Endgame (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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People edit see section history

• Bobby Fischer: Eccentric chess champion genius.
• Boris Spassky: Add a description of this character.
• Regina Fischer: Mother
• Jack Collins
• Joan Fischer: Sister
• Mikhail Botvinnik
• Zita
• Reshevsky
• Mikhail Tal: The twenty-three-year-old Latvian native was a brilliant player.
• Bronstein
• Carmine Nigro: “Mr. Nigro was possibly not the best player in the world but he was a very good teacher. Meeting him was probably a decisive factor in my going ahead in chess.” Bobby Fischer
• Miyoko Watai: Wife
• Karpov
• Lothar Schmid: Judge Match Spassky-Fischer
• Armstrong
• Vasiljevic
• Ben Larsen
• Geller
• Benko
• Ginzburg
• Lilienthal
• Gary Kasparov
• Byrne
• Saidy
• Larry Evans
• Bisguier
• Kubat
• Marshall
• Laucks
• Gardar Sverrisson
• Tigran Petrosian
• Kok
• Whitaker
• Ethel
• Rader
• Ilyumzhinov
• Palsson
• Olafsson
• Ellsworth
• Einstein
• Siegbert Tarrasch: He then named Siegbert Tarrasch, a German player, as “one of the ten greatest masters of all time.” Bobby Fischer
• Max Pavey: a thirty-two-year-old radiologist who’d been champion of both Scotland and New York State and who was playing at the top of his form. Pavey was the first master Bobby ever played.
• Harold Sussman: Dr. Sussman was also an amateur photographer, and he captured some portraits of Bobby that worked their way into the Fischer oeuvre years later. Fittingly, Sussman also became Bobby’s dentist.
• Wilhelm Steinitz: Bobby seemed to appropriate and learn from many: the intuitive combinational ability of Rudolf Spielmann, the accumulation of small advantages as demonstrated by Wilhelm Steinitz, the almost mystical technique José Capablanca had of avoiding complications, the deep but beautiful murkiness of Alexander Alekhine.
• Jose Capablanca: Bobby seemed to appropriate and learn from many: the intuitive combinational ability of Rudolf Spielmann, the accumulation of small advantages as demonstrated by Wilhelm Steinitz, the almost mystical technique José Capablanca had of avoiding complications, the deep but beautiful murkiness of Alexander Alekhine.
• Alexander Alekhine: Bobby seemed to appropriate and learn from many: the intuitive combinational ability of Rudolf Spielmann, the accumulation of small advantages as demonstrated by Wilhelm Steinitz, the almost mystical technique José Capablanca had of avoiding complications, the deep but beautiful murkiness of Alexander Alekhine.
• Paul Morphy: Morphy’s Games of Chess, which displayed the great player’s tactical ingenuity and his adherence to three general principles: rapid development of one’s pieces, the importance of occupying or capturing the center squares of the board, and mobility—the necessity of keeping lines, ranks, files, and diagonals open.
• Marcel Duchamp: Artist Marcel Duchamp lived directly across the street and was an active member of the club, and became a great fan of Bobby’s.
• Max Euwe: Euwe, a doctor of philosophy and a professor of mathematics at the Amsterdam Lyceum, was a former World Champion, having defeated his predecessor in 1935 with a studied and logical approach to the game.
• Lazlo Polgar: The Polgars, the royal chess family of Hungary, visited Bobby—Laszlo, the father, and his two precocious daughters, Judit, sixteen, and Sofia, nineteen. Both girls were chess prodigies.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Paradoxes abound. Bobby was secretive, yet candid; generous, yet parsimonious; naive, yet well informed; cruel, yet kind; religious, yet heretical. His games were filled with charm and beauty and significance. His outrageous pronouncements were filled with cruelty and prejudice and hate. And though for a period of decades he poured most of his energy and passion into a quest for chess excellence, he was not the idiot savant often portrayed by the press.”

  Frank Brady

• ““A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as one thousand.””

  Virginia Woolf

• “His head was not merely filled with chess bytes, phantom computer connections on a grid of sixty-four squares, but with poetry and song and lyricism.”

  Frank Brady

• “To vivify Bobby’s extraordinary life I sometimes use the techniques of the novelist: elaboration of setting, magnification of detail, fragments of dialogue, and revelation of interior states.”

  Frank Brady

• “Whether one admires or despises Bobby Fischer—and it’s quite easy to do both simultaneously, as these pages will show—I hope that his story proves that while he was a deeply troubled soul, he was also a serious and great artist, one who had a passion to know.”

  Frank Brady

• “After reading this biography, I would suggest that the reader look to, and study, his games—the true testament to who he was, and his ultimate legacy.”

