Behind the Bastards - Part One: Bobby Fischer: Chess Nazi

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Mia Wong is joined by Robert Evans to talk about the most famous chess player the US has ever produced. (Two Part Series) FOOTNOTES: https://www.routledge.com/Balkan-Babel-The-Disintegration-Of-Yugoslavia-From-The-Death-Of-Tito-To/Ramet/p/book/9780813339054 https://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess2/pasad.htm https://everything2.com/title/Bizarre+anti-Semitic+interview+with+Bobby+Fischer https://www.jstor.org/stable/41887632 https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300192582/genocide-on-the-drina-river/ https://www.bbc.com/serbian/lat/srbija-61926384 https://archive.is/SqmDV https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/04/02/serb-banks-face-run-by-depositors/5bdbec03-e67c-4fd0-a03d-fe83d4f2ad86/ https://archive.is/hyXe6 https://en.chessbase.com/post/listen-to-bobby-fischer https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/creativity-movement-0 https://en.chessbase.com/post/alekhine-and-the-nazis-a-historical-investigation-by-dr-christian-rohrer https://www.chessmaniac.com/Bobby_Fischer/fischer_interview_12092001.shtml https://chess24.com/en/read/news/karpov-at-70-my-great-blunder-was-i-agreed-to-hold-the-match-with-kasparov-in-the-soviet-union https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/12/bobby-fischer-s-pathetic-endgame/302634/ https://archive.is/BUs7J https://www.jta.org/archive/chess-king-bobby-fischer-erupts-in-spate-of-anti-semitic-remarks See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, it's behind the bastards. That's right. It certainly is. That is a fact that is as undeniable as it is undeniable that someone in the subreddit will decide to argue with us about that point because that is what they like to do. I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, where just a couple of weeks ago I made a comment that I will not be calling mummies mummified persons because I like mummies. And somebody took a fence at that on behalf of the mummies. And I'm just going to tell you right now, Abedin Costello versus the mummified person?

Terrible. Terrible name for a movie. So we're not going back. Never. Anyway, Mia, welcome to the program. Thanks. I'm here. I'm going to I'm going to make a non legally actionable statement, which is that if I remember correctly, the Oriental Institute stole their entire everything that's there is stolen. So for sure, legally actionable. This is just what I remember off top of my head. Yeah, yeah. It's one of those things people were like, well, you know, it's it's important to acknowledge the humanity of these mummies because a lot of them were stolen. And I was like, no, no, no, it's important to give them back because a lot of them were stolen. We can still call them mummies. The problem is not that people were calling them mummies. It's that they stole dead people. Yeah. And then eight. Yeah.

Yeah. The issue is not that we used to the term mummy. Just let it be, everybody. Anyway, I'm I'm very mummy pilled. I'm very glad you're mummy pilled. But thank you, Sophie. Introduce our guest, Mia Wong. Mia Wong. How are you doing today on the podcast that it is right now? Normally, you're on another podcast, but today you're on this one. Yeah, I have hijacked this podcast in order to chess. Oh, God. Oh, God. We're talking about chess again. Yes, which I really I really I'm realizing is if it wasn't a hack and a fraud, I would have actually asked you before we did this. Do you if you actually play chess at all?

Well, again, there's no works in chess. So no, of course not. No, when I was a child, I played a few games of chess. And then I was introduced to the true game of skill, Warhammer 40,000 Third Edition. And and so that's that's the only strategy game I ever needed. You know, can consider considering the minds of every single person in this story who plays chess, I think this is actually a wise decision. It it does it does something to your brain that that's what that's what I've learned after many, many hours of reading about chess players is something something fundamentally breaks in your brain when you play chess for this long. That does not surprise me. It seems like the kind of thing that people get extremely into and then make it the entire core of their identity, much like Warhammer 40,000. But again, without orcs.

Yes, but similar numbers of fascists as we're as we're going to find. Yes, yes, that is that also does not surprise me to hear. Oh, God, OK, so speaking of Nazis and fascists, one of the sort of elements of this story that is kind of important is getting some kind of understanding of how good these people are at chess. Because none of the story makes any sense unless, you know, the people doing this are genuinely previously good. So I'm going to I'm going to start this with a brief tangent about a man named Miguel Najdorf. So Miguel Najdorf is not a bastard. He is very cool and his life story is very sad. He he he was born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1910, which is. Oh, that's not going to go well.

So yeah, you tell me. That's one of the one of the bottom times to be born to a Jewish family in Poland in 1910. That's that's right because you're going to be old enough to be fully aware of how bad things are going. Yep. So no magical realism for you. Oh, God, yeah. No, it's this story is going to get very bleak very quickly. Yeah.

So Najdorf in, you know, as a kid, it's very clear that he's very, very good at chess. He very rapidly becomes a grandmaster, which is the highest official rating in chess. So there's an organization called FIDE or the International Chess Federation. And they they basically run chess after like a certain period of time. Okay, you could do like 17 episodes just about FIDE politics. It's nonsense. I don't understand how this chess organization has so much political drama, but it does. But so in 1950, FIDE creates the rank of international grandmaster and they choose 27 people to be the first grandmasters.

Najdorf is one of them. These days he's famous. Yeah, he's a he's a he's a mighty player. I mean, you would have to have a pretty good strategic mind to make it out of Poland. Yeah. You gotta be a thinker. So he gets out of he's he gets out of Poland, but he's out of Poland when everything goes to shit because he's playing a tournament in Argentina. Oh, oh boy.

Wow, that's I don't there's like there's a comment to make there given the history of Argentina and the people who make Poland be a problem. But I don't know what it is right now. So we should probably just move on. Well, yeah. I mean, the other thing I will say about is that there are a lot of Jews who fled to Argentina before this was happening. So do do not automatically assume that someone with the European last name in Argentina is a Nazi because there's actually a good chance that they're like someone who is fleeing the Nazis. Well, that's awkward. But it makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. So now Najdorf today, I think it's probably most famous is like there's an opening in chess called the Najdorf or technically speaking, it's full name is Sicilian defense, the Najdorf variation. So I got okay, we're going to do a little bit of we're going to do like one thing of chess terminology, which is that chess is this thing called openings. Okay. And they're like standard sets of moves that people play at the beginning of the game. Yeah. Yeah.

And now, you know, if you have a if you have an opening named after you, it is because you were an important player in the history of chess. Okay. And that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And as was opening like I this might not be true, but I'm pretty sure it's like the most it's like the most studied opening in the history of chess. Yeah, I mean, my game store back when I played Warhammer 40,000.

There was a move that everybody called a Robert and it was when somebody did something so stupid with their army that it led to a victory because the other person simply didn't conceive of somebody doing something that dumb. Look, I once beat an 1800 and tournament like an 1800 is like a pretty seriously good chess player. I was like a not very good chess player. But I once be a because I did that I played so badly that he stopped paying attention. He put his queen down and then I took it. There's nothing more dangerous than an idiot with a trick up his sleeve. It's it's it's the most dangerous thing in the world, or at least in war gaming. Anyway, yes. Okay, so I'm going to talk about Warhammer a lot during this.

Yes. I hope you're ready. The conclusion that I had about Bobby Fisher's there's two ways right off Bobby Fisher, right? Bobby Fisher is the eventual going to be the subject of this show. There's one way where you talk about chess a lot. And then there's another way where you talk about genocide a lot. And everyone has already done the one where you talk about chess a lot. So I'm going to do the one where you talk about genocide a lot instead of that.

