The Battle of the Brains

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then Bobby is the hungry Brooklyn wolf. Fischer still plays with the merciless intensity of the onetime boy wonder who said, "I like to see 'em squirm." And not just when the world title is at stake. In international play, where brain-saving draws are a routine matter, Fischer is the only grand master who rarely agrees to settle for a tie game. Even when he is far ahead in a tournament and could coast, he usually answers a request for a draw with a rueful, smiling refusal and then fights on until that magic moment when "I can see their ego crumbling." Says Bobby: "The game, not the tournament result, is the main thing."

Inner Fury. The effect is devastating. In Fischer's assault on the world title, each of his last three opponents asked for postponements because of nervous strain. Invariably, Bobby's victims say that they were defeated because they were playing "below strength." "People have been playing me below strength for 15 years," says Fischer scornfully. "There is some strange magnetic influence in Bobby," says Soviet Grand Master Yuri Aver-bakh, "that spiritually wrecks his opponents."

So it might seem. In tournaments he sits transfixed, his foot tapping rapidly to the beat of some inner fury. Playing through solitary games in his room, he slams home each move with cries of "Crunch!" "Chop!" "Smash!" "Crash!" U.S. Grand Master Robert Byrne suggests that the demon in him is his "pursuit of the Idea of the game, in the Platonic sense. All of us players have that ideal. But Bobby knows how to embody it. He has the ability to overcome the chaotic mess and the complexity of modern chess, the baroque scramble, and isolate a single theme, a single line of development and carry it through. How he does it is his secret. Nobody else can."

Fischer decimates rather than dazzles. He builds solid positional bases from which he launches attacks that are rarely devious and almost always total. When he has white, and thus the game's first move, he almost always opens with the centuries-old PK4 (moving the pawn in front of the king two squares forward). Though every grand master knows by rote the defenses against this stock opening, it is a part of Fischer's genius that he continues to fashion from it games that are freshly minted masterpieces of precision. "His judgment and feel for a position are un-equaled," says Grand Master Evans. "Chess is in his fingertips. That's the difference between a master and a truly great grand master like Fischer. The master will study for hours and perhaps make the right move. But Fischer will toss out the moves, on his fingertips, and they will be the unerringly correct ones. He has a sense for what is correct, what is beautiful and what is true."

Army Game. Chess probably began as a simple diversion. Its origins have been "traced" to everywhere from Ireland and Egypt to an Indian tribe in South America; its inventor was supposedly everyone from Aristotle and King Solomon to a Buddhist monk seeking a substitute for war. The facts seem to support Chess Historian H.J.R. Murray, who says that the game was the "conscious and deliberate invention of an inhabitant of northwest India." The generally accepted date of its origin: A.D. 600. The game, substantially