Word: chess
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Five members of the chess team accompanied the group, competing against the Beida team and, over the two-day period, mustering one “upset” win, Xu said...
...Trouble With Genius," Lev Grossman's review of David Edmond and John Eidinow's book Bobby Fischer Goes to War [March 15], suggested that Fischer's irrational behavior detracted from his chess-playing prowess. But in the game of chess, it is important to predict the moves of one's opponent. When a player does not behave rationally, such predictions are hard to make. Viewed in this light, Fischer's antisocial, egomaniacal antics were ingenious psychological ploys that made his opponents second-guess their ideas about the grand master's chess strategies. Fischer's aberrant behavior was a crucial aspect...
...Bobby Fischer Goes to War (Ecco; 342 pages), David Edmonds and John Eidinow tell the story of Fischer's most famous match, the 1972 world championship in Reykjavik. Fischer faced Soviet grand master Boris Spassky in a chess game that was not only an epic staring match between two intellectual gladiators but also the focus of all kinds of weird, free-floating cold war cultural-political energy. It was the Rumble in the Jungle and the Cuban missile crisis all rolled into...
...Spassky, the cog in the Soviet machine, was a genial, sensitive fellow who liked a drink once in a while. He was Ali to Fischer's Foreman. Of course, Fischer ate him alive. Bobby Fischer Goes to War tells the story in fine, brisk style, interpreting the red-hot chess-fu action--the Ruy Lopez opening! The Nimzo-Indian defense!--for us nongeniuses and conveying the richness of the world beyond the chessboard through details plucked from FBI and KGB records. We see, for example, Soviet experts whisking Spassky's orange juice back to Moscow to test for suspicious capitalist...
...wound up in the Navy, assigned to the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier the U.S.S. Enterprise, but his officers wouldn't even let him tour the engine room. Champollion died at 40. Fischer never defended his world title. He declined into irascibility and then obscurity. What happened to him? A chess master once said, "Chess is not something that drives people mad. Chess is something that keeps mad people sane." Which is to say that genius may lie not only in having a gift but in lacking something crucial as well. Reading these books, one feels grateful for being just...