Sure. So speaking of genocide. Okay, so how good is Nazdorff at the game of chess? Here's the Guardian talking about how many games Nazdorff could play at one time while blindfolded for decades. Miguel Nazdorff's 45 games at Sao Paulo in 1947 stood as the record. Jesus Christ. Yeah, 45. Nazdorff had stayed in Buenos Aires when the war broke out during the 1939 Olympiad and took up blindfold displays

in the hopes that the news of his achievements would reach his relatives in Poland who would actually perish in concentration camps. Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. That's that's a lot. There's a lot there. Yeah.

Yeah, playing 45 the desperation that is behind playing 45 games of chess at once. So your relatives while blind will know that you achieved something is like it's both deeply impressive and like heartbreaking in a really specific way that I don't think I've encountered before. But I get it. It's I don't know. This is one of the things the political backdrop of chess is just really bleak. Like one of the things is going on this period is Nazdorff keeps trying to play this guy named Alakene who was the world champion and Alakene is a Nazi.

And he like just is not able to play Alakene because bullshit just keeps happening. But yeah, chess chess is a game that very, very quickly gets enfolded in this kind of stuff. Yeah. That said, we can look back at what sort of Nazdorff like did here in order to like have a chance to see his family again. And, you know, OK, so what was he actually doing? The answer is he is playing 45 people at the same time in his mind. Yeah. Yeah.

Purely just kind of keeping track of the movements in his head. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I can't find his actual win rate like for these. But, you know, most of the times when people do something like this, they win almost all of these games. And yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And like this is the kind of person that is like at like Bobby Fisher is better than Nazdorff. And this is the kind of thing Nazdorff can do. So this is the level of chess that everyone in this story can do right is they can do things like playing 45 games of chess in their mind at the same time. Yeah. I mean, yeah. OK. Yeah. And this is this is sort of the justification for everything that we're going to see in this story.

Right. Like chess is a game that chess. Yeah. This is this is a justification for like literally people. People like like physically turning their backs on like actual genocides going on. Is that I mean, people don't need chess as an excuse to do that. Oh, yeah. No.

So far as to say the normal reaction to a genocide is to turn your back on it. Yeah. But you know, OK, they're going to excuse a just incredible myself specifically because one man was really, really good at chess and he was also from the United States. And that that man is Bobby Fisher. Oh boy. Now, most of my knowledge of Bobby Fisher comes from a hilltop hood song called Cosby Sweater. So I know very little about him other than that he was good at chess.

Yeah. That's OK. So there are two important things about Bobby Fisher. One is that he's very good at chess. The second one is that he's a Nazi. Oh, gosh. We will be establishing both of these over the course of this episode. OK.

OK. OK. Chez Nazi. All right. Well, there's our title. So that's good. So if you mark that, mark that off the to do list. Chez Nazi Bobby Fisher solid title.

I'll keep everybody happy. Yeah. The words Bobby Fisher, Chez Nazi. This is the closest I've ever come to divine inspiration. They just appeared in my head one day and I was like, I need to do this episode now. That's that's good. So I mean, why do we I feel like if a Nazi is good at chess, that's an easy case for just just push that push that fellow in a river, put some heavy rocks in their pockets

right right in a river. We don't need we don't we don't need a Nazi to be good at strategy and just kind of hanging around society. That's not going to help anybody. You would think but it's chess. And what the thing that thing that happens when a Nazi is good at chess is everyone like gives them a bunch of money. Well, I don't like that either.

Although. Yep. OK. I don't like that either. But I guess it does show that chess isn't really good for anything. Not really. No. So.

OK. But Bobby Fisher was not born rich. He's born on March 9th, 1943 at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. And I need to put in and make an important note at the beginning here. We do not claim this man that fuck this guy. This guy's not a Chicagoan. He leaves very quickly. I mean, you can tell it's bad because his hospital was named after the current sheriff

of Multnomah County in Portland, Mike Reese, who sucks anyway. And amazingly, that is not the only person in this story who is going to have the same name as the guy from Portland who sucks. Oh, wow. That's OK. I'm excited for this. Yeah. We have a lot of guys who suck though.

So the odds are always pretty good. Yep. So. All right. Regina Fisher is who's Bobby Fisher's mother is she is a wild character. She is a long time very committed communist. She does. I mean, she's doing activism for so long.

There's Nazis start as communists. That's that's. Yeah. OK. Yeah. Well, I mean, Fisher Fisher's never really a communist. Like his mom is like like she's so dedicated to like this. She's a mom.

Yeah. The other the complicated part of the story is at least his mom and there's questions over who Bobby Fisher's dad is. I don't think are that interesting, but at least half of his family is Jewish and Bobby Fisher still turns out like this. Um, his mom like she. So the reason she's in the U.S. is that she had been like making a living like in the Soviet Union.

And then anti-Semitism got so bad at her style that she had to flee. And so, you know, she's she's she's not she's not only in the U.S. and when she gets birth to Bobby, she's like completely broke. She is a homeless single mother. And so after about a week, the kicker out of the hospital and they're like, OK, well, where do we send this person? And she gets sent to this hospice for single mothers. Great country.

I bet this was a nice place. Well funded. Had a lot of respect for single mothers. OK, here's the thing. Here's the thing. If she had been allowed to stay there, it probably would have been kind of OK. The problem is that the the the way the hospice works was that I. It's only supposed to take care of parents and newborns.

So Regina has another daughter or has a daughter who's like very young. OK. And she tries to bring the daughter to this hospice thing. And they they are immediately like you need to leave. And she's like, no, I have a literally a weak old baby and another child and I have no home. So she tries to stay there. And they call the cops. Cool.

And not all. And this isn't just like a like they, you know, the CPD arrests her. And this isn't even just like an arrest. It's not even just like they take her in and like whatever. They they prosecute her for this. Jesus Christ. Yeah. And I love the idea of like that.

I've got a job working at a hospice for single mothers because I want to take care of the next generation. What? She has a child that's slightly too old. Send her to prison. Yeah. My God. It's so bad. Like the judge looks at this and is like, what are you guys doing here?

She's like, OK, give her a psyche valve and let her go. Which like this is a Chicago judge in 1943. That is a terrifying individual. That that guy probably sentenced eight guys to death like that morning for being slightly too queer. And even he's like what you're trying to put a single mother in prison for trying to stay in a hospice for single mothers. I mean, this is classic CPD shit. This is this is this is definitely like my the two parts of me are warring here because on one hand this is an almost unthinkable nightmare. But on the other hand, I'm very pro child prison.

So this is really tough for me, you know. Well, here's the thing. The children are too young to do labor. So what's the point of child prison? Like you can't you can't you can't you can't put a one. Children are never too young to do labor. They can. I've seen one week olds.

They could pick up blocks. We have a lot of blocks in this country that need to be picked up. Look, in aggregate, they can do a lot of work. That's all I'm saying. You've watched too many Andrew Tate Hustler University videos. You got to you got to get those kids working. Look, if they're not paying rent, they're just, you know, I don't suck it up. I keep trying to find a way to.

I'm trying to continue this job. But all of the different lines that come to me are literal pieces of Nazi propaganda. So it's probably best just to move on. Yeah, yeah. So the first few years of Bobby's life, they are moving constantly. Regina holds like half a dozen jobs in like nine states. And she's, you know, she's like, this is the middle of World War Two. So it's slightly easier to find a job than it would be.

