The Chess Player

It seems as though the newspapers have been full of stories about the death of Bobby Fischer this week (I count eight in The Guardian alone), and I’m slightly at a loss to understand why. Perhaps it’s the horrendous contrast between his sheer genius at chess, and the fact that he was so piss-poor at playing the game of being a human. It may be that we look at examples like Fischer where the gift of genius comes at the cost of simple humanity and give heartfelt thanks that we were not cursed with such a gift. 

 

Reading some of this week’s articles about Fischer written by writers on the game of chess, I was also somewhat reminded of Charles Harness’ short story The Chess Players (found in his book The Rose).  It’s about a group of chess players who critique the abilities of one of their number, completely oblivious to the fact that he is, in fact, a pet rat. The only important thing, in their eyes, is whether he is any good as a chess player.