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BOBBY'S ENDGAME
I wrote a long article and did a lengthy
interview with Larry Evans about Bobby Fischer a few
years back. It appeared in Malcolm Pein's Chess
and is online at Chessville.
http://tinyurl.com/354gcb
.
GM Evans' conclusion: Bobby was the strongest
player in history, Kasparov was the greatest.
During Bobby's 20 years away from chess, a
cottage industry among chess writers was to speculate
why he wasn't playing. All kinds of ideas were floated.
Yet as Evans and I noted in another article, despite
hundreds if not thousands of articles devoted to the
subject, no one ever got it right.
Evans never subscribed to the cowardice line that
was a favorite of the Soviets and some Western
writers. Fear did not enter Bobby's mind because
reality for him was in the "I" of the Beholder.
At the famous news conference in 1992, when asked
why he didn't play for 20 years, Bobby said, in effect, that
the question was all wrong. The issue was not why he had
not played the rest of the world; the issue was why
the rest of the world had not played him.
Bobby had all kinds of fears, but they were not
the fears of a personal coward shirking combat --
physical or intellectual.
Bobby's words could not be taken as seriously
meant, though they were seriously considered. For
example, he denounced Larry Evans in one of his radio
rants as an S.O.B. and Jewish-whatever, yet just before
dying he sent Evans a message (that I won't repeat until,
perhaps, Larry himself decides to do so) that he was sorry
for maligning him and still maintained friendly feelings for
the Sage of Reno.
Too, Bobby evidently could respect the logic of
an argument. In an editorial that I wrote with Evans
on whether Bobby were a criminal for playing in
Yugoslavia, the conclusion was that he was not a
man with whom one would shake hands but that he was in
no way a criminal. In spite of the biting personal
comment, Bobby put the entire piece on his website.
Apropos of little, I remember an encounter between
Jim McCormick and Irv Cisski, the now gone proprietor
of the beloved Last Exit on Brooklyn. Jim looked at
Irv and called him a left-wing Jew queer. Irv replied
in something like these words, "Wrong on all three
counts, Jim. Try right-wing Catholic heterosexual.
You know, Jim, in my Polish neighborhood when growing
up, the quickest way to loose your front teeth was to
call someone a Jew."
I think even Jim was amused by that comeback.
Yours, Larry Parr
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Date: 22 Jan 2008 03:27:35
From: help bot
Subject: Re: Bobby Remembered
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On Jan 21, 10:45 pm, [email protected] wrote:
> I wish people would just forget about him. Now lets talk about Anands
> great victory over Topolov! Great performance from the CURRENT world
> champion!
You're dreaming. Although the BF threads will
eventually die off, these newsgroups will just go
right back to their former state-- dominated by
threads discussing Sam Sloan. There are the
man's lawsuits to talk about, and then there is
his personal obsession with Susan Polgar, and
lest we forget, the slave-children of TJ. Oh, and
Pokeman, too... .
-- help bot
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Date: 22 Jan 2008 03:45:19
From:
Subject: Re: Bobby Remembered
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On Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:19:01 -0800 (PST), "[email protected]"
<[email protected] > wrote:
>BOBBY'S ENDGAME
>
> I wrote a long article and did a lengthy
>interview with Larry Evans about Bobby Fischer a few
>years back. It appeared in Malcolm Pein's Chess
>and is online at Chessville.
>
>http://tinyurl.com/354gcb
>.
> GM Evans' conclusion: Bobby was the strongest
>player in history, Kasparov was the greatest.
I wish people would just forget about him. Now lets talk about Anands
great victory over Topolov! Great performance from the CURRENT world
champion!
J.Lohner
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Date: 21 Jan 2008 09:17:06
From: help bot
Subject: Re: Bobby Remembered
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On Jan 21, 12:01 pm, Mike Murray <[email protected] > wrote:
> >... I suggest leaving it to future
> > historians to try and figure out who really was the
> > greatest, and to nerdy mathematicians, who was the
> > strongest.
> How can they build on and improve our work if we don't do it?
I don't consider personal-bias based speculations
to be "work", in the sense you mean.
I do believe that, with enough intelligent effort and
the proper data, it is possible to generate chess
ratings which are meaningful over time. Here, the
longer one waits to begin, the better one can take
advantage of the never-ending increase in the
chess strength and speed of computers, and of
course the growing dataset of endgame table-
bases.
Another issue is that, perhaps, the main reason
man makes so little real progress in many areas,
is the attempt to "build upon" (flawed) prior works
of others. This is a cr*ppy analogy, but consider
the Fosbury flop, or the Australian crawl-- these
did not build upon, tweak and improve prior work;
instead, they injected creativity, originality, to
best all that had gone before and sweep it aside
as largely irrelevant. Food for thought... (chili,
pizza, ice cream)
-- help bot
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Date: 21 Jan 2008 08:57:47
From: help bot
Subject: Re: Bobby Remembered
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On Jan 20, 11:19 pm, "[email protected]" <[email protected] > wrote:
> GM Evans' conclusion: Bobby was the strongest
> player in history, Kasparov was the greatest.
"Surprise!"
Such conclusions, coming from Larry Evans, are
meaningless, on account of his overwhelming
personal biases.
> Fear did not enter Bobby's mind because
> reality for him was in the "I" of the Beholder.
The reality is that BF was something of a paranoid;
he feared someone might have "put something" in
his food; he feared Russian conspiracies; he feared
not winning the U.S. Championship; he even feared
that if he published books on chess, somebody
might eventually find his analytical mistakes. A real
sad sack.
History shows that when considering the importance
of the titans of any specialized skill or field of endeavor,
there is a powerful, almost overwhelming bias toward
the more recent names, which of course victimizes
those players who may well have at one time been
considered even more dominant by their peers, or by
the general public. I'm thinking that in this Larry
Evans-Parr assessment, players like Emanuel Lasker
and Paul Morphy are given short shrift, in favor of the
two /personal favorites/ of this not-so-dynamic duo,
BF and GK.
The fact is, nobody lives long enough to make such
judgments in a fair and unbiased manner, weighing
the merits of a George Washington against a Ronald
Reagan, a Paul Morphy against a Rybka. Yet even
where there might be /some/ overlap in time, people
tend to think in terms of "the good old days", versus
their fallen status in the modern world. People like
Larry Evans-Parr make this sort of personal bias
exceedingly obvious. But even were sharper minds
to weigh in here, the fact remains that by its very
nature, these newsgroups are dominated by English
speaking Americans, who as a group, have a very
powerful *bias* in favor of Bobby Fischer.
In view of these facts, I suggest leaving it to future
historians to try and figure out who really was the
greatest, and to nerdy mathematicians, who was the
strongest.
-- help bot
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Date: 21 Jan 2008 09:01:45
From: Mike Murray
Subject: Re: Bobby Remembered
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On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 08:57:47 -0800 (PST), help bot
<[email protected] > wrote:
>... I suggest leaving it to future
>historians to try and figure out who really was the
>greatest, and to nerdy mathematicians, who was the
>strongest.
How can they build on and improve our work if we don't do it?
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