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Question: |
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Eric Tangborn and I are writing a book about
lesser
known moments in Bobby Fischer’s chess career and have three
questions. |
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1. Recently Neil Brennan of the North Penn Chess
Club wrote me about a game published in Spring 1976 issue of
Zugzwang
(the journal of the King of Prussia Chess Club). |
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A.W. Conger- Bobby Fischer
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Golden Knights!? 6/27/55
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1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 Bg7 4.e4 d6 5.Bg5 h6 6.Bh4 O-O 7.f4 c5
8.d5
Qa5 9.Qd2 Qc7 10.Bd3 a6 11.Nb5 Qb6 12.Nxd6 1-0. ( If 12...Qxd6, then
13.e5 Qe7 14.d6 Qe7 15.exf6 Bh8 16.f5 g5 17.Bxg5 hxg5 18.Qxg5+ Kh7
19.fxe6#
- [Conger]. He gave the game in descriptive notation). |
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Fischer’s career (apparently short-lived) as
a correspondence
player is not well documented. Here is what I have been able to
find. |
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A. In My Seven Chess Prodigies John
Collins
writes that Bobby never played correspondence chess - but then Collins
didn’t meet Fischer till the spring of 1956 - when Bobby’s
postal career
would have appeared to have ended. |
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B. Chess Review, August 1955, has ratings
of 1198 for B. Fischer and 1274 for Conger. An R. Fischer is welcomed as
a new postalite in the May 1955 issue of Chess Review and assigned a
ratining
of 1200. B. Fischer is rated 1082 in March of 1956 and appears
again
with the same rating in the August issue of that year. The
appearance
is that he has stopped playing. Note that these postal ratings
were
approximately 500-600 points lower than over the board ratings of the
time. |
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C. Donald Reithel writes in my Legend on the Road
(pg 12) that he played Bobby in a prize tourney in 1955? |
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D. I seem to vaguely remember that Bobby wrote in
his Boys Life column that he once played in a Golden Knights
tourney.
Unfortunately I can’t pin down the exact column. |
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Can anyone add anything to this? |
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2. Fischer gave some simuls in Spain in
1970.
The game with Garcia Bachiller was pointed out by Edward Winter who
mentions
it was published in Bobby Fischer-su vida y partidas by Pablo
Moran.
Does anyone have a copy of this book? I’m wondering if it
might mention
more about Bobby’s activities. I also dimly recall seeing a
game
between Bobby and (Gomez!?) played in Spain at around this time.
I believe it was published in the last year in Ajedrez or Ocho
y Ocho, but again I can’t seem to put my fingers on it. |
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3. I would say the greatest gap in attempting to
complete a Bobby Fischer games collection is the 1958 match with
Matulovic.
Game one (Matulovic’s win) is widely publicized, but the other
three in
the 2.5-1.5 Fischer victory seem to have disappeared off the
planet. |
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This is what I know: |
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A. It was held July 20-26, 1958 at the Chess Club
Slava in Belgrade alongside a match between Bent Larsen and Milan
Vukcevic
(according to Milan). |
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B. Matulovic won game one and we have the score
( well-annotated in Edmar Mednis’ How to Beat Bobby
Fischer). |
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C. Standard sources have Bobby on the White side
of a French in game four but don’t list the result. |
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D. It was a training match according to Vukcevic
- presumably for the upcoming Interzonal. |
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E. IM Zoran Ilic of Nis, Yugoslavia, was told my
Matulovic that IM Bob Wade offered M.M. 1000 DM (roughly $600) for the
missing three games - MM said he didn’t have them. |
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F. In early 1999 IM Jeremy Silman (through Pal
Benko)
asked Bobby about the missing games. Bobby replied that he
didn’t
remember them, but thought they were published in the Yugoslav press of
the time. I’ve been told that Sahovski Glasnik and
Politika
published nothing of substance on the match. |
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Can anyone solve this mystery? |
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Sincerely, |
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Chess
is a scientific game and its literature ought to be placed on the basis
of the strictest truthfulness, which is the foundation of all scientific
research.