Nor like in, you know, in like, say 1938 or something. But, you know, she's trying to like work enough to keep her family together and keep her kids fed. And, you know, this means that Bobby's childhood is kind of a mess. It doesn't sound good. No. Yeah. But one thing that emerges very early is that Bobby loves games. His biographer, Frank Brady, who writes a really good book about probably the best like

biography of Bobby Fisher called Endgame. Bobby Fisher's remarkable rise and fall that we're going to be using for a lot of this. So there is a fall. That's good. Oh, there's definitely a fall. Why, you know, okay, I'll give a minor spoiler here is Bobby Fisher was the first person to be canceled for making fun of 9-11. And maybe the only person who deserves to be canceled for it.

So he does it. It does eventually go badly for him. But. Okay, that's good. That is, it is currently 1940, like what, 1949? So that's going to take a while. Yeah. But Frank Brady tells the story about how Bobby, like he starts playing Perchese.

And he really likes the strategy of Perchese. But every time a random thing happens, he just loses his mind. And so, okay. So he seems to have, he has a brain that's very good at solving puzzles. And at age six, he buys a chess set. So he doesn't, he doesn't, what do you mean? He doesn't like the fact that like Perchese is based in part on like rolling of dice. Like he hates that there's an element of chance.

Yeah. Again, he doesn't have the raw human courage necessary to play Warhammer. No. And that's like, he could never have cut it as a Hearthstone player. No. I maintain I'm better at that game that he ever would have been. Yeah. But okay.

So unfortunately, he discovers chess and he, he, okay. Yeah. And like six years old, he buys a chess set for $1. He starts playing it with his family and his family is like, I don't want to play chess with you. But Bobby just like wants to play chess constantly. So he starts doing something very strange, which is he just starts playing games against himself. I mean, okay. That makes sense.

Yeah. Like I have done this before when I was really, really bored back like before smartphones existed. Yeah. When the Louis body dementia was taking my grandmother, she would just play solitaire over and over and over and over and over and over again. So that seems, that makes sense to me. But the thing with playing chess against yourself is that you know what the other person is

doing because you're both people. And so it's kind of exciting. I mean, I play a lot of like, so you can play Heroes of Might and Magic 3 on your phone and you can, you can do a hot seed mode. I played both sides of that. That can be fun sometimes. I'm with him on this is what I'm saying. Like I kind of get it.

But like he does this like literally all the time. Like this is like what he spends his days doing. Yeah. It's more of a way to pass time on a flight. But yeah. So Bobby likes this a lot. And you know, this does not make him a normal kid. He's really bad at making friends.

And also, you know, the other part of his life is sort of genuinely sad is that he's alone like after school ends, he's alone basically constantly because his school gets out before his sister's does. And then his mom is almost never home because she has to work like night shifts and day shifts to sort of like keep the whole family there. So she doesn't get home until super late. And okay, so Bobby has to find something to do. And the thing that he does, and he's doing this as like a pretty small child, like he's

like seven or eight when he starts doing this is he starts just reading chess books and like playing through the games on his board. Oh boy. Okay. You know, okay. So on the one hand, he hasn't Bobby Fisher, like he doesn't really have anyone to play against. But on the other hand, if you want to train like, you know, if you want to train like a

six year old to be really good at chess, like eventually this is what you do, right? If you want to get good at chess, you sit down with a bunch of books and you study them. And he's going to keep doing this literally his entire life. It gets to a point where like, he, he just, this is the only thing he does with his time is just sit there and read chess books and articles. Again, I have, I've made similar choices with Warhammer 40,000 in my past. Yeah. Although, I mean, the, the excited Bobby's doing this.

He is reading somebody chess books that even like the Soviet chess grandmasters who are literally paid by the state specifically to study chess are like, how are you reading this much stuff? And he's just like, I just, I just, it's the only thing in my life. Yeah. My entire world is empty of anything but chess. And our entire world, Mia and mine, our entire world is empty of everything except for the products and services that support this podcast.

We live in a dank void surrounded by the results of unchecked capital exploitation. So lots and lots of gold. Yeah. Nice and gold during the summer of 2020. Some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys.

As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991. And that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union is falling apart. And now he's left defending the union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

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podcasts. I do get like 10 to 15 messages a day about the gold ads. Yeah. Well, and you love that. So that lets you feel like you're not alone. I know guys. I see you. Look, I am a big fan of people reaching out to us and letting us know that there are

random ads from a shady gold company going into our thing. Please continue to do that. Every day Sophie messages me and says my life has been improved by the fact that people are complaining about these random gold ads. Don't just skip ahead by like 30 seconds or a minute using the button on your phone. Message Sophie. She loves it and it makes her feel wanted and like she has a wide and broad base of friends out on the Internet.

Just check it out to her. Let her know there's gold ads on the show. So please keep doing it, everybody. One of the upsides of podcasts is that none of you ever, well, I say upsides. None of you ever get to see the faces. So if you make stream this, which makes my life better and makes your life worse and this makes me happy. Just know that my face said, I hate you, Robert Evans.

I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. But you know who I don't hate? Oh, all right. Let's let's let's rock on.

Yes. Let us return to the world of Bobby Fisher as a very small child. So all right. But Bobby Fisher's mom is very concerned about the fact that he's just sitting around playing chess all the time. He doesn't have anyone to play chess with. So she emails a chess guy at like the local newspaper and is like, Hey, can you find someone for my like seven year old child to play with?

And for for reasons I do not understand, this guy is like, yeah, here, go go go play at this simultaneous exhibition that this like chess master is going to be holding. So yeah, chess masters do these things where they're called similes where, you know, like we talked about Nash rough doing one of these, right? I mean, normally they're not blindfolded, but it's a guy shows up and like you show up and like 30 of you just get destroyed by this guy. So this newspaper editor is like, OK, OK, send Bobby Fisher to play against like this incredibly strong American player.

And the result of this is that seven year old Bobby Fisher just gets absolutely annihilated and then starts crying because he's a seven year old and he's just like gotten destroyed in public. And this is an interesting sort of event in Bobby's life because people make a lot out of this. Like when you when you buy every single this is a critical moment and like it probably kind of is but also like, I don't know, he's a seven year olds. It turns out when when this happens to a seven year old, they cry because there's seven.

I mean, it's still toughen up a little bit. Come on. Yeah. He's I don't people expect really weird like people keep asking like people like throughout the entire like people would ask Bobby Fisher about the games that he played when he was seven. And they're like, do you remember these games? And it's like, this man is seven like, come on.

Why do you the chess writer expect this guy to remember a game that he played at age seven? I don't know. I've just been sort of continuously baffled by chess writers. I mean, chess writer does kind of presuppose a few things about a person. I guess I'm not surprised that someone who would pick that as a living would want like question somebody in depth about a series of games they played when they were too young to be fully conscious of the world. That makes sense to me.

If someone would interview me about being seven, I would I could probably I have moderately strong memories of herding a bunch of cows with a broomstick in my fucking back 40. But but that's about it. I remember the time my dog got skunked and then ran into the house and skunked to the entire house. And I remember getting not the big Lego pirate ship, but I had a good report card and my mom got me the small Lego pirate ship, and that was the best day of my childhood. You know, it was fucking dope as pirate ship, everybody.

I look so someone should have got Bobby Fisher this thing so he didn't turn into Bobby Fisher and instead had a cool pirate ship. One Lego pirate ship could have solved a lot of problems. Yeah. Instead, unfortunately, what happens is that I OK, so there's a there's a guy who is the president of the Brooklyn chess club who like sees the seven year old playing this game. And he's like, well, the seven year old is actually pretty good. He's and he invites him to join the Brooklyn chess club, which is very weird because the

Brooklyn chess club is like it's a very prestigious organization. It's like it's like we're like doctors and lawyers and stuff go to play chess and they don't allow children in. But the president's like, no, I'm making an exception for this like seven year old. And so Bobby shows up and nobody wants to play him because and this is this is sort of a thing that's I think kind of special about over the board chess that you don't get with very many other things, which is that over the board chess is one of the few games you can play.

