Leo (July 23 — Aug. 22)
The sudden arrival of fresh information will prove that a recent unwelcome surprise is actually the start of great things. What initially upset you will ultimately bring happiness. Don't let the pressure get you.
Scorpio (Oct. 24 — Nov. 22)
When you say too much, you effectively invite feedback. People feel entitled to reply, to argue or to reinterpret your messages. In order to gain maximum control over a certain situation, Pluto advises you to create an air of mystery.
Pisces (Feb. 20 — March 20)
Live with the reality of your current situation. If you don't like it, do your best to persuade yourself that you actually do. The object of this exercise is to get you into a good mood.
The Associated Press
REYKJAVIK, Iceland – Bobby Fischer, the reclusive American chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died. He was 64.
Fischer died Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said. There was no immediate word on the cause of death.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Robert James Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in Reykjavik to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.
The event was given tremendous symbolic importance, pitting the intensely individualistic young American against a product of the grim and soulless Soviet Union.
It also was marked by Fischer's odd behavior – possibly calculated psychological warfare against Spassky – that ranged from arriving two days late to complaining about the lighting, TV cameras, the spectators, even the shine on the table.
Spassky said in a brief phone call from France, where he lives, that he was "very sorry" to hear of Fischer's death.
Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed by his idiosyncrasies.
Fischer was world champion until 1975, when he forfeited the title and withdrew from competition because conditions he demanded proved unacceptable to the International Chess Federation.
After that, he lived in secret outside the United States. He emerged in 1992 to confront Spassky again, in a highly publicized match in Yugoslavia. Fischer beat Spassky 10-5 to win $3.35 million.
The U.S. government said Fischer's playing the match violated U.N. sanctions against Yugoslavia, imposed for Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic's role in fomenting war in the Balkans.
Former Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov said Fischer's ascent of the chess world in the 1960s was "a revolutionary breakthrough" for the game.
"The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess," Kasparov told The Associated Press.
Over the years, Fischer gave occasional interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, often digressing into anti-Semitic rants and accusing American officials of hounding him.
He praised the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, saying America should be "wiped out," and described Jews as "thieving, lying bastards." His mother was Jewish.
He also announced he had abandoned chess in 1996 and launched a new version in Argentina, "Fischerandom," a computerized shuffler that randomly distributes chess pieces on the back row of the board at the start of each game.
Fischer claimed it would bring the fun back into the game and rid it of cheats.
He renounced his American citizenship and moved in 2005 to Iceland, accepting an offer of citizenship from the country still grateful for its role as the site of his most famous match.
Fischer had been detained for nine months detention in Japan for trying to leave the country using an invalid U.S. passport. Japan agreed to release him after he accepted Iceland's offer of citizenship.
Fischer told reporters that year that he was finished with a chess world he regarded as corrupt, and sparred with U.S. journalists who asked about his anti-American tirades.
"The United States is evil. There's this axis of evil. What about the allies of evil – the United States, England, Japan, Australia? These are the evildoers," Fischer said.
| Reuters |
Friday, January 18, 2008
|
REYKJAVIK (Reuters) - Bobby Fischer, America's first and only world chess champion who was once dubbed the "Mozart of Chess," has died in Iceland at the age of 64.
A spokesman for Fischer, who could have faced prison in America for violating sanctions against former Yugoslavia by playing a chess match there, confirmed that he had died. The cause of death was not immediately made public.
Fischer, a former child prodigy who once said he liked to watch his opponents squirm and who had become an Icelandic citizen, became world champion by beating the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky under the glare of Cold War publicity in Reykjavik in 1972.
The brilliant but eccentric American abandoned his title without moving a pawn by failing to meet a deadline to defend his crown in Manila in 1975. World chess authorities reluctantly awarded it to challenger Anatoly Karpov of the Soviet Union, who was to hold it for the next decade.
Fischer withdrew into himself, not playing in public and living on little more than the magic of his name, although millions of enthusiasts regarded him as the king of chess.
He made headlines and fell foul of U.S. authorities when he came out of seclusion to play his old rival Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992, at a time when the country was the target of sanctions during Belgrade's war with breakaway republics.
He vanished after the match, for which he won $3 million, and resurfaced only after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States. In an interview with a Philippine radio station, Fischer praised the strikes and said he wanted to see America "wiped out."
Fischer, who also stirred controversy with anti-Semitic remarks, was granted Icelandic citizenship in March 2005 after eight months in detention in Japan fighting a U.S. deportation order.
"THE MOZART OF CHESS"
Fischer always had a high opinion of himself. Asked who was the greatest player in the world, he once replied:
"It's nice to be modest, but it would be stupid if I did not tell the truth. It is Fischer."
It was not an idle claim. Arguably the greatest natural chess genius the world has seen, he was called "the Mozart of chess" when he began winning at the age of six.
His success soon gained Fischer a reputation for being cocky. He told interviewers his favorite moment was when opponents began to feel they would lose. "I like to see 'em squirm," he said.
He was U.S. junior champion at 13 and U.S. Open champion at 14, retaining the title whenever he chose to defend it.
He was the youngest international grandmaster ever at 15, gaining the rating at his first international tournament in Yugoslavia. He once defeated 21 grandmasters in succession -- no U.S. player had beaten more than seven in a row.
As Fischer's fame grew, his temperament became more unpredictable. He walked out of tournaments because of what he considered to be bad lighting or bad air conditioning. He refused to play matches on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
In the mid-1960s, he opted out of two world championship qualifying series because he thought the tournament system favored the Russians. In 1967, when officials would not meet his demands for better conditions, Fischer angrily withdrew from international competition "for a period of introspection."
He took his massive collection of chess books and moved to California, where he later said he had "plotted my revenge if I ever came back."
When the rules were changed in 1972 to include an eight-player eliminator to find the challenger to world champion Spassky, Fischer had the chance to prove he was as good as he always said he was.
He raced to victory in the candidates' series, prompting Spassky to say the American would find a world championship series a different and more difficult proposition. He was wrong.
If anyone suffered from the pressure when the match was held in Reykjavik, Iceland, it was Spassky.
He became a national hero -- Americans who had never played chess and knew little about the game followed the Fischer saga.
In the 1990s, he was said to be living under assumed names in cheap hotels in Pasadena on the outskirts of Los Angeles, surviving mainly on occasional royalties from his books. In London, one newspaper described him as "dressed like a derelict, waddling and fat and with a straggly beard."
Former friends painted a picture of a solitary man spending much of his day in rooms littered with chess books, oranges and jars of vitamins, playing chess by himself and reading magazines on chess to keep in touch.
One commentator said there was one constant through his life's exceptional peaks and troughs -- his "running battle with the rest of the human race."
(Editing by Peter Millership)
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