Post by stoic on Dec 3, 2021 10:10:55 GMT
One thing is sure: each of them was a real chess genius with an absolutely brilliant memory. Here is an example
Unfortunately, outside chess many of them were mediocre personalities with limited intelligence. Kasparov is, for example, a fanatical supporter of a pseudo-scientific "new chronology" movement. I watched an interview with its founder once, and he's just crazy, you don't need to be a psychiatrist to understand it. And yet Kasparov defended this heresy with all his heart.
And here is the last interview of Fisher. I can't say he's totally sane either.
So, I agree with Zweig 100%:
"All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites
into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
In principle I have always found it easy to understand that such a unique, ingenious game would have to produce its own wizards. Yet how difficult, how impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active person who reduces the world to a shuttle between black and white, who seeks fulfillment in a mere to-and-fro, forward-and-back of thirty-two pieces, someone for whom a new opening that allows the knight to be advanced instead of the pawn is in itself a great accomplishment and a meager little piece of immortality in a corner of a chess bookโsomeone, someone with a brain in his head, who, without going mad, continues over and over for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to devote all the force of his thought to the ridiculous end of cornering a wooden king on a wooden board!"
Unfortunately, outside chess many of them were mediocre personalities with limited intelligence. Kasparov is, for example, a fanatical supporter of a pseudo-scientific "new chronology" movement. I watched an interview with its founder once, and he's just crazy, you don't need to be a psychiatrist to understand it. And yet Kasparov defended this heresy with all his heart.
And here is the last interview of Fisher. I can't say he's totally sane either.
So, I agree with Zweig 100%:
"All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites
into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
In principle I have always found it easy to understand that such a unique, ingenious game would have to produce its own wizards. Yet how difficult, how impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active person who reduces the world to a shuttle between black and white, who seeks fulfillment in a mere to-and-fro, forward-and-back of thirty-two pieces, someone for whom a new opening that allows the knight to be advanced instead of the pawn is in itself a great accomplishment and a meager little piece of immortality in a corner of a chess bookโsomeone, someone with a brain in his head, who, without going mad, continues over and over for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to devote all the force of his thought to the ridiculous end of cornering a wooden king on a wooden board!"
Without chess their lives would be completely unremarkable. Yet on this field they could dig deep...