We you sit down and there's a seven year old across of you and the seven year old just destroys you. Yeah. I mean, Warhammer actually would be one of the others, but yeah, but they're kind of rare now. But the problem is, OK, so Bobby Fisher shows up and nobody wants to play with him. It would be it would be it would be cool if football worked that way. Oh, my God.

Like full contact football, throw some seven year olds on the field. Now let's see if their prodigies put them up against these three hundred and fifty pounds steroid monsters. See how it goes. All right, kid. After the snap, there's no more rules. I mean, you know, I was just so they throw Bobby Fisher into this pool and it goes about as well as you would expect a baby fighting like a guy in full football shit, which is

he gets run over and destroyed like continuously awesome. That's good. That's good for kids. Yeah. But unfortunately, he like just keeps doing this. And so he like even he's progressively more and more of his time is consumed by chess. It gets to the point where like he has his like little chess set and his chess set is just like covered in crumbs and like stains of all the food that he's eating while he's

playing chess. And this gets to a point that's like I'm going to read this thing from end game, which is that Fisher biography. He even maintained his involvement with the game while bathing. The fishers didn't have a working shower, just a bathtub. And Bobby, like many young children, needed to be urged to take at least a weekly bath. Regina established a Sunday night ritual of running a bath for him, practically carrying him up to the tub.

And once he was settled in the water, she'd lay a door from a discarded cabinet across the tub as a sort of tray and then bring in Bobby's chess set, a container of milk and whatever book he was studying at the time, help him get into position, position them on the board. Bobby soaked sometimes for hours as he became engrossed in the games of the greats, only emerging from the water prune like when Regina insisted. Ew, the milk of it all really just went on to the video. It's not right.

I don't like that. Yeah, that's not my favorite thing that I've heard. Yeah, to the two Regina's credit, she actually like. This is why we, okay, I don't know. I'm on shower gang now. I'm fully shower pilled. I'm a shower cell. I couldn't agree more.

I used to think a bath was a lovely thing. And now it's been milkified and that sounds that sounds horrifying. It sounds like it sounds like a scene from the one of the one of the later alien movies where one of those androids has been wounded and they've got that like white, milky blood gooping out everywhere. Gross. Thanks for that, Mia. Yep.

So, oh yeah, as you can see, this is a very normal child. Yeah, sounds like a great childhood. Yeah, unfortunately, he's taking his milk baths. He's getting his ass beaten by adults, reading lots of weird chess books. Sounds healthy. Yeah. I can't see how this guy turns out to be fast. Oh, oh, oh, don't worry, we are, we are literally right about to get to that.

So great. Okay. The problem is that he just keeps getting better at chess. And by the time he's 12, he's like actually really good at the game. Like he's playing real tournaments. He's beating people who are actually good at chess. And at this point, Bobby becomes involved with the extremely wealthy chess patron, E. Flory Lux, who arranges for him to go on this like chess trip around the U.S. and then go

to Cuba to like play chess against Cuban chess players. Okay, what do we know about this guy? Because that's, that's, that's, oh boy. Okay. From that game. That does sound a little bit, that does sound a little bit sketchy. Oh yeah. Lux frequently wore a small black enameled lapel pin bearing a gold Nazi swastika.

Oh boy. Amazingly. Oh boy. It never seemed to attract much attention. He didn't wear it all the time. What? But often enough. What?

You wear that once then people should be like, fuck man, that's, it's boiled. Great. And, and it didn't seem to inhibit him when he was in a Jewish delicatessen and to get his favorite sandwich of pastrami on rye when he was talking to Jewish chess players. One player will. I didn't then affect him. Yeah. I don't know.

This is like right after the holocaust. I, I, I, I honestly, it shouldn't have mattered if it was before the holocaust. No. Like you shouldn't be able to, you shouldn't be able to go anyway. I, okay. You would think. Cool. Great.

This is, he's getting worse. So at one point there was a player who gets embarrassed when he walks it and you know, no, no, he walks into this restaurant and nobody says anything about it. Okay. Here's some more stuff just about who this guy is and in addition to the pin locks off in war, whether permitting a small brimmed alpine fedora with a feather in the band adorned with emblems from countries he traveled to. Absolutely not.

Okay. He, he'd, he'd simultaneously dressed in later hosannet times and for a few years even sported a hitlerian mustache when he entered tournaments dressed in cocky shirt and pants and dirt tie and displaying that mustache. It was as if the dopper gamer of dare fury had been reincarnated. In his home hung Nazi flags in prominent locations and displays of airplanes, models of mishmits and junkers as well as 75s and you know, yeah, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not a world.

Jesus Christ. Me. Person. Look, the German language is accursed. That's right. Yeah. He also has just like a bunch of, he's like a giant oil painting of Adolf Hitler in his house and like a bunch of third right memorabilia.

So this guy's great. Yeah. No. Dope. Yeah. The next line from this book was lax was inarguably one of the most eccentric people in the New York chess community, which like I, I guess eccentric is a way that you could describe this guy walking around in the naughty pin with the Hitler mustache and later hosannet.

That is, that is certainly a centric, you know, you know, so later on in his life, right? But by the time he's about 60, he's on this tour when he's like, I think like 13. You know, when he's like 16 or 17, Bobby's going to be like a very serious anti-Semite. And you know, people are always like, well, how did this happen? It's like, well, it might have been the fact that he was hanging out with this Nazi guy as like a 12 year old. And I had an impact. And also on the trip to Cuba is this guy named Norman T. Whitaker, who quote, had also been

in prison for car theft and for raping a 12 year old. When he was in his 60s, he proposed marriage to a 14 year old. So this is a great crowd of chess players. Wow. Yeah. A real, real, real luminaries in the field. Best of the best. Yeah.

Frank Brady also notes, quote, Bobby sat up in front between the fascists and the con man, which is, is this, this is called foreshadowing. Sounds like dad's doing a great job, by the way. Yeah. This is where, no, no, this is where your kids got to be. Yeah. Get in there. Well, his dad is like fucked off somewhere.

Yeah. Oh, sorry. It's, it's, it's, it's, I don't know. It's good. No. This sounds fine. Um, I can't wait to hear how well the rest of the story goes. Well, the problem is, he just keeps winning that chess.

So at age 13, he wins the US Junior Chess Championship, which is like nuts. And okay, unfortunately, I do have to talk about one game of chess because there, Bobby Fisher plays, I mean, he plays a lot of famous game chess. He plays one very famous one at age 13, where, okay, so this game gets dubbed the game of the century. I'm talking about it literally all the fucking time. I'm sick of it. I'm very angry.

This game's fine. He plays like an, he's playing like a very strong international master. Um, and you know, he does, he plays a pretty cool game where like, he likes sacrifice, he famous sacrifices his queen and then uses his queen sacrifice to like get this attack and does all this stuff with his knights in his rucks and everyone is like, loses their mind. Yeah, exactly. Unbelievable.

Yeah. And you know, okay. On the one hand, like this is a pretty good game of chess. On the other hand, I can open YouTube right now and find like a thousand games of chess that are way cooler than this that aren't the product of like domestic operation paperclip. So this is, this is, this is, this is, okay, this is the extent of which I'm going to talk about the game of the century because I'm sick of people talking about it. Okay.

