Bobby Fischer, the troubled chess genius who achieved fame by taking chess world championship from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is dead, his spokesman said on Friday. Former chess champion Bobby Fisher died at age 64. US Grandmaster Bobby Fischer became world champion after a legendary game against Soviet player Boris Spassky in the capital Reykjavik in 1972. After winning the world title, he did not play another match for 20 years.
The spokesman of Bobby Fischer Gardar Sverrisson said Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital on 17th January (Thursday).
Bobby Fischer Dead, No Immediate Cause
US-born Fischer, a fierce critic of his homeland who renounced his US citizenship, moved to Iceland in 2005.
The Chicago-born, Brooklyn, NY-reared Fischer was wanted in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Cold War rival Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.
An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer became an icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
However; Bobby Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it.
Fischer then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the exhibition rematch against Spassky on the resort island of Sveti Stefan.
Bobby Fischer won, but the game was played in violation of US sanctions imposed to Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Yugoslavia. - By DDNEWS
Radio Netherland reports On Bobby Fischer
In 1992, he played a rematch against Boris Spassky in Serbia, thereby violating UN sanctions.
As a result, he faced a ten-year sentence if he ever set foot again in the United States.
He went to live in Hungary, and later moved to the Philippines and Japan.
He was arrested at Tokyo's Narita airport in 2004 for travelling on a passport that was revoked by the US government.
After spending months in Japanese custody, he was granted citizenship by Iceland in tribute to his making the island famous in 1972.
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