  Frank Brady

• “Ultimately, he rejected all games of chance.”

  Frank Brady

• “the peripatetic Fischer family, citizens of nowhere, moved once again”

  Frank Brady

• ““If anyone asked me what I owe my <interest in> chessplaying to, I could say it was the landlord.””

  Bobby Fischer

• ““Mr. Nigro was possibly not the best player in the world but he was a very good teacher. Meeting him was probably a decisive factor in my going ahead in chess.””

  Bobby Fischer

• “He became such a fixture there, and displayed such seriousness, that a photograph showing him studying appeared in the library’s newsletter in 1952 with a caption identifying him. (at the Gran Army Plaza Library)”

  Frank Brady

• “Bobby seemed to appropriate and learn from many: the intuitive combinational ability of Rudolf Spielmann, the accumulation of small advantages as demonstrated by Wilhelm Steinitz, the almost mystical technique José Capablanca had of avoiding complications, the deep but beautiful murkiness of Alexander Alekhine.”

  Frank Brady

• “The boy—and then the man—had one salient cognitive goal, although he didn’t express it openly: He wanted to understand.”

  Frank Brady

• “Morphy’s Games of Chess, which displayed the great player’s tactical ingenuity and his adherence to three general principles: rapid development of one’s pieces, the importance of occupying or capturing the center squares of the board, and mobility—the necessity of keeping lines, ranks, files, and diagonals open.”

  Frank Brady

• “The three Fischers, prototypes of Talmudic scholars, were always studying: Joan her textbooks; Regina her medical tomes; and Bobby the latest chess periodical. The apartment was often as silent as a library.”

  Frank Brady

• “Tsar Nicholas II originally bestowed the title in 1914; it was being used in 1954 and is still awarded today.(Grandmaster)”

  Frank Brady

• “It was deeply ingrained in the culture, and it seemed that everyone—man, woman, and child; farmer, civil servant, or doctor—played chess. The impending clash between the Soviets and the Americans thus had Cold War implications.”

  Frank Brady

• “Chess was not merely a game to the Soviets; it was war, and not as cold as might have been thought.”

  Frank Brady

• ““You can’t win every game. Just do your best every time.””

  Bobby Fischer

• “Bobby said that he always felt Nigro was more of a friend than a teacher, but that he was a very good teacher. Nigro was a professional teacher and was quite formal in his instructional technique, while Collins, as talented and caring as he was, employed a Socratic approach.”

  Bobby Fischer

• ““geniuses like Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare and Fischer come out of the head of Zeus, seem to be generally programmed, know before instructed.””

  Jack Collins

• “Only four months had passed since his thirteenth birthday and Bobby had become the youngest chess master in history and one of the strongest young players in the country.”

  Frank Brady

• “A stunning masterpiece of combination play performed by a boy of 13 against a formidable opponent, matches the finest on record in the history of chess prodigies.… Bobby Fischer’s <performance> sparkles with stupendous originality.”

  Frank Brady

• ““The Game of the Century” has been talked about, analyzed, and admired for more than fifty years, and it will probably be a part of the canon of chess for many years to come.”

  Frank Brady

• “Bobby browsed and shopped at the Four Continents for years, and nothing attracted him more than a book he’d heard spoken about in almost reverential whispers: Isaac Lipnitsky’s Questions of Modern Chess Theory.”

  Frank Brady

• “He had little interest, though, in such figures as Ivan the Terrible or Peter the Great or Joseph Stalin or Leo Tolstoy or Alexander Pushkin. He’d come to Moscow to play chess, to cross pawns with a serious Russian tournament player.”

  Frank Brady

• “By the end of the tournament, the suavely bedecked Bobby had played all eleven games without a single loss. Fischer had not only retained his title as United States Champion, he’d accomplished something unprecedented: For the third year in a row, he’d marched to the title without being defeated in any of the pairings.”

  Frank Brady

• “If there was any question of his accomplishment, Chess Life set the record straight: By winning the United States Championship for the fourth time in succession, Bobby Fischer, 17-year-old International Grandmaster from Brooklyn, has carved an indelible impression in the historic cycle of American chess and has proven without a doubt that he is both the greatest player that this country ever produced and one of the strongest players in the world. Fischer has not lost a game in an American”

  Frank Brady

• “Bobby’s pragmatic philosophy was similar to the old Arabic saying “Trust in Allah but tie up your camel.””

  Frank Brady

• “Ultimately, it was his supreme confidence in himself that made him a great player.R”

  Frank Brady

• “" Solitude makes us tougher toward ourselves and more tender toward others."”