Um, yeah. But unfortunately, I do have to mention her to chess people will like attempt to murder me in my sleep. So yeah, chess people, you hope you're not, I hope you're now satisfied. I have briefly covered this one game. See, I'm not worried about that at all. I feel like it could beat the shit out of chess people in a fight. Maybe.

It's been though their time in chess books, they have, I don't know, they have suspiciously high level state contacts, which is not, I don't know, you wouldn't think that was true, but these guys know a lot of intelligence agencies. Yeah. Well, that's fair. So at age 14, Bobby Fisher becomes the American chess champion. And Robert, you might be asking, how did a 14 year old win the US Open and become the American chess champion?

And part of it is just that the Americans suck at chess. Yeah, that sounds right. And the other thing that's going on here is that Bobby Fisher, you know, okay, so like he realizes that Americans aren't very good at chess. And so he learns Russian in order to read Russian chess books. And he just keeps doing this his entire life. He just keeps learning languages, like specifically to read chess books that are in other languages. And so, you know, he starts, he starts reading, like he starts like reading these things.

And you know, while, while, while all of this is happening, Bobby Fisher starts getting investigated by the FBI. Okay. Which. Uh oh. Okay. So he, he's. That's bad, right?

You don't want to get investigated by the FBI. Yeah. I mean, he's being investigated by the FBI for like a third of his life, but somehow it's the third of his life where he doesn't think that he's being investigated by the FBI. Oh. Which is a very, very strange. So the reason is this is happening is that the FBI thinks that his mom was working for the Soviets.

Okay. And okay, it turns out that not only was she not working for the Soviets, she'd actually gotten kicked out of the Communist Party. But you know, it's the FBI, they're not going to let something as petty as, you know, reality get in the way of their sort of domestic like espionage operations. And this gets like so serious that like they are the FBI is infiltrating TV shows. Like the crews of TV shows that Bobby is going on to like see if he's a Soviet spy. His mom starts drilling him about what to say if the FBI shows up at your door, which

is apparently, quote, I have nothing to say to you. Yep. That is, no, I mean, that is the thing that you say if the FBI shows up at your door, come back with a warrant. I'm not speaking to you without a lawyer. Nothing the fuck else. So I mean, actually, honestly, this is the first time mom has given him good advice. Yeah.

But like, you know, I feel really bad for her because it's like, she, she, well, she, she also, she's also the only person in Bobby Fisher's life who ever attempts to stop him from playing chess. But she does this by going to like chess psychiatrist and being like, is he addicted to chess, but they're all chess psychiatrists and they're like, no, I don't think you're going to get good information from a chess psychiatrist. So, okay, later on in life, Bobby Fisher is going to get absolutely obsessed with the idea that he's being spied on and people like coming to kill him.

And on the one hand, this is just like his own sort of like dissent and conspiracy, conspiracy theories. But on the other hand, like, it's hard to argue that the fact that the US government was in fact spying on him for a bunch of his life, like did not play a role in this. I mean, given the period of time that this is, if you are someone who is even moderately prominent in a thing that might put you in contact with people outside of the United States, you're being spied on by the US government. Okay.

So one of the big things happens is Bobby Fisher is trying to go to the USSR to play against the Russian chess players. And you know, so the Americans hate this, but okay, so what the larger backs were here is because Bobby Fisher is now the US chess champion, he gets invited to this like tournament in Yugoslavia. And if you place high enough in this tournament, you get a chance to be in another tournament and that if you and if you win that tournament, you can become the world, you can play the guy, you can play the world champion and become the world champion.

So he goes to this thing, right? And while he's in Yugoslavia, well, he's, he has to go to Yugoslavia, but he's like, okay, I'm going to go to the Soviet Union because it's like close. And the Soviets are like, sure, 15 year old Bobby Fisher, like you can come be a guest in our country because you're good at chess. So Fisher shows up to the USSR and like he like steps off the plane and just immediately starts demanding that the Soviets like bring out their best chess players to play him. The Soviets are like really, dude, like we brought you here as a guest and you are yelling

at us to bring out your best chess players. So eventually they bring out a guy named Petrosian, who is like, this guy is four years out from becoming the world champion. Like he is a good, he is like good at chess, right? Pretty good at chess. Yeah. But Fisher's pissed off because he's not the current world champion. And then immediately Fisher starts asking how much he's going to get paid for playing

Petrosian. And Petrosian's like, what the fuck are you talking? What do you mean? You, you came like. You Soviet Union. If you have no money. Oh, they, they have money, it's, it becomes clear very quickly in this story. They do in fact have money.

But he's like, he's like, what, what, what, what do you mean? Like you came to stay as a guest here and now you are demanding to get paid money for playing us. Like what is happening here? And you know, and Fisher just gets progressively more and more mad as this goes on because he wants to play like, like, like actual like tournament games and they're just playing like speed chess and he just gets like progressively angrier and okay. So there is a very important event in the life of Bobby Fisher that happens next.

And there's, there's a lot of disputes over what exactly happened. The claim at the time was that Fisher, like standing right next to his like English, like his trans English translator starts yelling about like, quote, these Russian pigs. This is the way that I've seen it reported in a lot of the sort of books and articles about him. This is what gets reported to the Russian press. Like Brady, who's Fisher's biographer claims that Fisher actually said pork and was complaining about his food, but the translator got the confused word for pork and pig.

But whatever happens, like this turns into sort of like a firestorm, right? Because you know, this American kid came here and then starts screaming about Russian pigs and the Soviets are like, okay, you like can't stay here now. And okay, so this means that Bobby, Bobby still has time before this tournament and he's like, okay, where are we going to go? And then from left field, by God, is that Tito's music? Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

Is he coming in with a steel chair? Yep. He is. He's about to beat the shit out of who was who was in power on the Soviet Union at this point. I, I probably Khrushchev, he's about, he's about to hit Khrushchev from the high wire with a steel chair. God, man, I just every time Tito comes into a story, you know, things are about to get

fun. But you know what else makes things fun? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? Is it buying them? Yep. That's your goddamn right. There's nothing besides buying products and services that makes anyone happy. And that's the truth.

That's science. That's mathematics. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying

to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

Ugh. Alright, please continue, man. So Bobby is about to get kicked out of the Soviet Union. Hugo Slavia, who is like the great socialist enemy of the USSR, swoops in and is like, hey, Bobby Fisher, yeah, come here, play our grandmasters, it'll be great. And you know, Fisher is like incredibly happy about this. And I just got to say this, man, Tito, buddy, this man is going to do things to your country that if you found them out would cause all of your organs to explode simultaneously,

like you should have left them to the Soviets. But unfortunately, Tito offers hospitality to this terrifying American man. And you know, the product of this is that Fisher like goes to Hugo Slavia and loves it there. And for like the rest of his life, he's going to, well, okay, and this is where we need to be sort of careful. He's going to like, he's going to like Belgrade a lot specifically. Hell yeah.

Um, this is going to become important later. Hey, Belgrade's dope city. Love it. Yeah. If you want to get a pile of perfectly cooked processed meat walked to you by a waiter who is actively smoking a cigarette over the plate and enjoy the entire experience, Belgrade is the city for you. Um, I mean that unironically, uh, great town.

