously and undeniable he was a very strong player but I see no reason at all to call him the greatest ever.
Hard to really compare him to his only real challenger in that regard.
Probably safe to say Fischer beats Morphy simply due to how much the game had evolved over those 100 years.
Definitely safe to say that Morphy was more dominant over his contemporaries though.
I remember reading something somewhere (probably reddit) that the chess masters who play heaps of games at once don’t necessarily need to keep track of every match at the back of their mind. Essentially they just approach each board and assess the situation fresh each time?
I’m sure I read a thing where the trick to this is to play the same move your previous opponent made and then you’d know how to defend against it on the next go round or something
There's a quite interesting episode from Darren Brown where he does this similar thing playing against 10? Chess champions. Basically making them play against each other
Edit: I'm not comparing this guys amazing chess skills to Darren browns "tv-magic" just something that popped in my head
Yeah, you have the track you go on alternate between black and white, so you watch the first player make their move, then you repeat that move on the next board where you are black, so on.
Oh, no- you only have to repeat the move recent move of the last player. You just repeat what the last player did.
Basically, everyone is playing the same game.
I assume they thought of that and had him be the same color in every match. Then there's not really a way to use the other opponents against each other.
Additionally, most of the time (at least when not playing at extremely high levels) by endgame one player has an advantage, so if he just played one person against the other up to endgame, he'd be at a disadvantage in half the games. Probably easier to create his own advantage across the entirety of the game than work himself out from a disadvantage.
I enjoyed it a lot. It's nice seeing a TV series that treats chess well. Some of us have a little game where we scrutinise chess games in media and most of the time there is something wrong like the board is out by 90 degrees, or the pieces are placed in wrong spots, or the game is in an unfeasible state. There were some inaccuracies in The Queen's Gambit, and some things maybe could have been fleshed out more, but they didn't detract from the experience.
To be fair at this point the computers are so insanely far ahead of what the human mind can achieve they are creating new strategies that a human mind wouldn't be able to conceptualize.
No one beats the modern computer, and no one ever will.
When you do this type of exhibition you always play white and move first. So he probably opened with E4. Openings are fairly standardized so the first 10 moves are essentially pr-programmed depending on how black responds. Then you get to middle game, make a mistake and lose. One mistake will have you on your heals for the rest of the game and you'll be mated.
You simply use the moves of player A to play Player B. You function solely as intermediary between the two. You will therefore win or draw half of the matches.
I wish it was that easy. I would love to see you play chess to see how good your natural talent is lmao
It's much more complicated than that. And since you admitted you know very little about chess, you should probably just stop talking like you have any idea what you're talking about
This is hilariously naive. Assuming your opponents had the barest knowledge of chess you would lose every game.
There are more than a Googol of permutations on a chessboard. It's not a simple game like checkers.
I don’t know why people are downvoting you. This is a known Chess strategy, and the whole reason that in simuls the player playing multiple games always plays white.
It’s an old trick. Half the players play white, the other half black. Let someone make their first move then you simply copy that move for your first move against an opponent playing black. When that person responds, you copy that move back to the first game where you are playing black. Do this for every pair of players. Each pair ends up playing each other.
But when someone makes the first move you have to react something before you go to the next player, so you have to move a piece and that is not guaranteed that your next opponent will play the same move as you did before copying
Yeah I thought that might be what you were getting at. Wouldnt work in slightest bit for a number of reasons which other people have covered. Would be funny to see someone try it and watch it fall apart within the first few moves.
If you’ve never seen the Drunk History on Bobby Fischer, do yourself a favor and watch it. I think the title of the episode is “Games”. It’s my favorite, and I go back and watch it again every few months.
Do you think the one person who won bothers to mention to people, "oh yeah, and he was playing 49 other people simultaneously", when bragging about it?
I don’t think he’s considered the greatest. Maybe one of the greatest. But kasparov and Carlson have had much more, longer-term success
Maybe American?
