My 60 Memorable Games

"It’s not clear how much of this book was written by Fischer and how much was written by a grandmaster called Larry Evans, who was a friend of his and a very strong player. Nonetheless, officially, this is Fischer’s only game collection . The 60 games begin in 1957 and go up to 1967, so it’s only 10 years. What is very attractive about the book – apart from the fact that Fischer was such an extraordinary player and analyst – is the honesty of his comments. There was always a simplicity to Fischer which was seductive, even if at times it could also be very crude. Now one thinks of Fischer as someone who would never admit to any kind of error or weakness, but this book sprang from an earlier part of his life. He’s laceratingly self-critical, which is quite unusual in these kinds of books. He uses phrases like, “I already knew that I had been outplayed.” Or, “I just underestimated the force of his reply.” It also contains three of his losses, whereas you tend to find in these “best of my games” books that it will all be wins. At the beginning, he quotes Emanuel Lasker, a great world champion of the early 20th century, saying that on the chessboard, “Lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of the lie; the merciless fact, culminating in a checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.” This is an aspect of chess which was especially compelling to me as an adolescent. There is no hypocrisy in it, no duplicity. Everything is open, you can’t hide and you can’t prevaricate. To people of a certain age, boys perhaps, that is very attractive. And Fischer, in that sense, never grew up. The games themselves, Fischer’s best games, have a fantastic clarity, which is particular to his style. A lot of the very greatest players, and particularly the Soviet players, rather relished high levels of strategic and tactical complexity. Fischer sought clarity, and achieving it is, in a way, more difficult. This is why sometimes comparisons are made between Fischer and Mozart. As a young player, learning chess, you may not be able to emulate it, but you can understand clearly what he is trying to do. It’s not sophisticated, it’s not deliberately obscure. That was very attractive to me, and many other people, coming to terms with the game at that period. Yes, but it’s deceptive because clearly he puts huge effort into it. Certainly he had a brain that cut through problems. Often, I suppose, that is the key to the great chess imagination – being able to see what the shortest route is from A to B, when it isn’t necessarily obvious. His play was very streamlined. No, but it was the first one I found inspirational, partly because he described not just the moves but the psychology, what was going on at the board. There’s the game he played against the Yugoslav player [Petar] Trifunovic, game number 33 in the book, played in Bled in 1961. Trifunovic was a very solid player, extremely hard to beat. At one stage Fischer writes “I was considering a move, Bishop to N5”. He gives it a question mark – denoting a blunder – and says, “Trifunovic seemed too quiet all of a sudden, and I suspected he’d tuned into my brain waves.” Fischer goes on to write that it was only because he had sensed his opponent’s unnatural stillness that “at the last minute” he saw that the move he was about to play, B-N5, would in fact have been a terrible blunder. The book has many of these kind of notes that give a tremendously vivid sense of the mental and psychological struggle. He transmits the true nature of top-flight chess, which is not just a question of reams and reams of variations, but also of the interplay between two human beings. Fischer used to say, “I don’t believe in psychology , I believe in strong moves.” In a way that’s true, but when you’re at the board you can’t not be aware of it. Of course the variations are also very deep and detailed. It’s one of those books where you need two chess sets, one for the board, and a pocket set to follow the variations, because Fischer had astonishing powers of calculation. It’s not an easy book, at that level. It’s not a book you could give to a beginner. No. These are books that repay constant reading and rereading. You couldn’t say that about books for a beginner – once you’ve read them, you throw them away or give them to your child, or the child of a friend."