Love it. Yeah. Fisher, I don't know. He, he, he, he, he, he just enjoys that a lot and other stuff that he's doing there at Questionwork. We'll get into that a little bit. Um, okay, so he's playing this tournament right and everyone expects him to just sort of bomb out because he's like 15, but instead what he does is he draws like a bunch of the

best players in the world and you know, and he beats, he beats some people, he draws like three of the best Soviet players. And somehow, you know, this like 15 year old kid from the, from like the, just the absolute provincial backwater United States, uh, like qualifies for the champion's tournament and simultaneously becomes the youngest grandmaster in history and it's at this point that everyone starts to lose their minds for Bobby Fisher. Okay. Like all of the American chess scene, everyone's suddenly talking about like, oh my God, there's

this kid who could beat the Soviets at chess. Like he gets, he gets a full editorial in the New York times. Um, suddenly there's this like, there's like the great white hope against the Soviet chess machine and you know, every, like from this point on, like everything that he does just becomes like inlayered in like levels and layers and layers and layers and layers of propaganda because the US had finally done the thing that it always does when it used to fight communism. They had found their own Nazi.

So even, even at like this age, Bobby is very, very anti-Semitic, um, he's better at hiding it than he's going to be later on, but he is doing stuff like, for example, the encyclopedia adjudica, I like put him in on their list of like famous Jewish people because his parents are Jewish and he writes them a letter saying he is not Jewish and they need to take him off his list and then he starts doing something he's going to do for the entire rest of his life, which is threatened to whip out his dick to show that he's not circumcised and thus not Jewish. Wow.

Which is like, can't argue with that perfect evidence there, I don't know, I have nothing on this, it is a very, very weird kind of anti-Semitism and I need everyone to like, okay, whenever you think of biofisher, you need to understand that he is at all times two steps away from just whipping out of his dick to prove how not Jewish he is. Like he, he's going to like, there's another time he does have been racist into the proud tradition of whipping out your dick at a chest tournament. That's heartbreaking. Yeah, I, it's, he's, I don't know, it's, it's, it's, he's, he is a wildly weird anti-Semitic

person. There's another story of his sort of early anti-semitism, so in 1962, he's, he's doing this interview, he's, I think, how old is he, like, 18 or 19 at this point. There's this Harper's Magazine interview where I, he says, quote, yeah, there are too many Jews in chess. They have taken away the class of the game. They don't dress too nicely. That's what I don't like.

And I want to remind everyone here that like, okay, Bobby Fisher is about to become like the, like literally the symbol of American chess, right? And, you know, a genuine sort of geopolitical and moral hero of the US. And this was just in Harper's Magazine. Like he just said that, he's, and that, and that's, and this isn't like, it's not like he's saying this to like, I don't know, like a tiny village paper in like rural Idaho or something like that. The journalists actually read this, right?

But you know, there's something that's going to happen time and time again in this story. Is it like, the press is just like, they'll, they'll see him say something like, like this, and then they're going to see some pretty good chess and they're just instantly going to forget about it. And everyone's going to go back to comparing him to like Mozart and like Picasso and immediately forget what he thinks about the Holocaust. Yeah. He, he, he's a literal Nazi, but he's good at chess.

So who can say if it's bad? Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. But back in being good at chess for a little bit, um, Fisher qualifies for the candidates tournament, which is the tournament where like, if you win it, you get the right challenge of world championship. And like almost immediately after he gets there, he makes history of becoming the first

grandmaster ever to get into a fist fight with another grandmaster at a chess tournament. Okay. Now that's dope. That's, that's good. That's like, that's like Adam Sandler and fucking happy Gilmore. Yeah. So, all right. So I, I, I respect that.

Look, he's a Nazi, but that's pretty funny. Yeah. And then he does, he does another very, there's another very famous Bobby Fish and thing that happens here. And I'm just going to read this in the end game, Henry Stockhold, a chess player who was covering the match for the Associated Press, brought Bobby to a broth of one night and waited for him. When Bobby exited an hour later, Stockholm asked him how he enjoyed it.

And Bobby's comment, which he repeated other times, has been quoted chess is better. Huh. So this is a, this is a, a, a, a incredibly weird, weird dude. Yeah. Unfortunately for Bobby, he just gets like destroyed in this tournament and this leads to basically what becomes the Bobby Fisher chess special. He immediately starts screaming about how the entire tournament was rigged. And this is like enough that he gets an entire like giant, I think it was like a front cover

piece in sports illustrated called the Russians have fixed world chess. And okay. So this is kind of true. Um, what was happening at these tournaments that the Soviets would play these like fast draws against each other so that they could like preserve their energy for when they had to play non-Soviet players. But also there was, there was like, there was endless analysis of this, that's done by like people then and people now.

And basically what they concluded was like, okay, so the Soviets win every tournament, but the Soviets win every tournament because they have more good chess players than anyone else does. I mean, yeah, that, that makes sense. Yeah. Bobby is convinced it's because they're just like cheaters and he, this, this just like, he gets really, really angry at this. And you know, he's already embarrassing this grudge from the Soviets, like kicked him out.

And so at this point, he basically just like swears eternal revenge on the Soviet Union to the point where he refuses to play any tournaments that the International Chess Federation puts on because he's like, the International Chess Federation is like a tool of the Soviets. And I mean, here, man, like, yeah, well, okay, so this, this is, you know, as much as I've been saying, this is where he starts to get really weird. So there's this like, Yeah, because like, I guess it's like, that's like a little fucky, what they were doing, but that's not really.

Yeah, it's not really. Right. Like if you're playing them, you're still just playing a game of chess, like they haven't taken chess steroids. They're not, they're not hiding an extra queen up their sleeves. No, they're just like kind of coming in a little fresher than you because they fucked around slightly. But I don't know, cheating seems like a weird way to phrase that.

Yeah. And he just gets, he gets just utterly, like he, like on his like deathbed, he is going to be yelling about how the Soviets cheated him and like stuff like that. All right, man. And, you know, okay. And partially she just gets like, like, yeah, he turns into a kind of guy that is partly very recognizable and partly not. So his two favorite books in this period are 1984 and Animal Farm.

Oh boy. This is a, you know, things are going great. I'm going to guess he didn't read a lot of other Orwell. No. It's, you know, amazingly, those are like the two most normal things he's going to read from here on out. He also like, he starts listening to my, my, my ancient enemy, the evangelical preacher Billy Graham.

Oh no. No. And then he discovers a man named Herbert W. Armstrong's Radio Church of God. Oh no. No. That's not wrong. Oh boy. We should talk about Armstrong a little bit.

All right. So Armstrong is, he's cut from the same cloth in a lot, in a lot of ways. I'm fairly certain we've mentioned him once or twice on the show. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's like, he's like, I mean, he's like, okay. He's, I think he's technically Christian, but he's definitely technically Christian.

Well, here's the thing. Here's the thing. He's not a Trinitarian. And at that point, I, I, I start, I start looking at you real closely when you deny the Trinity as to whether or not you are actually a Christian. This is, this is the line that I feel someone who was not Christian has imposed on Christianity. See how they like imperialism this once. Like he's a, I have no opinion on that, but Armstrong is like a weird, real weirdo.

He's like a, he's a British Israelite, which is just like, yeah, I mean, he's, yeah, he's, he's these are the folks who believe that like British people are the real Jews and Jews aren't real. Like the actual Jewish people are not actual Jewish people. Um, which, which, you know, there's, there's a bunch of weird, like it, this kind of feeds into the creativity movement and we're going to get, we're going to get to that a little bit too. Oh good.

Yeah. So, yeah, I, you know, so what, what, there's a lot of things that he like gets involved with. Um, Fisher, Fisher, like, well, he doesn't quite join the church because there are some like prescriptions on stuff that the church has rules about like, you're not supposed to date anyone inside the church and Fisher's like, this is stupid. So he hasn't technically joined the church, but he's like, Bible classes fighting the power.