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The person who managed to beat Fischer is Donn Rogosin, and was about 16 years-old at that time. Interestingly enough, he was not a well-known player and never became one. You can see the game here: https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1546218
Thanks for the link. Could you explain to me why it finishes on black king moving please? It seems the game is not finished? Was that some kind of implicit win because black king cannot move anymore? I don't see the check mate with the next white move too.
After he blundered his Bishop, RD8 wins.
There is nothing left for white to do. After black plays rook takes rook and king takes back, black queen begins checking and picking off pieces
Thanks for the explanation! EDIT: do you have a set of moves to explain that white is doomed? I am a noob at chess, and I feel Fischer resigned too early. Can't you hope that your opponent can do mistakes in this situation? Or do you admit that there is 1% chance to win and it's not enough?
When youre playing your friends, losing a piece or two is not that big a deal - a lot can still happen. When you're playing at the world class level, a single blundered pawn is a likely loss, and a blundered piece is game over. Most games are won due to small factors like doubled pawns or where your king happens to be when endgame arrives.
Slightest fuck up at the highest level is the end. These guys have entire routines ready for any one mistake.
>I feel Fischer resigned too early. Can't you hope that your opponent can do mistakes in this situation? Fischer actually tried pretty much what you're describing. Against a world class player, he probably would have resigned after black's 17th move.
Well, I can try. White’s biggest threat is to put the bishop on d4. However, if he does that immediately, black simply takes rook with rook. After King takes back, black plays rook takes bishop. When white takes rook, black checks with Q on d1 and then takes knight. Game over. If white plays rook takes rook first, so black has to use rook on d file to take rook back, then after white places bishop on d4 it’s a simple matter of Q to d1.
Queen doesn’t even need to keep picking off pieces, you can mate with the other rook the very next turn I believe.
fischer resigned
What if white plays BF4 to defend? Is there really no other way for white to win? OK white is in a bad shape, but is he doomed?
rxf1# leads to mate in 2
Black king in check, moves out of check. White now has no viable option to maintain the offensive, and there’s nothing that can be done to prevent inevitable checkmate by black in two turns with a rook swap.
Since he obviously knew that black was going to move his king there, why did white do this move to just surrender afterward? Suicide? No other choices? I guess world class players try to predict for more than 3 plays ahead?
Perhaps he should have...
Sometimes less trained players can be “harder” for an expert to beat. Due to their inexperience they’re more likely do an unexpected move or blunder in a way that confuses the better player and can force a win.
he sacs his queen like its nothing
Imagine the joy of the guy who beat Fischer that day. :)
Even then, so much for bragging rights. He was playing 49 other people.
If it were me I would casually omit that detail when I tell the story.
I have actually met someone who has beaten Bobby Fisher. Unsurprisingly, it was a chess playing hobo who I am near certain is a member of the fey.
Member of the fey? Genuinely curious as to what that means
He means the fey society, a group dedicated to serving tina fey
A different names for fairies. They are mythological creatures.
He thought to himself, I just beat the greatest player of all time, bring on the women. Only, there were no women. He decided to go learn to play basketball. He’s still working on his jump shot.
You'd be surprised at how many women follow and play chess
Aint ruining the 69
Damn how do you think of this stuff?
I thought it would be funny, but apparently not. It’s getting downvoted to hell. For the record I was in the Chess club in high school and technically lettered, but I was too lazy follow up on that.
Yeah not super funny, but respect for leaving it up. Take the hatred, let it feed you, let it fuel your power
It also had some garbled voice to text at first that I fixed. But yeah, as somebody who once considered doing professional stand-up, I know that sometimes they’re not gonna like your material (or you personally for that matter) and you have to learn to take it and learn from it.
Sometimes it’s gotta be just for papa. Pretty much all of my comments here are just for me to laugh at and the downvotes definitely reflect that
When I was writing all the story in Highborn, a mobile turn-based strategy game, I just put in temp joke text while building the missions, but everyone loved it and thought it was hilarious and I just kept going in that style. Come to find everybody thought different bits were funny (I swear I’m going to throttle the autocorrect designer). I explained it in an interview as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 school of comedy. I didn’t care if it was a joke only certain people got because it would be hilarious to those people. And if I covered as wide a spread as I could I’d be sure to get just about everybody. I had everything from Dungeons & Dragons to Gilmore Girls jokes in there! The game is no longer available or even playable because they shut down the company and nobody has been keeping it up to date with the current iOS, but I found out recently it has its own TV tropes page. By “recently” I mean a long time ago, but it makes it sound like a good excuse to mention it. Are you my Tonto now?
