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Bobby Fischer died yesterday. I feel repetitive going on another tear about someone who was big when I was younger, but Bobby Fischer was an unparalleled phenomenon. I guess people watch people play poker on TV, but I doubt that you can conceive of most of the American public watching a guy describing a chess game on TV for hours on end. The Bobby Fischer-Boris Spassky world championship match came during the cold war and anything that was US vs. Russia was highly charged. This was especially so because Russians has ALWAYS been champions of chess.

Fischer insisted that the match be televised and then lost the first match on a mistake (or "blunder" as they invariably call it in chess) and blamed the noise from the TV cameras. Then he refused to play the second game in front of the cameras and forfeited. In a chess match, you get a point for a win and half for a draw, and in the world championship you play to 12. So he spots the world champion a 2-0 lead, bullies him into playing in a back room, leaving the people who bought tickets sitting in the auditorium looking at a big projection of a chess board. At home, we also saw the projection of the board and a nerdy but personable little guy named Shelby Lyman (I still remember) explaining the moves as they happened. Fischer proceeds to stomp Spassky, playing every single game differently (in a game where opponents obsessively study each others' patterns) and breaking his will by using a line of play he'd never used before and one Spassky was famously good at playing, and beating him almost effortlessly. The match took pretty much the entire summer of 1972 and the country was transfixed. Fischer, unfortunately was a lunatic, and pretty much disappeared afterward, and at the times he reappeared you'd wished he hadn't.

Of course, there was about a 6 month-long chess craze during the match and afterwards, but it's ultimately too hard to be really good at chess for it ever to become too popular. I got to the point where I could actually plan a couple of moves in advance and play with some sense of purpose, but the complete absence of luck made it all seem too heavy. If you lost you could blame only yourself, which was too much responsibility for a teenager. So I switched to the probably equally nerdy game of bridge, which I was already pretty good at and played frequently and happily for a number of years. Bridge is also very hard, but you play with a partner so it's social and there's plenty of luck in the casual game (though not in tournaments, of which I played a dozen or so during college, including one at Penn).

Two side notes...

The movie Searching For Bobby Fischer is excellent. I highly recommend it. It's not about Bobby Fischer. It's about a kid chess player.

Playing bridge was a small but key link in the chain of thought that led me to be a math teacher. My friends and I used to stay after school and play. Our favored spot was the math conference room. After we'd been doing this for several weeks, one of the math teachers spotted us and asked if he could join the game, which of course we let him do and eventually others joined as well. So all through my senior year I hung out with my friends and the math teachers, and it was a very pleasant thing and gave me chance to know them as real people and feel positive about them.