Chess Master Bobby Fischer Dead At 64

Fischer put chess on the map in 1972 when he dethroned the Soviet world champion has died after a long illness of kidney failure. He was 64. The often controversial master died in Iceland on Thursday.

Fischer was born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn. In 1992 he faced criminal charges for playing a chess rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia defying international sanctions. He later renounced his American citizenship.

In 2005 he moved to Iceland, a nation that loves chess. He was a master at the game, using his eccentricities to unsettle those who sat across the table from him.

“Chess is war on a board,” he once said. “The object is to crush the other man’s mind.”

In 1975 he lost his world title after he refused to defend it against Anatoly Karpov. He dropped out of the competitive chess scene and emerged in public rarely, mainly to make anti-Semitic comments.

Fischer become a grand master of chess at the age of 15. Winning the title of world champion in 1972 in Iceland he was the first American to do so.

In July 2004 he was arrested in Japan for travelling with a revoked U.S. passport. He was threatened with being sent to the United States for violating sanctions from the 1992 chess match that was against sanctions imposed to punish then-President Slobodan Milosevic.

He spent nine months in custody in Japan before Iceland granted him citizenship. He moved there with his longtime partner Miyoko Watai. She survives him.

Spassky, reached briefly at his home in France, said: “I am very sorry, but Bobby Fischer is dead. Goodbye.”