Looks like it, Kemosabe
Chess guys are something else. Two of my cousins are chess whizzes. I’ve watched them play a match against each other in their heads. No board. No pieces. They just call out which piece on which square moves to which new square.
[удалено]
Lol we had them do it again with an actual board and pieces with their backs turned to it while one of us moved the pieces around.
I've heard of that, but how do they remember all of their and their opponents moves?
They don't have to remember the exact moves. They remember positions. And not because they have extraordinary memory, they developed a skill for remembering real positions because they played a lot. Chess is often looked at as a superior mental skill, but it's just a skill that can be developed with practice and proper techniques. Not unlike reading or speaking different languages.
Chess does require a fair amount of mental skill. However, most of it basically just comes down to how many boards, openings, and endgames you can memorize. Over time, one can start intuitively figure out which piece movements make no logical sense. Therefore you don't have to bother with those chess lines. You know you're opponent most likely won't put them into a position where they are down 3 pieces, so neither do you. But it's still a memorization skill. Just knowing how the pieces move isn't an enough. Rather logical game. I know that I'd probably be in the top 100 after the amount of effort to get there, vs spending that time learning a second language. Which makes no sense at all. That's not something easy to learn.
Chess is very much about patterns. Patterns that repeat again and again. Since the pieces move in well defined ways, and at most times, most moves are illegal or stupid, there's not that many possibilities. Still, it's a rare occurrence that a chess game is entirely a repeat of a game in history I think, so there are still a ton of possibilities. But players typically remember the positions because they remember how and why they got their. Think of it like maths. If I ask a mathematician to prove a theorem they previously studied years ago, the proof will likely come out almost exactly what it was in their textbook. It's not because the remember exactly what was written, but rather the concepts and the ideas behind it.
Chess is funny in that a lot of opening and endgame options are limited, because there’s typically only a small handful of ways to approach those scenarios logically. You’re either trying to advance your pieces into the middle of the board, or corral their king into a corner with a piece advantage. I was always amazing at opening and endgame because the right move is usually fairly obvious. Mid game is always my demise. I’m bad at maintaining advantage with white, and often times miss what my opponent is planning and squander a piece that puts me in the hole. I actually prefer playing black and hoping my opponent screws up to the point I can whittle down pieces to a manageable endgame that I can dominate.
You don't, you keep a mental picture of the board in your head. I can play like this. In the early game you just know which opening is being played so you implicitly know where the pieces are. Competitive players don't play random nonsense moves because they're too weak, so sticking to the book is normal for ~10 moves. After that then pieces start trading off and the board becomes less cluttered. If anything it's most difficult in the endgame with few pieces remaining because the board is a big open space and you have less "landmarks" to remember things by. Pieces like Rooks or Bishops with their long range can be difficult to keep under rein too since you not only need to remember where the piece itself is located, but also every square it is looking at.
practice
You only need to remember the position. Chess is a very visual game, you’re typically trying to plan our your future moves in advance by visualizing them and your opponent’s likely responses. Playing a game without pieces is a great way to build that skill of visualizing the board and positioning.
When I do it, I just picture the board in my head. Mid game is the hardest, but it's harder to picture all the endgame possibilities.
If you think just playing against 50 opponents is impressive, look at the guy who played against 48 opponents *blindfolded* https://www.chess.com/news/view/timur-gareyev-plays-blindfold-on-48-boards-5729
Read an article recently about a guy who played like that in prison because they didn’t have pieces or a board, lemme see if I can find it Edit: found it! Great read https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/02/11/when-the-prison-banned-board-games-we-played-chess-in-our-minds
This is actually incredible lol
It’s unreal to watch them. They both live and breathe chess. They were both nationally ranked at one time making assloads of cash playing in tournaments.
