Bobby Fischer Dies...

...Completely off-topic, but for a good reason. When I re-discovered chess playing around March last year, the first chess book I read was on Fischer's sensational defeat of Boris Spassky in 1972. And the inevitable conclusion was that this man was a chess genius, beating some of his opponents for the world crown 6-0, virtually impossible in Grandmaster Chess. But then he seemed to vanish for the last 25 years, adding to his mystery and the legend, resurfacing to praise the 11th September attacks on America, his homeland. His political views may have been extreme, but he was a complete gentleman while playing chess, as his first game against Spassky in 1972 showed, and over the board the perfect, almost flawless chess player. For me, he was the greatest chess player of all time, and there is almost poetic irony in his death aged 64. It is the number of squares on a chessboard.