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Very important, forgot to post about it this morning. Below is a 2005 file photo of former world chess champion Bobby Fischer who has died in Iceland, an Icelandic radio station reported today. He passed away in Reykjavik after a serious illness. He was 64. He was called the "Mozart of Chess" when he began winning at the age of six. Fischer, the only world chess champion from the U.S., defeated the Soviet Union's Boris Spassky at the height of the Cold War.



He was one of the best players who has ever lived and is credited with putting chess on the map. After his 1972 victory, chess was suddenly on newspaper front pages across the world. In New York a reporter went from bar to bar and discovered that of the 21 he visited, 18 had their televisions tuned to the chess - and only three to the Mets baseball game.

He had a, hum, eccentric - to put it mildly - personality. Since the age of six chess had been his life. He spent hour after hour, day after day, studying the game. At the age of 11, he - in his own words - "just got good". By 15, he was a grand master, the youngest in history - and it dawned on the Soviet chess authorities that their pre-eminence was finally under threat.

An evident genius - his IQ was estimated at over 180 - Fischer had no interest in school work and his solitary nature, and brusque manner, was already landing him in trouble. Twice prior to 1972 he had dropped out of the game - as his demands to tournament organisers became ever more extravagant. He complained about prize money, about the lighting, the size of the board and pieces, the noise from audiences.

It was unclear whether the 1972 match - the so-called match of the century - would ever take place.

It took a couple of calls from Henry Kissinger, the then US national security adviser, to persuade him to continue.

Victory in Reykjavik should have transformed Mr Fischer into a multi-millionaire. Offers flooded over. A million dollars alone was offered if he would endorse a chess set. But Mr Fischer would not sign contracts, and within a year he had disappeared, almost without trace.

In 1975, he refused to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov, though the International Chess Federation had conceded to all but two of his 179 demands. He became a total recluse - his life a fertile ground for rumour.

Then, in 1992, he defied US sanctions and played a re-match against Mr Spassky for $5m. At a press conference he spat on a warning letter from the US treasury department. He proceeded to beat Mr Spassky again - but from this moment on, he was on the run. By this time he had descended into an abyss of unreality, the world of Holocaust denial, persecution complexes and conspiracy theories. He raged against the Jews, though his mother was Jewish, and - as released FBI documents later showed - his biological father probably was Jewish too. His anti-communism transmuted into a rabid anti-Americanism. America, he said after the 11 September 2001 attacks, had got what it deserved.

Finally picked up in Japan, this by now sad, forlorn, ragged character eventually found sanctuary in Iceland.

After all, many Icelanders remembered him with affection. He had not only put chess on the map. For a short period, in 1972, he put this tiny country of only 250,000 people on the map too.