Bobby Fischer - A Child Prodigy

Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago, Illinois on March 9, 1943. His mother, Regina Wender, was an American citizen of Polish Jewish descent. She was born in Switzerland but raised in St. Louis, Missouri. She later became a teacher, nurse, and physician. Fischer's birth certificate listed Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German biophysicist, as Fischer's father. The couple married in 1933 in Moscow, USSR, where Wender was studying medicine. They divorced in 1945 when Bobby was only two years old. In the following years, he grew up with his mother and older sister, Joan. In 1948, they moved to Mobile, Arizona, where Regina was teacher in an elementary school. The following year they moved to New York, where she worked as an elementary school teacher and nurse.

In May 1949, the six-year-old Fischer learned how to play chess together with his sister. Only a month later, he saw his first chess and now he started to play chess on his own. At age seven, he began to play chess seriously. He first joined the Brooklyn Chess Club where he received instruction from its president, Carmine Nigro. He later (in June 1955) joined the Manhattan Chess Club, that was one of the strongest clubs in the whole world.

Later, when Bobby was already famous in the whole world, he told in an interview that when he was about 11 years old he realized he was a promising chess player. See the following interesting interview for some more interesting pieces of information!



When Bobby was thirteen, John W. Collins started to coach him. Collins had already coached several top players, including future grandmasters Robert Byrne and William Lombardy.

Life of Bobby Fischer

Robert James "Bobby" Fischer (March 9, 1943 – January 17, 2008) was an American chess Grandmaster, and the eleventh World Chess Champion. Already as a teenager, he was a chess prodigy. In 1972, he became the first, and so far the only, American to win the official World Chess Championship defeating defending champion Boris Spassky (USSR) in a match held in Reykjavik.

Chess fans around the world were disappointed, when in 1975, Fischer failed to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov.

After this, he did not play competitive chess until 1992, when he won a rematch against Spassky. The competition was held in Yugoslavia, which was then under a strict United Nations embargo. Breaking the embargo, led to a conflict with the US government. Fischer never returned to United States.

In his later years, Fischer lived in Hungary, Germany, the Philippines, and Japan. During the 2004–2005 time period, after his US passport was revoked, he was detained by Japanese authorities for nine months under threat of extradition. After Iceland granted him citizenship, the Japanese authorities released him to that country, where he lived until his death in 2008.