Hartford Courant Hartford, Connecticut Tuesday, February 26, 2008 - Page D05
Recounting A Masterful Bobby Fischer Game
You don't expect to meet Genghis Khan at the chessboard. But that's what happened to Robert Byrne, the recently retired New York Times chess columnist, in the late '50's. He had heard talk about a new prodigy but was not impressed, as such talents routinely come and go.
“But oh, my God,” Byrne recalls, “this maniac came at me! …And everything indicated he knew exactly what he was doing. …I had white, but I was on the defensive in about 10 moves and scared skinny…I said to myself, this kid is different from all the other bright kids.”
It is a tribute to Byrne, a top-flight grandmaster, that he overcame his initial distress to score 4-5 in the nine classical tournament games he played against Bobby Fischer during the next decade. (Fischer did win two blitz games in 1971, when he was at the height of his powers.)
Ironically, Byrne will probably be best remembered by future chess historians for a single game he lost to Fischer in the 1963 U.S. Championship.
A position occurred in which Byrne was ahead by a minor piece. Suddenly he appeared in the analysis room, where a crowd of players, including two grandmasters, were following the game.
Everyone—including this writer—immediately assumed that Fischer had resigned and Byrne had come to celebrate his victory. But amazingly, it was the latter who realized after only 21 moves that it was he who was hopelessly lost.
Fischer's extraordinary intuition and genius had created a masterpiece which is one of the most profound in chess history.
Below is the famous game that was played in Manhattan.