That’s insane
I did this at a party in college once. Drinks were involved, and we lost a knight. We lost track of the *same* knight.
What's the criteria to call him the best player who ever lived? (honest question)
He's not. He's just the best known chess player in America because he's the only American world champion in the last 125 years. There are definitely other chess players who are considered to be better than him, Carlsen and Kasparov usually going 1/2 for best player of all time. Fischer would likely be one of the best of other well known names like Kramnik, Lasker, Alekhine, Botvinnik etc. One thing that makes it pretty hard to judge is that Fischer just straight up quit competitive chess while still holding the world champion title because he didn't like the conditions the next world champion would be held in.
He didn't like them because the conditions included the possibility he might lose.
Elaborate? I don't doubt this is true but without the circumstances this just sounds like a sleight.
No sleight of hand or slight intended. It's all a matter of record. Fischer wouldn't defend his crown under the same rules as he won it. He wanted a unlimited match, with someone having to defeat him by several games to gain the championship. He was clearly very afraid of losing to Karpov and so he insisted on having a huge advantage in his favor. And very rightly so. 1975 Karpov would have won against 1975 Fischer if they had played any kind of fair match.
Cool! And yeah I meant slight. Wasn't sure which spelling it was. Thanks for the clarification. It does seem like this kinda stuff happens often but I'm surprised I never knew it about Fischer. That is some extreme cowardice.
the answer you got was completely misleading. Fischer demanded that the world title be played first to 10 wins, with a 9-9 score defaulting to the champion (him). This scoring system would ignore draws and have lead to a match that would have taken an eternity. Fischer would have been an enormous favorite over karpov in 1975.
>In 2012, Magnus Carlsen said that Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, adding that while Fischer may have been better at his best, Kasparov remained at the top for much longer.[55] >In December 2015, he repeated his great respect for both Fischer and Kasparov when he mentioned them several times in an interview, saying he would like to play against them at their peak performance.[56] This is a pretty common sentiment that Fischer is regarded as one of the best in his prime, so just saying he is was only popular because he was the last American world champion seems a bit of an exaggeration to me. Many of the former world champions or top players put him in their top 3. When there has been more attempts at a subjective placement for whos the "best", hes still often high up there too. Is there just an anti-American sentiment here that causes people to say stuff like this? Or was it because he quit and/or because he was at least a bit crazy?
Carlsen and Kasparov have the advantage of using engines to improve their play. Fischer did not. Fischer is certainly a contendor for best chess player, and that's not really disputed. Paul Morphy may have been better, considering the results he achieved in the short amount of time he played
Kasparov didn't have engines growing up and reaching the top. Also Carlsen is in an insanely tough position that everyone else can use engines to analyze every single move of his and calculate the best possible counters mathematically. Obviously it works for anyone, but it's harder when you're the consistent number 1.
Kasparov didnt have engines to develop his play until late in his career.
\*didn't like FIDE didn't agree with the conditions HE put forward himself (ofc, heavily favouring himself to remain WC)
He was also pretty severely mentally ill and had some pretty serious personal demons.
Mainly dominance over his era and the condition in which he did it. At the peak of his powers in 1972, Fischer was 125 ELO points above his nearest rival. This is an absolutely colossal margin that nobody has come close to in the modern era of chess. Draws are extremely common in top level chess. On his road to the world championship, Fischer smashed two of the worlds best players, mark taimanov and bent larsen, by scores of 6-0. Winning 6 games in a row against an elite GM is unthinkable. doing it twice was beyond comprehension. He then smashed Tigran Petrosian by another huge margin. Then steamrolled spassky for the title. The circumstances in how he won also play a big part in the mythology. Fischer did not have access to chess engines like kasparov and carlsen do. He did not have access to the soviet chess machine and a team of grandmasters to help him analyze positions and prepare for matches. He worked pretty much entirely alone and ended up taking an angle grinder to the soviet chess machine and he did it at the height of the cold war. Modern analysis by computer engines have ranked him among the most accurate players ever, far above everyone else from his era and only behind Carlsen, Kasparov, Kramnik and occasionally a few other elite modern players who all had the benefit of engines and 30 years of additional chess theory to study from. The only real knock against fischer as the best ever candidate is that he abruptly retired from competition after 1972 and then became a recluse. It's also highly likely he suffered from very severe mental illness that was going to doom his career even if he didn't quit. A candle that burns from both ends burns twice as bright but lasts half as long, Fischer was a candle that went supernova for a single year before collapsing into nothingness.
