Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen on Nostr: Fischer was NOT an inventive or creative chess player. If you want scintillating ...

Fischer was NOT an inventive or creative chess player. If you want scintillating variations and innovations in #chess theory you can go to Tartakower or Frank Marshall or Carlos Torre or any of a pretty good haul of grandmasters over the decades who seemed to have unique notions about how to play chess, notions sound enough to be championed by later players. Fischer was NOT that sort of player. He was determined to win...and that isn't actually the same as wanting to be good at chess.

In the end, Fischer's determination to win eventually consumed whatever had once existed of his love for chess and thus, after Fischer finagled himself a highly suspect World Championship victory largely through making himself the chess world's biggest and most demanding arsehole, he barely played chess ever again (refusing to defend the title while, of course, simultaneously claiming that the Russians never had the guts to take it back from him) and he fudged up a new game, Chess960 (or Chess480) which is a cute idea to jumble up the opening position randomly before the game and it's horribly unbalanced and gimmicky but that suits the current style of superficial computer-assisted professional chess. Magnus Carlsen, the Bobby Fischer Lite of the contemporary chess scene, loves gimmicky shit like Chess960.