King of Chess

Hi there!

First, let me salute a good man and a friend, Mr. Manny Benitez who have published several extra edition of (TW)The Weekender almost everyday since last week. "Wow! tito Manny, grabe yung surge of energy and inspiration to write ha!"

Here's one TW that features the King of Chess, the great Robert "Bobby" Fischer:

Extra!!! The Chess Plaza Weekender
Saturday, 18 Jan. 2008 Quezon Memorial Circle, Quezon City
Weekday Edition

NOLTE GRABS 1ST I.M. NORM IN TARAKAN
Bobby Fischer dies in Iceland at 64

ROBERT JAMES “BOBBY” FISCHER, regarded by many as the greatest chess player to walk the earth, has died in a hospital in Reykjavik, the Icelandic capital, at the age of 64. News of his death spread like wildfire around the globe overnight.

The reclusive and eccentric former world champion was stricken with kidney failure, Iceland’s radio and television networks announced to the world.

He had renounced his American citizenship and had been a refugee from US justice since playing his so-called world title rematch with former world champion Boris Spassky in Belgrade, capital of the former Yugoslavia, in 1992.

During his years of self-exile, Fischer lived for a while in Asia, shuttling between Manila and Tokyo. He was arrested and detained in a Japanese jail by immigration authorities until he was bailed out and flown to Reykjavik in 2005.

It was the Fischer-Spassky “Match of the Century” in Reykjavik in September 1972—at the height of the Cold War—that triggered the worldwide boom in chess.

Fischer became the first American world champion when he beat the Soviet champion, breaking Moscow’s iron hold on the chess throne since 1948.

In 1975, however, Fischer, who never played a single game of chess in public during his reign, was stripped of his title by the World Chess Federation, better known by its French acronym, Fide, when he refused to defend his crown against Soviet challenger Anatoly Karpov.

Because of Fide’s action, the United States Congress passed a resolution to proclaim Fischer as still the world champion—the first and only American to be declared as such in Capitol Hill.

Seventeen years later, he had become a man wanted by the US government, a refugee from justice for his violation of United Nations and US sanctions against Yugoslavia, which by that time was in the midst of a genocidal ethnic strife.

After being stripped of his title he left New York City and moved to California where he lived the life of a drifter.

In 1981, he was jailed as a vagrant for a night in Pasadena in 1981 as Robert James—this is the incident that possibly made him hate his homeland and much later renounce his US citizenship in Reykjavik.

Shortly after that incident, he wrote a pamphlet with the title, I Was Tortured in a Pasadena Jailhouse. He then left the United States, and traveled incognito in the Americas, Europe and Asia, resurfacing only in 1992 to face Spassky in Belgrade in a match financed by a wealthy banker.

The Fischer-Spassky “return match” took place at a time when Yugoslavia was an international pariah because of its civil strife that saw the massacre of hundreds of civilians in Croatia, Bosnia, Herzegovina and Kosovo.

Fischer’s second in that match was Eugenio Torre, Asia’s first grandmaster and close friend of the eccentric American.

It is said that Bobby lived for months in Baguio City in the late nineties and early part of the new millennium.

When he was arrested in July 2005 at the Narita Airport in the suburbs of Tokyo, Fischer was about to board a flight to Manila,

Japanese immigration authorities accused Fischer of traveling without the proper documents, his passport having been invalidated.

He was under detention for deportation proceedings when he was bailed out by a group of fans and friends and flown to Reykjavik where he lived as a citizen of Iceland following his renunciation of his US citizenship.

Born on March 9, 1943 in Chicago to Jewish parents (it is said that his biological father was an East European man who led a bohemian life), but grew up under the care of his mother, the former Regina Wnder, after she and her husband, Gerard Fischer, said to be a German physicist, had divorced.

Bobby learned chess at the age of six in Brooklyn. It is said that he and his sister taught themselves but he laster came under the wing of Herman Helms, the “Dean of American Chess” and Brooklyn’s chess hero.

In his first US championship in 1955, Bobby finished in fifth place. In 1967, at the age of 14, he won the US crown and became US champion for eight successive years.

He became a grandmaster at 16, a world record that remained unbroken, until 1991 when Judit Polgar became national champion of Hungary.

Among his contributions to chess, Fischer has invented the Fischer clock and advocated the so-called Fischer Random Chess, also known as Chess 960, in which the pieces are arranged at random in the back ranks to prevent playing by rote.

Nolte gets IM norm in Asean Masters joust

FILIPINO Fide Master Rolando Nolte captured his first International Master norm while IM Jayson Gonzales narrowly missed his third and final norm on a technicality.

Nolte achieved the IM result by downing Indonesian GM Herman Ardiyansah in the ninth round of the Asean Masters Circuit in Tarakan.

Gonzales should have similarly gotten the GM title in the ninth round if not for the fact that one of the three grandmasters he had faced was a fellow Filipino, Mark Paragua, who had beaten him in the fourth round, it was explained.

As calculated by reader John Manahan, Gonzales could have availed of the 7.0 points from nine games rule on GM norms.

The Filipino IM had six wins, two draws and a loss against three GMs, one IM, one WIM, two Fide masters and two untitled players over the past nine rounds.

They had an average rating of 2396.11, enabling Gonzales to achieve a performance rating of over Elo 2600.

YOUTH PREVAILS OVER EXPERIENCE
Radjabov joins Aronian, Carlsen

ANOTHER young superstar, 20-year-old Teimour Radjabov of Azerbaijan, joined Levon Aronian, 25, of Armenia and 17-year-old Magnus Carlsen of Norway at the helm of the main event of the Corus Super Tournament in Wick aan Zee.

Radjabov, the former top junior player in the world, soared to a tie for first to third places with Aronian and Carlsen on the back of the Azeri super GM’s win against highly-rated Ukrainian GM Pavel Eljanov, 24.

The three tournament leaders have 3.5 points each from two wins and three draws.

In a tie for fourth and fifth places at 3.0 each were former world champion Vladimir Kramnik and the world’s strongest female player, Judit Polgar of Hungary, a mother of two.

Besides Radjabov, only former world champion Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria and two-time world junior champion Shakhriyar Mamedyarov of Azerbaijan won in the fifth round, against Dutch champion Loek van Wely and Boris Gelfand of Israel, respectively.

Reigning world champion Viswanathan Anand of India remained winless with 2.0 points from four draws and one loss.

Trailing behind the five leaders were Mamedyarov, van Wely, Michael Adams of England, and Vassily Ivanchuk of Ukraine at 6-10; Anand and Topalov at 11-12; and Gelfand and Eljanov at 13-14.