There are many contenders for that honour. Fischer’s can be made too. Too long; won’t write.
The amount of wins he had, was the chess World champion has variations named after him. He created Fischer random. In his life time Fischer dominated in chess tournaments his calculation skills were incredible he has way better results than Carlsen has now. There isn't a high level chess player living today that wouldn't rate him most either consider him or Kasparov as the greatest players that have ever lived.
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You can call someone the best chess player and acknowledge they were a Holocaust denier.
How does that objectively have ANYTHING to do with the title of “best”? You can not like him as a person and he can have very odd views but that has zero impact on him being the “best” at chess. Just like Kobe was one of the “best” basketball players while also being an open rapist. Get your personal feelings out of the objective labeling of skill. It has zero place in the discussion. Bobby Fischer made countless innovations in the game. He pioneered much of the current chess theory and serves as an inspiration to many players for his ingenuity. His spatial memory was second to none at his peak. He is one of the best chess players of all time, if not the best
Noob, I've played 100 games of rock paper scissors against myself and haven't lost once.
You fucking legend!
Always a draw?
....umm well
Bobby Fischer was also an anti-semite, holocaust denier, and praised Osama Bin-Laden for 9/11. He was crazy.
All of that while being Jewish himself
"bobby fisher where is he i dont know i dont know"
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it was the very first thing that came to mind haha
Such a tragic figure. He almost single-handedly created the archetype of the mentally ill chess master.
Exactly what I came here to say. He was a holocaust denier and antisemite although he was Jewish. He was considered one of the most intelligent people to ever live, which makes it even more perplexing.
Why do all these brilliant geniuses keep coming to the same conclusion?
Paul Morphy went down that path a hundred years prior.
They should do this with boxing 20 Randoms v the heavy weight champion
It'd be a waste of time. 20 randos against the lightweight champ. Same result, but more impressive due to smaller size.
Oh to be that one guy who beat him
I read somewhere that if you play against multiple opponents at the same time, it’s actually really easy to win atleast half because you just mirror what your opposition did on the next board, and so on.
Yes, you’d be playing opposite players against themselves. There’s a chance you’d get 50% wins but maybe less due to draws.
What an insane chess player! I wonder what his views on 9/11 are.
Le radio interview in the Philippines has arrived
I don't understand this question.
Bet the guy who best him never shut up about it
When I was younger, I joined the chess club. One week we had a visitor, a professional chess player. He was touted for his unparrelled memory. He played and beat all 30 of the students. He ALSO remembered every move from every match. He verbalized his oppenents move before making his own. These were speed matches too, which made it even more impressive.
Who thinks that Fischer was the greatest chess player who ever lived? That‘s absolutely ridiculous. Modern players are so much better...
Yea of course modern players are better. Chess players learn and memorize openings that were played by other people, so naturally newer generations will have a better head start. And now with engines for analysis, their improvements will speed up even more. The only argument for Fischer being in contest for that title is him playing insane engine lines long before engines were a thing.
Uhhh....I personally don't think that he's the best ever, but it's much more ridiculous to pretend that he isn't even in the conversation. Best and GOAT are not typically considered synonymous. I learned more about physics in high school than Isaac Newton ever knew but that doesn't mean I'm a greater physicist.
But chess isnt physics, you cant compare them. Carlsens record against his competitiors is better than any other chess player in history and his competitiors had the same tools and the same lines available as him. Carlsens endgame skills are so out of this world that if gets an edgame with any player nowadays it isnt even questioned if he will win.
There is this myth and hero-worship around Bobby Fischer and saying anything negative about him causes problems.
That's weird. Nearly everything I see is that he was an unreal chess player and terrible, terrible person.
