[mike777]

http://news.yahoo.co...eu/obit_fischer

Bobby Fischer died.

[luke warm]

yeah, i saw that on cnn this morning... he got a whole lot of people interested in chess, but seemed to have had an ongoing dispute with the gov't

[Winstonm]

I heard he had a fondness for Tyson chicken.

[kenberg]

I remember Warner Wolf in his sports show trying vainly to explain the exciting action in the Fisher-Spaasky match. Towards the end he suggested that next time they just hold three games and be done with it.

[y66]

Referring to the first match between Fischer and Spassky in Reykjavik in the summer of 1972 , Bruce Weber writes:

Mr. Fischer won with such brilliance and dramatic flair that he became an unassailable representative of greatness in the world of competitive games, much as Babe Ruth had been and Michael Jordan would become.

“It was Bobby Fischer who had, single-handedly, made the world recognize that chess on its highest level was as competitive as football, as thrilling as a duel to the death, as aesthetically satisfying as a fine work of art, as intellectually demanding as any form of human activity,” Harold C. Schonberg, who reported on the Reykjavik match for The New York Times, wrote in his 1973 book “Grandmasters of Chess.”

Even in his years of triumph, Mr. Fischer was volatile and difficult. During the 1972 world championship match against Mr. Spassky, Mr. Fischer’s petulance, even loutishness, was the stuff of front page headlines all over the globe. Incensed by the conditions under which the match was to be played — he was particularly offended by the whir of television cameras in the hall — he lost the first game, then forfeited the second and insisted that the remaining games be played in an isolated room.

There, he roared back from what, in chess, is a sizable deficit, trouncing Mr. Spassky, 12 ½ to 8 ½. (In championship chess, a victory is worth one point for each player, a draw a half-point.) In all, Mr. Fischer won 7 games, lost 3 (including the forfeit) and drew 11.

Through July and most of August 1972, the attention of the world was riveted on the Spassky-Fischer match. Americans who didn’t know a Ruy Lopez from a Poisoned Pawn watched a hitherto unknown commentator named Shelby Lyman explain each game on public television.

All this was Mr. Fischer’s doing. Bobby Fischer — the rebel, the enfant terrible, the uncompromising savage of the chess board — had captured the imagination of the world. Because of him, for the first time in the United States, the game, with all its arcana and intimations of nerdiness, was cool. And when the championship match was over, he walked away with a winner’s purse of $250,000, a sum that staggered anyone associated with chess. When Mr. Spassky won the world championship, his prize had been $1,400.

More ...

[zasanya]

kenberg, on Jan 18 2008, 07:37 PM, said:

I remember Warner Wolf in his sports show trying vainly to explain the exciting action in the Fisher-Spaasky match. Towards the end he suggested that next time they just hold three games and be done with it.

To many chess players Bobby Fischer is and will always remain the greatest sportsman of all time.If a guy cannot understand the beauty of chess he/she is to be pitied.

[skjaeran]

Is it normal to misspell Boris' name? Correct is Boris Spasskij.

[cherdano]

skaeran, on Jan 20 2008, 04:38 PM, said:

Is it normal to misspell Boris' name? Correct is Boris Spasskij.

Well, the correct spelling is Бори́с Васи́льевич Спа́сский, and Boris Spassky is the common English transliteration.

P.S.: Isn't it nice how wikipedia, unicode and copy-and-paste combine to let me pretend knowing cyrillic?

[sceptic]

xzxcvzxc

[1eyedjack]

Reminds me of the dyslexic Russian artist. Signed his name in acrylic

[jdonn]

skaeran, on Jan 20 2008, 05:38 PM, said:

Is it normal to misspell Boris' name? Correct is Boris Spasskij.

Google hits for "Boris Spasskij" = 8620
Google hits for "Boris Spassky" = 127000

The wikipedia article begins "Boris Vasilievich Spassky (also Spasskij)"

So uh... whatever

[skjaeran]

jdonn, on Jan 21 2008, 09:28 AM, said:

skaeran, on Jan 20 2008, 05:38 PM, said:

Is it normal to misspell Boris' name? Correct is Boris Spasskij.

Google hits for "Boris Spasskij" = 8620
Google hits for "Boris Spassky" = 127000

The wikipedia article begins "Boris Vasilievich Spassky (also Spasskij)"

So uh... whatever

If the normal english spelling is Spassky those numbers aren't surprising.

Actually, I'd never seen it spelled that way until here. Which isn't strange. I've never read chess columns or articles in english.

[y66]

What is the world coming to? Now they're misspelling it in Norway too!

Verdens Gang

http://www.vg.no/nyh...hp?artid=515399

Aftenposten

http://www.aftenpost...icle2204640.ece

[skjaeran]

y66, on Jan 22 2008, 12:57 AM, said:

What is the world coming to? Now they're misspelling it in Norway too! 

Verdens Gang

http://www.vg.no/nyh...hp?artid=515399

Aftenposten

http://www.aftenpost...icle2204640.ece

Yeah, that's probably Wikipedias fault. That Verdens Gang gets it wrong isn't surprising at all - the journalists there are able to misspell nearly half the norwegian words; how should they get this one right? But I'd have thought Aftenposten would get it right.