Yeah. But he also picks up something that like he picks up basically these guys are also sort of like, I don't know if proto is retro, but they're basically like, like Christian science people. So they like don't believe in doctors and they don't believe in vaccinations and Fisher like picks this up. He like is really hardcore on this don't go to doctors thing. And he also starts tithing the church 10% of his income dope.

And the other thing he starts doing around this period is he starts carrying around this blue cardboard box everywhere that he goes and he would just refuse to open it. Everyone would like, he's just walking around carrying this blue cardboard box and everyone's like, okay, Fisher, like what, what, what is this blue cardboard box and he just get really mad when anyone asked him. And one time he finally like relented to the pressure and opened it and inside of the box was the Bible, which, oh my God, like, this is something that like a youth pastor would the story like a youth pastor would tell one of those like this child's baby for Jesus

there, buddy. Yeah. It's so he gets very weird. So okay, so this goes on for like a couple he has a couple of years of being wrapped in his like, I'm not going to play for Fidei, I'm not going to he plays like very little chess, but eventually Fidei is able to sort of like entice him back to like play chess again by like changing the format of the world's tournament. So like people could the candidates turn about people can't collude.

And so while we Fisher like goes into this tournament and he just trivially easily destroys like three Soviet grandmasters and he, you know, he's very, very quickly and incredibly decisively, he just annihilates them. And this means that he has to write the challenge to world champion Boris Spassky, who at this point Spassky is like one of the few people on earth that Fisher has never beaten. But you know, this is a sensation in the U.S. suddenly like, you know, back back back back back when he like qualified for the candidates tournament like chess, like there was some coverage of it and like chess people talking now like everyone knows who Bobby Fisher is

like any entire country that this is this is like everyone and suddenly everyone's in the chess too. Like it's on the front page in New York Times. Yeah, it's one of those things like when people briefly cared about hockey because because of that team fought the Soviets. Yeah. Yeah. And like this is this is basically the 1970s version of like the the the Magnus Carlson

Hans Neilman like cheating but plug thing. And it sparks like until basically literally this month probably like the greatest chess boom America has ever seen. And you know, okay, so this this is like nobody really cares about chess. What's actually happening here is this is, you know, this is like this is basically American nationalism and sort of anti-communism. And Fisher is seen by everyone like including himself as as a cold warrior, a term that people took like incredibly seriously at this time.

And now it sounds like the tag off or like a ripoff Mortal Kombat character. Yeah. And you know, okay, like the stated reason for this is that like chess is like a big deal to the Soviets is ideologically important like Lenin like played chess and wanted everyone to play chess. Yeah. We got a. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the thing you have to understand about the Cold War is every single person on the face of the earth is completely insane during this entire period, right? This match has literally no effect on the Cold War, nothing. It does nothing. There was never a chance.

We could even conceivably have done anything. And I want everyone to keep this in mind as we tell as I tell the story of this world championship, because by the end of the story, the president of the United States is going to be personally involved in getting Bowie Fisher to play this game. Like this is this is a game of chess. They're just playing chess. This is complete. Everyone is completely deranged.

So okay. Now that we've prefaced this with the fact that like nobody nobody involved with this is even remotely sane. Bowie Fisher is like, okay, he's headed into his like world championship match with Boris Spatsky. They're going to play a bunch of games. One of them is going to win. There's a huge fight about the location that frankly doesn't matter that they settle on

Iceland. And this tournament, you know, it's it's going to be a huge deal. It has the largest prize pool of all time for a chess match. And Bowie Fisher takes a look at the most money a chess player has ever received for playing chess and is like, no, I want a bigger cut of the ticket sales. And they're like, Bobby, like if you if you take money from the ticket sales, like, we're going to lose money on this. And he's like, I don't care.

I literally will not play unless you give me money from the ticket sales. And they think he's bluffing, but he's not bluffing. He cancels his flight from New York to Iceland because they won't like pay him more. And this is also very funny because the head of the Icelandic chess Federation, who's like the guy who's been organizing this whole thing is a very hardcore anti-communist, right? And he's you trying to use this whole match is anti-communist propaganda. But you know, you get what you pay for, buddy. Like, yeah, you want to do anti-cap and anti-communist propaganda.

Have fun dealing with like this absolute capitalist asshole who just keeps extorting you literally every five seconds. And OK, so this this this this sort of saga of Fisher Fisher, like refusing to show up to Iceland continues until a chess journalist calls this British investment banker named Derek Slater, who puts like nine hundred thousand dollars in today's money into the price pool in order to get Fisher to play. And Fisher's still like, and at this point, Henry fucking Kissinger makes a personal call to Bobby Fisher and says, you have to play this game for America.

The United States of America requires you that you play this chess game. And this finally convinces Bobby to play. Now, the other thing that's that's very weird about this is OK, so this is like this is like, you know, high Cold War drama, right? So you would expect that Fisher's opponent, who is Boris Spasky, like the darling of the Soviet chess machine, you would expect him to be a communist. Yeah. But no, he's a czarist.

Oh, no, here is a quote from Spasky. As for my views, I'm a Russian nationalist and there's nothing scary about that. Don't be afraid. Some say that Russian nationalists is a nasty thing, most definitely an anti-Semite to racist and national Bolshevik know for a nationalist God exists in that and nations that respect each other. I'm a convinced monarchist. I remained a monarchist during the Soviet years and never tried to hide that.

I believe the greatness of Russia is connected to the activity of the national leaders represented by our czars. Wow. Strong take. OK. You know, I talked about this a bit earlier, but like this was the moment where I finally just became convinced that I spent like a bunch of time trying to find like a super grandmaster who has like normalish politics.

And the thing that I realized, yeah, there's something about just spending a lifetime playing Trusted Drives is completely bad. Like all of these people have the most nonsense politics I've ever seen. Like it's like looking through a poll board and you just find you find ideologies are like, how are you a czarist in like 2003? What is happening here? I mean, there are still czarists today. Like, yeah, there's there's many, many monarchists on Twitter at least that you can find.

And if you if you go to YouTube and you look up like Russian imperial anthems and stuff from the czarist area, you will find people being like, oh, for the days of Nikolai the second. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm not. I'm also not surprised that a chess guy in specific would be a monarchist. It is low key a monarchist.

It is true. But but the thing that's weird about this right is like all of the sort of like all of the like every single like major communist, I don't know if actually Stalin did, but like every like major communist person like Tito plays chess, Lenin plays chess, Che Guevara at one point like helps Fisher play a tournament in Cuba, like everyone plays chess. And then all of their chess players are like weird fascists and none of them are communists. It's it's oh God. I don't know.

I I'll never understand chess. So I but but clearly if you like chess a lot, you're problematic. So I think we can say that for certain. It's true. This is this is how I get canceled. So all right, this I'm just going to read a quote about end notes about what from end game about what Bobby Fisher does when he like finally shows up in Iceland after getting personally called by Henry Kissinger.

