The Battle of the Brains

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rematch and would walk out of the room if the Cuban's name was mentioned in his presence. Upon losing one match, Latvia's Nimzovich jumped on the table and shouted: "Why must I lose to this idiot!"

Oneupmanship? Before the era of the time clock, delaying tactics were so common that in 1851 British Historian Henry Buckle wrote two chapters of his History of Civilization in England while waiting for his opponent to make a move. During a match with World Champion Emanuel Lasker (1894-1921), Steinitz slurped a glass of lemonade so noisily that Lasker moved to a separate table. Some of Lasker's victims claimed in turn that the champion stunned them with his foul-smelling cigars. World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik( 1948-57,1958-60, 1961-63) used to train for a match by having an aide blow smoke in his eyes. Matched against the U.S.S.R.'s Mikhail Tal, a former world champion (1960-61) who has been accused of trying to hypnotize rivals with his laserlike gaze, U.S. Grand Master Pal Benko wore sunglasses throughout the game. Says U.S. Grand Master Robert Byrne: "In chess I follow one rule: Don't trust anyone."

Into this tradition was born Robert James Fischer. His father was a physicist from Berlin, his mother a nurse born in Switzerland and raised in the U.S. They were divorced when Bobby was two. When his mother went to work, Bobby was left in the care of his older sister Joan. She kept him amused by playing board games with him in their three-room walk-up apartment in Brooklyn. When Monopoly and Parcheesi palled, Joan bought a cheap plastic chess set at the local candy store. She was eleven at the time and Bobby was six, and together they worked out the moves. Bobby took to the game instantly, trouncing his sister so handily that he soon began playing both ends of the board himself. His alter ego never had a chance. "I tried to be fair and play the best moves for both sides," he says, "but I usually won."

His absorption with the new game was so total that for long stretches he would not respond when spoken to. Worried, his mother sent him off to the Brooklyn Chess Club in the hope that he might meet some other children there. But prodigies were scarce that year; so Bobby ignored his peers, later joined other clubs and began haunting the chess tables in the parks, "crushing all these old guys." At twelve, he had mastered enough Russian to read his monthly copy of Shakhmaty v S.S.S.R. and pore over the games it reported. "I had heard the Russians were the best," he says, "and I wanted to be the best."

He soon was. A floppy young gangleshanks in corduroys, T shirt and sneakers, he hunched over the board cracking his knuckles, biting his fingernails and hushing kibitzers with cries of "Pleeze! This is a chess game!" Occasionally, when he lost a crucial game, he burst into tears. There were, however, more triumphs than tears. At 13, he became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Open Championship (open to those under 20); at 14, the youngest ever to win the U.S. championship; and at 15, the youngest ever to win the title of international grand master. The Mozart of chess had arrived.

Boy Robot. Interested only in his game, he abruptly left Erasmus Hall High School in his junior year, ending an academic career marked largely by lack of interest and poor