Bobby Fischer takes on all comers - in cyberspace
By Andrew Allerson, Chief Reporter
(Filed: 09/09/2001)
BOBBY FISCHER, who became world chess champion
in 1972 by triumphing in the most famous match ever played, and
who then retired to a hermit-like existence of total obscurity,
has been discovered playing the game anonymously on the internet
against fellow Grandmasters.
The disclosure that Fischer has emerged from a
virtual 30-year self-imposed exile is made today in The Sunday
Telegraph Review by Nigel Short, the British Grandmaster who in
1993 was the official challenger to Garry Kasparov.
Short says that he has played nearly 50 speed
chess games against Fischer during the past year.
"I am 99 per cent sure that I have been playing
against the chess legend. It's tremendously exciting," said
Short. He has overwhelming evidence that the man who beat him
comfortably is the same man who defeated Boris Spassky, the
Russian world champion, in an epic battle of the "superpowers"
in Reykjavik in 1972.
Afterwards Fischer disappeared from the public
eye until 1992, when he briefly returned to play Spassky again
for a 20th anniversary re-match in the-then pariah state of
Serbia. Fischer won a prize of more than £2 million, playing
brilliant chess, before disappearing again, hotly pursued by the
US Government, which had indicted him for breaking the UN
embargo of Serbia.
Short had been told by a Greek Grandmaster last
year that Fischer, now 58, had been playing anonymously on the
internet, but was sceptical. Short, however, eventually arranged
to play the anonymous opponent and during their games began
"chatting" with him over the internet.
In October last year, in the first of their
four confrontations, Short lost 8-0. Short is one of the world's
best speed chess players, and in 1995 drew a series of speed
chess games 6-6 against Kasparov, the then world champion.
Short says: "In my opinion Fischer is a much
stronger speed chess player than Kasparov, which is incredible
when one considers that at 58 he is virtually a geriatric in
terms of the modern game."
The final "proof" that Short was playing
Fischer in cyberspace came when the Briton asked: "Do you know
Armando Acevedo?" - an obscure Mexican player. The response was
immediate: "Siegen 1970." Fischer had played Acevedo in the
Siegen Chess Olympiad of 1970. "The guy was obviously trying to
tell me something," said Short.
Short initially intended to keep his games a
secret, but decided to disclose them as rumours are spreading in
the chess world of Fischer's apparent re-emergence. Fischer is
believed to be living in Japan.
Short fears that today's disclosure means he
will never play Fischer again. But their games will live with
him. "To me, they are what an undiscovered Mozart symphony would
be to a music lover," he said. |