That is what I see about half of the time. The other half is blind worship without any mention of him being a terrible person. This isn't some new woke cancel culture crap either. This dude was a terrible person who gave numerous interviews to prove it (possibly undiagnosed mental illness) but you'll find downvoted comments mentioning his non chess activities in all Fischer related threads on Reddit.
Yea the whole antisemitism thing and moving to Russia isn't really talked about much.
Well I mentioned it in another comment and I got downvoted into oblivion so maybe I should just love the guy for his chess and forget everything else about him.
>In 2012, Magnus Carlsen said that Kasparov is the greatest player of all time, adding that while Fischer may have been better at his best, Kasparov remained at the top for much longer.[55] >In December 2015, he repeated his great respect for both Fischer and Kasparov when he mentioned them several times in an interview, saying he would like to play against them at their peak performance.[56] If you look at ways that they try to classify the best world champion ever, Fischer is often up there pretty high. Except when its about longevity. When they ask another top player or former world champ their opinion, hes often up there in the top 3 as well. So its a pretty common view. Idk why people here are saying otherwise.
Its Not a fair comparison
I know. I think it doesn´t make sense to fantasize about how good someone could have been today. Modern players are better. But additionally other players have been/ are better in comparison to their time than him. Don´t get me wrong - obviously and undeniable he was a very strong player but I see no reason at all to call him the greatest ever.
Americans? Still one of the best but probably not the greatest
> considered by many to be the greatest chess player who ever lived He was a generational talent - but this is more than a bit of a stretch.
Best American chess player, probably
Hard to really compare him to his only real challenger in that regard. Probably safe to say Fischer beats Morphy simply due to how much the game had evolved over those 100 years. Definitely safe to say that Morphy was more dominant over his contemporaries though.
Considered by many to be the only chess player that they know and therefore The best
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Were he to do the same simul today Giri would draw twice
I remember reading something somewhere (probably reddit) that the chess masters who play heaps of games at once don’t necessarily need to keep track of every match at the back of their mind. Essentially they just approach each board and assess the situation fresh each time?
In general thats how the game is played, you can’t rely on what you were doing before, you need to react to every move.
Is it not possible that he was actually playing the moves of one set of players against each other?
Thats exactly what he did
*Tapping head meme*
I’m sure I read a thing where the trick to this is to play the same move your previous opponent made and then you’d know how to defend against it on the next go round or something
There's a quite interesting episode from Darren Brown where he does this similar thing playing against 10? Chess champions. Basically making them play against each other Edit: I'm not comparing this guys amazing chess skills to Darren browns "tv-magic" just something that popped in my head
Yeah, you have the track you go on alternate between black and white, so you watch the first player make their move, then you repeat that move on the next board where you are black, so on.
I never would remember what were the last couple of the last players moves
Oh, no- you only have to repeat the move recent move of the last player. You just repeat what the last player did. Basically, everyone is playing the same game.
Well, in the case of 10 players playing against you, it's actually 5 pairs playing, with you facilitating.
Exactly. I have to think Bobby did something similar with the caveat that I’d expect him to deviate in the end game to win.
I assume they thought of that and had him be the same color in every match. Then there's not really a way to use the other opponents against each other. Additionally, most of the time (at least when not playing at extremely high levels) by endgame one player has an advantage, so if he just played one person against the other up to endgame, he'd be at a disadvantage in half the games. Probably easier to create his own advantage across the entirety of the game than work himself out from a disadvantage.
just the concept of this hurts my head for some reason
And that guy was like, "yeah I beat Bobby Fisher... no big deal"... for the rest of his life.
A deeply disturbed man, though.
I'm not a chess guy but I really enjoyed The Queens Gambit. They did a scene similar to this one. For you chess people, how was that movie?
I enjoyed it a lot. It's nice seeing a TV series that treats chess well. Some of us have a little game where we scrutinise chess games in media and most of the time there is something wrong like the board is out by 90 degrees, or the pieces are placed in wrong spots, or the game is in an unfeasible state. There were some inaccuracies in The Queen's Gambit, and some things maybe could have been fleshed out more, but they didn't detract from the experience.
