BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS PISCES: BOBBY FISCHER

Former world chess champion Bobby Fischer died Thursday (Jan. 17, 2008) at a hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland, said a spokesman. 

There was no announcement on the cause of his death.  

Fischer was born March 9, 1943 in Chicago and was raised in Brooklyn, New York, after his parents divorced in 1945. 

He learned to play chess when he was six and was a U.S. chess champion by the time he was 14 and a grand master at 15.

In 1972, he became an icon of the Cold War when he captured the world championship from Boris Spassky in Reykjavik, Iceland, while competing for what was then the largest purse ($250,000) offered in any sport outside boxing.

Amid praise for his ‘classicist’ style, the win set off a short-lived U.S. chess boom.

A longtime nemesis of tournament officials for his tantrums and phobias, he failed in 1975 to agree to terms for a title defense against Anatoly Karpov, and was stripped of his crown by FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Echecs). Afterwards he refused to compete in public, lived in virtual seclusion in the Los Angeles area, and was briefly active in the fundamentalist Worldwide Church of God.

In 1992, he disappeared after violating international sanctions by going to Yugoslavia to play Boris Spassky. Fischer became a fierce critic of the U.S.   

He lived undetected in Europe and Japan until 2004, when he was arrested in Tokyo for passport irregularities and the US requested his extradition.

In 2005, he renounced his U.S. citizenship and left for Iceland, having been granted an Icelandic passport and citizenship.