AFort Lauderdale News Fort Lauderdale, Florida Sunday, September 12, 1965 - Page 35
Life and Games of Bobby Fischer
A few weeks ago I mentioned Frank Brady's “Profile of a Prodigy”: The Life and Games of Bobby Fischer.
The 75 annotated Fischer games offer an instruction in some fine points of chess manipulation. This position is selected at random from one of the games.
Fischer has picked up an extra Pawn, but White has a Knight Fork in operation. If it works, the gain of the Pawn would be offset. Black avoids the fork with R-Q8, intending to play the other Rook to B8 if the White Knight took the Black Bishop, which is what happened. Then Black naturally ate up the White Bishop and Rook in exchange for a single Black Rook. This must have surprised White. One might wonder why instead of NxB, White did not try to prevent the advance of the second Rook, and play RxP instead. Of course this would lead to B-R3 with both White Rooks sliced by the Bishop, and would cause White to play NxB after all, letting the Rook through anyway. Going over the games with an effort to understand the ideas, and aided by the notes given and the diagrams, will be a good exercise in winning chess, and should indeed expand your thinking horizon.