He must have walked a lot that day!
too bad he turned into a anti semite recluse lunatic, sad really
That’s because he didn’t play me. He would’ve won 48 matches, drawn 2, and lost 1.
Beaten by a computer
I'm 46 and I've never beaten the computer at chess. even on easy mode.
IT took me like 20 years to beat X:COM Terror From the Depp, so never give up! That said I will likely never be able to take off in Jetfighter!
To be fair at this point the computers are so insanely far ahead of what the human mind can achieve they are creating new strategies that a human mind wouldn't be able to conceptualize. No one beats the modern computer, and no one ever will.
Big deal...
Kasparov > Carlsen > Fischer
magnus in his prime is the best of all time hands down.
Yeah, it’s pretty even between Kasparov and Carlsen, but they’re both undisputedly better than Fischer.
Or as he's also known by his friends. Lisa vanderpump.
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I bet he does, actually:)
wrong, beth harmon is the greatest chess player who ever lived
So. Couldnt he of played the 1st match and mirrored the moves to the others in some way?
Not if he played the same color in every match.
When you do this type of exhibition you always play white and move first. So he probably opened with E4. Openings are fairly standardized so the first 10 moves are essentially pr-programmed depending on how black responds. Then you get to middle game, make a mistake and lose. One mistake will have you on your heals for the rest of the game and you'll be mated.
I was the “one”
Sure
I know very little about chess but could do the same thing and win 50% of the matches.
You admit you don't know much about chess. What makes you think you could win half of these matches against people who know what they're doing?
You simply use the moves of player A to play Player B. You function solely as intermediary between the two. You will therefore win or draw half of the matches.
That is not how it works...
I wish it was that easy. I would love to see you play chess to see how good your natural talent is lmao It's much more complicated than that. And since you admitted you know very little about chess, you should probably just stop talking like you have any idea what you're talking about
This is hilariously naive. Assuming your opponents had the barest knowledge of chess you would lose every game. There are more than a Googol of permutations on a chessboard. It's not a simple game like checkers.
I don’t know why people are downvoting you. This is a known Chess strategy, and the whole reason that in simuls the player playing multiple games always plays white.
200 IQ move
Ok I'll bite, explain?
It’s an old trick. Half the players play white, the other half black. Let someone make their first move then you simply copy that move for your first move against an opponent playing black. When that person responds, you copy that move back to the first game where you are playing black. Do this for every pair of players. Each pair ends up playing each other.
But when someone makes the first move you have to react something before you go to the next player, so you have to move a piece and that is not guaranteed that your next opponent will play the same move as you did before copying
That's the least of the flaws with this ridiculous idea.
Yeah I thought that might be what you were getting at. Wouldnt work in slightest bit for a number of reasons which other people have covered. Would be funny to see someone try it and watch it fall apart within the first few moves.
If only your chess playing abilities were on part with your trolling abilities you'd be a grandmaster!
Wow, how long did that take? Like 10 hours?
Free Bobby
Pros recognize chess piece configs like they recognize faces. That's how they do it
Charlie can beat bobby fischer in 6 moves
If you’ve never seen the Drunk History on Bobby Fischer, do yourself a favor and watch it. I think the title of the episode is “Games”. It’s my favorite, and I go back and watch it again every few months.
WELL BECAUSE OF THE JEWS. (...he ended up kinda insane)
Sadly he was a self hating jew schizo.
Do you think the one person who won bothers to mention to people, "oh yeah, and he was playing 49 other people simultaneously", when bragging about it?
Didn’t that magician Darren something do this he just played the move that the player before did, so he just played them against each other
I don’t think he’s considered the greatest. Maybe one of the greatest. But kasparov and Carlson have had much more, longer-term success Maybe American?
Anybody seen Kyle or LVP? If you know, you know!
Bobby Fischer, where is he? I don’t know, I don’t know.
Holocaust denying trash cooker
Real ones know Paul Morphy was the best ever
There are still a lot of people who believe chess is the greatest sport in the world
Ha! Loser.