Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

by Frank Brady

“You can’t win every game. Just do your best every time.”

Robert Frost once said about a successful education: “Just hanging around until you have caught on.”

old Arabic saying “Trust in Allah but tie up your camel.”

The reference text he consulted most frequently was what journalists were quick to describe as the “Big Red Book”—number 27 of the excellent Weltgeschichte des Schachs series—the games of champions—containing 355 games of Spassky’s, conveniently typeset with a diagram at every fifth move. Bobby never let the book out of his sight and carried it everywhere. It contained his own notes on Spassky’s games, jotted in pencil, with comments and question marks designating poor moves, exclamation marks designating good ones. Almost as a parlor trick, he would often ask someone to pick a game at random from the book, tell him who played it against Spassky and where the game was played, and he would then recite the game move by move. He had memorized more than 14,000 moves!