Is Bobby Fischer insane, extremely intelligent, or both?

But he does get to travel a lot

and accurate too.

At 17, he was probably a genius. Now past 50, he's insane, or he has insane views anyway. Even in his chess playing days, he was insane r close to it.

He lose my support back in the mid 70's when he refused to defend his title against Karpov.

You can't be a chess grandmaster if you're a blithering idiot.

But way out there

Hey, I just posted that in another thread in GD right before you started this poll :think:

:shrug: Why?

Showed a press conference with him being, well, himself...

dupe

But there is a fine line between genius and insanity and he has DEFINITELY crossed it.

I just saw the video of his press conference on SportsCenter. Whatever last tenuous grasp on reality he had just slipped.

They are very intelligent and creative to the extent where they deny all reality because they see the world, and themselves, as too flawed to be dealt with. Bobby Fischer's anti-semitic rantings are because of his flawed relationship with his mother and his disaproval with the Jewish culture.

That applies to artists (look at Dali for instance "Dali doesn't use drugs, Dali is drugs." or Van Gogh (it's not everybody who cuts of chunks of their own ear). It also applies to many famous composers.

I think some people just operate on a different frequency :).

:scared:

(not sarcastic)

I've loved the comments he made as he finally allowed to leave, and then as he entered Iceland.

Real Shrubbie hater, that one! And succinctly pegged Koizumi for the shithead moran he is, too.

Go Bobby Fischer!!

...Americans have always made the mistake of believing that people who are very good at one thing will be good at other things as well. Thus Henry Ford and Lee Iacocca both had support for the presidency, Generals are touted for the presidency time and again(although I feel that Wesley Clark would be an excellent president, not an endorsement just an opinion) and W garnered his support because he was very good at ummmmm, well, uhhhhh being named George Bush I guess.

Those of us who play chess and have followed him knew Fischer was a little unbalanced even during his heyday.

Fischer's relationship with his mother is casebook Freudian. She was a Jew and, from what I can tell, of a leftist political persuasion. He cut off communications with her, rejected Judaism and embraced a Pentacostal sect and, although not in a way that suggested he had any deep thoughts about politics, began babbling ultraconservative talking points. The embrace of ultraconservatism has passed to an embrace of right wing fanatacism and the rejection of Judaism to outright anti-Semitism of the most vile nature, at least on a verbal level.

Fischer has always displayed paranoid tendancies. There is a rumor that in the mid-seventies he had his dental fillings removed; he said that they were being used to transmit unwanted messages to him. He often spoke of Communist plots to poison him.

However, his mastery and dominance of the game of chess speaks for itself. In one stretch in 1970 and 1971, he won twenty consecutive games, all from international grandmasters. Most games at this level of play end in draws; a chess player is considered to be on a hot streak if he wins three games in a row or just goes twenty consecutive games avoiding loss while still winning a few. It was a remarkable achievement.

This is one of the games from that winning streak:

Robert Fischer v. Mark Taimanov, Candidtates' Quarter-Final Match/Vancouver, May 1971 (Sicilian Defense)