Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen on Nostr: In short, Bobby Fischer was utterly ruinous to #chess and did, I think, far more ...

In short, Bobby Fischer was utterly ruinous to #chess and did, I think, far more damage to the sport than he ever gave. His notoriety was claimed to have been a boon to U.S. chess but I don't actually believe that it was, because Fischer taught everyone a horrible example in what a chess grandmaster was supposed to be like. There have been many kinds of people at the top of the chess world, including people like Smyslov and Max Euwe who didn't consider chess to be their favorite thing. Smyslov wanted to be an opera singer! Euwe taught math at a girl's school and all evidence is that he regarded his teaching career as infinitely more rewarding and worthwhile than everything he ever did for chess, which by the way included trying to manage the repulsive antics of Fischer as head of FIDE in the 1970s.

If you look into the stories of real actual geniuses at things, that's what you actually find: *variety*. *Diversity*, if you don't my using that word. Child prodigies are in fact fairly uncommon and they're often distinguished by their failure to make good on early promise. And yet, partly thanks to Fischer and *Searching for Bobby Fischer*, U.S. culture got far too emotionally invested in the notion that if you wanted to excel at something, anything, the trick was to pluck children out of the cradle and train them up to do *nothing but that thing*.