Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

The Biggest Game

Bobby Fischer's 1972 chess match in Reykjavik, Iceland against world champion Boris Spassky is as iconic and intrigue-filled as Ali's fight in Zaire. It's also the game that, for better or worse, turned chess (unaccountably) into somewhat of a fad of its era. David Edmonds and John Eidinow, the authors of the gripping Wittgenstein's Poker, a book about the brief and much-contested argument between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (the "poker" in question wasn't the game, but an actual fire poker) clearly relish the deliciously nasty, deceit- and manipulation-filled story. Fischer was an impossible case, and very famously so: "In the media," the authors write, "Fischer was routinely described with a range of derogatory adjectives. He was insolent, arrogant, rude, uncouth, spoiled, self-centered, abusive, offensive, vain, greedy, vulgar, disrespectful, boastful, cocky, bigoted, fanatical, cruel, paranoid, obsessive …." (You get the idea.) Spassky, however, has been analyzed much less. The War Against Bobby Fischer presents a richer Soviet perspective than has been offered before, and it's a page-turner for grandmasters and neophytes alike.

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