  Friedrich Nietzsche

• ““Imagine that you can hear the end of Schubert’s ‘Unfinished Symphony’ or Beethoven’s 10th, or see the missing arm of Michelangelo’s Venus. These are the feelings that Fischer’s return brings to the world’s chessplayers.””

  London Daily Telegraph

• “Searching for Bobby Fischer was the true story of a young boy, Josh Waitzkin, who showed incredible talent for the game, and how he became successful at the board, at first despite his parents’ doubts and then with the encouragement of his parents and his extraordinary chess teacher, Bruce Pandolfini, played in the film by Ben Kingsley. It was one of the most respectful and sensitive films ever made about chess.”

  Frank Brady

• “He looked something like the Bobby Fischer of decades past, the intelligent eyes, the slight bumpish imperfection on the right side of the nose, the broad shoulders, the loping gait, but this Bobby Fischer was harder, a balding man with a slight paunch, a man at the far end of middle age who looked as if he’d known if not tragedy then at least major reversals.”

  Frank Brady

• “like Thomas Jefferson in the White House, he enjoyed his own company,”

  Frank Brady

• “Bobby was conflicted about his intense desire for privacy, and his need—from his earliest days of childhood—for attention”

  Frank Brady

• “Typically, his walks had no destination: To him they were akin to meditation—a chance to think without thinking—”

  Frank Brady

• “If gratitude is the heart’s memory, Bobby’s call to remembrance was weak or sometimes nonexistent.”

  Frank Brady

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Robert Frost once said about a successful education: “Just hanging around until you have caught on.”

  Highlighted by 59 Kindle customers

• Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

  Highlighted by 56 Kindle customers

• A cynic once said that the most difficult part of success is finding someone who is happy for you.

  Highlighted by 53 Kindle customers

• Nietzsche said that solitude makes us tougher toward ourselves and more tender toward others.

  Highlighted by 44 Kindle customers

• Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, describes how people in all fields reach success. He quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin: “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chessplayers, criminals and what have you, the number comes up again and again [the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours of practice].”

  Highlighted by 43 Kindle customers

• I began to weep quietly, aware that in that time-suspended moment I was in the presence of genius.

  Highlighted by 37 Kindle customers

• “You can’t win every game. Just do your best every time.”

  Highlighted by 34 Kindle customers

• Henry Stockhold, a chess player who was covering the match for the Associated Press, brought Bobby to a brothel one night and waited for him. When Bobby exited an hour later, Stockhold asked him how he enjoyed it, and Bobby’s comment, which he repeated at other times, has often been quoted: “Chess is better.”

  Highlighted by 33 Kindle customers

• Bobby’s pragmatic philosophy was similar to the old Arabic saying “Trust in Allah but tie up your camel.”

  Highlighted by 30 Kindle customers

• The boy—and then the man—had one salient cognitive goal, although he didn’t express it openly: He wanted to understand.

  Highlighted by 29 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• United States Championship
• Iceland
• Brooklyn
• Reykjavik
• Moscow
• Yugoslavia
• New York City
• Japan
• Budapest
• Hungary
• Soviet Union
• America
• Lombardy
• Manhattan
• Germany
• Los Angeles
• California
• Tokyo
• Russia
• Belgrade
• Europe
• Switzerland
• Cuba
• Portoroi
• Curacao
• Saemi
• Bern
• Havana
• Serbia
• England
• Washington
• Manila
• Canada
• Buenos Aires
• France
• Brussels
• Israel
• Paris
• Pasadena
• Greenwich Village
• Montenegro
• White House
• Magyarkanizsa
• Argentina
• Stockholm
• United States Chess Federation
• Sofia
• Zurich
• Tsentralny Shakhmatny Klub, Moskow: Tsentralny Shakhmatny Klub, the Moscow Central Chess Club, said to be one of the finest in the world.
• Cedar Tavern: A week before he left for Argentina, Bobby and the author of this book had dinner at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village, hangout of avant-garde artists and Abstract Expressionists, and one of Bobby’s favorite eating places.

Organizations edit see section history

• Marshall Chess Club: The Marshall Chess Club in New York City is one of the oldest chess clubs in the United States, located in Greenwich Village. The club was formed in 1915 by a group of players led by Frank Marshall. It is a non-profit organization.
• United States chess Federation: The United States Chess Federation (USCF) is a non-profit organization, the governing chess organization within the United States, and one of the federations of the FIDE. The USCF was founded in 1939 from the merger of two regional chess organizations, and grew gradually until 1972

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by West of Here, and followed by A Discovery of Witches.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Frank Brady (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: Add the Library of Congress Classification.
• Dewey: 920

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Biographies & Memoirs

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history