Several hours later, coming home from bowling in the early hours of the morning before returning to the hotel, Bobby sneaked into the playing hall to check out the conditions. After an 80 minute inspection, he had a number of complaints. He thought the lighting should be brighter. The pieces of the chess set were too small for the squares of the custom built board. The board itself was not quite right. It was made of stone and he thought wood would be preferable. Finally he thought that the two cameras hidden inside burlap covered towers might be distracting

when he began to play and the towers themselves looming over the stage like medieval battering rounds were disconcerting. So he's showing up at like four in the morning and he walks into the hall and he just starts bitching about all like the chess pieces are the wrong size and so okay the tournament organizers are like whatever we need this game to happen and they're just desperate for this match to happen and you know okay so chess starts to be played but in the words of John Boyce who cares about that midway through game one Bobby Fisher starts complaining that one of the cameras in the back is distracting so that the game like adjourns for the day

there's a thing in this period where like you play 40 moves and then everyone leaves and goes home and you come back and finish the game the next day. So Fisher comes in he plays one move and then he stands up on live TV walks to the back stage and spends 35 minutes of his own game time with his clock ticking down screaming at the organizers to take down the camera and okay they eventually give in but the next day the game is supposed to start and Fisher is nowhere to be seen. Fisher's team shows up his team is sort of like lawyers and like advice they show up and they tell them that Bobby Fisher will not play unless all cameras are removed from

the venue. Oh my god Bobby Jesus what a fucking brain Madonna it gets it this is this is we are we are like baby in the early mid game of Bob of Bobby doing this shit in this tournament um okay so he then refuses to even show up to the hall to see if the accommodations the organizers were like okay we'll move cameras and he like he won't even show up to like check if they're fine. So you know he just he's not there so the game starts right and Spassky's like okay I'm gonna start the game clock and Fisher is just still in his bed like in his underwear

in his hotel and eventually the organizers are like okay fine for one game we will remove all the cameras and Fisher goes I'm not gonna show up unless you give me back all of my time on my chess clock that I spent yelling like arguing with you about removing these cameras and the organizers finally are like come on man like that there has to be a line like you can't just not show up to your match and then demand we give you all of your time back because you were arguing with us so and they they everyone at every point in the story like expects Fisher is going to compromise he just doesn't he just does not show up for this game okay yeah so so we're now we're now on

day four right and the organizers are like he Fisher is like okay we need to wipe this game from the record I didn't lose this game you have to like forget that I didn't show up and they're like come on like you didn't show up to this game and so Fisher books a flight home to the US so it is now day four of the World Chess Championship Fisher is still refusing to play the New York Times on its front page publishes an article begging him to play like that's sad yeah he gets a second call it New York Times don't fucking simp for a fascist impossible challenge Richard Nixon personally invites him to the White House that is the least surprising part of this story also the fact that Henry Kissinger

would negotiate and you know okay we could reasonably ask ourselves at this point why is the Secretary of State and the President of the United States getting involved to make sure some like random asshole anti-semite plays a chess game and the answer is that like in so far as this game is is important anyway it's because you know it's about like symbols and sort of myths and Spatsky is like the representative of like the bureaucratic like terror apparatus of the Soviet Union who's being challenged by like this like lone individual manic manic genius of the free world but like okay if you think even take about two seconds think about what the US is doing while this is going on right okay like what what what

is Kissinger doing and the answer is using one of the like literally one of history's largest most most like bureaucratic organizations to delivering munitions from Tennessee to Tokyo in order to burn children alive in Vietnam and Cambodia to you know prop up an incredibly corrupt and tyrannical narco dictatorship so you know in in some sense right Fisher is is like he's someone he is kind of someone the Americans need right he's he's someone that like someone like Kissinger someone like Nixon needs to be the sort of like individualist hero to match the Soviets collective hero because otherwise everyone's gonna start questions about start like asking questions about the fact that like we also have our own terror

bureaucracy that is like murdering everyone in the street but like no hey look it's Bobby Fisher we're gonna like wave this like like shiny trinket in front of you and be like he is all of us and then meanwhile like okay like the great American collective hero is sitting in his underwear refusing to play like refusing to play chess because there's cameras in the room and even after all of this Fisher is still refusing to play and what what eventually convinces him is that like Boris Spatsky who by all rights at this point could simply have gone I beat him he refused to play me again I'm going home yeah it's like fine I I won't look like I will go talk to him we'll play a game be like backstage where there's no

cameras and Fisher like finally having gotten literally everything that he wants out of his temper tantrum like waits until 90 minutes before the match is going to start and finally agrees to play so the match starts again Fisher makes one move jumps out of his seat and starts screaming at the organizers that there's a camera again and at this point Spatsky who is like he has been putting up with Fisher's bullshit for like months now just like just snaps and just like walks out of the room and the this one referee has to convince both Spatsky and Fisher that they should actually play this game and eventually this guy who like absolutely should have had Kissinger's job because he's apparently just

a miracle worker like manages to convince both of them to play the game and at this point like the game after like a litany of bullshit to close in the secretary of state like cash infusions from British bankers that the thing like finally gets going and meanwhile in the US like this is such a big deal it's a good thing there's no other problems happening in the world at this point that these people could be focusing on this was the number one thing happening at the time yeah well okay here we're gonna get something about that so PBS puts together a special program specifically just to broadcast these games this is watched by over a million people here's from endgame so popular was the show that it crowded out

the baseball and tennis coverage normally seen in sports bars in New York and when the channel was covering the Democratic National Convention in Washington the stations were flooded with thousands of calls to have them put the chess match back on station officials gave into the viewers demands dropped the convention and went back to broadcasting the match so okay people of chess badia but like back in the match like nothing interesting happens it's not a very good match both of them are playing kind of badly Fisher wins and then he shows up to his medal ceremony and then in order to complain that there's not his name isn't engraved on the metal huh that is that that is that is that is Fisher winning

the chess world championship you know he at this point you know fish fisher is an American hero right like sure sounds like all the stuff he is a profoundly American figure and he comes back that is undeniable he sounds extremely American it's amazing so okay so he goes back to the US and he gets like he has a just infinite number of sponsorship deals and like branding stuff and everyone's talked to him and he just turns them all down um here's here's here's here's one last thing for men game the most fabulous offer came to Fisher in 1974 right after the Muhammad Ali George Foreman fight known as the rumble in the jungle in Zaire the Zaire government's offered Fisher five million dollars I think that's like that's

like 40 million dollars or something in modern money to play Anatoly Karpov in their country and what would have been a month-long championship chess match too short said Bobby how dare they offer me five million dollars for a month-long match this is like yeah this is thirty million dollars in today's money Ali receives twice that much for one night he didn't Muhammad Ali did not get five ten million no no but also Muhammad Ali's the sport that he played involved him destroying his brain by getting his skull smashed so yeah okay I understand why he might get more money yeah okay get get get this fucking next line it was after that match that Ali became began calling himself the greatest and Bobby took issue with that

too Ali stole it from me said Bobby I used the greatest for myself on television before he ever used it okay okay Bobby you don't get to copyright the term the greatest yeah and you don't get to complain that Muhammad Ali you see no no you know what I think we should do a hybrid chess boxing match between Ali no I would see the shirt oh my god it would have murdered him it would have been a mix he would have that man would have died in the ring it would have been would have been very funny oh unfortunately chess boxing will not become a popular thing until two months ago so yes we do yeah yeah yeah yeah and this is this is where we're gonna leave Fisher here for today at absolute peak of

his amazing and yelling at Muhammad Ali for calling himself the greatest because he did it first I think we can all agree chess was a mistake yeah yeah um Mia you want to plug your plugables before we we write out yeah so I I do a show called it could happen here that Robert is also on sometimes and other people are also on and it's good and you should listen to it and I'm also at it me chr3 on Twitter if you'd want to be there for some reason yeah yeah I have a book called after the revolution you can buy it by typing it in to any place that sells books Amazon or bookshop.org or whatever that places or just go to the ak press website you can buy after the revolution everywhere all right

folks until next week go go go play warhammer you know engage with the true sport of strategic masters the one that has a lot of chainsaws in it behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests it involves a cigar smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to

set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the Soviet Union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last Soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcast

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