Bobby Fischer

Robert James Fischer was the eleventh World Chess Champion and the most famous American the game has known. A prodigy from Brooklyn, he won the first of eight US Championships at 14 — one of them, in 1963/64, with a flawless 11-0 score that has never been matched in that event.

Fischer's chess married tactical sharpness to a near-perfect technical command, and he prepared his openings with an obsessiveness ahead of his time. His 1972 victory over Boris Spassky in Reykjavík, framed as a Cold War duel between the US and the Soviet Union, drew the wider world to chess as no match had before.

He forfeited the title in 1975 rather than accept FIDE's match terms, then withdrew from public life, surfacing only for a 1992 Spassky rematch. He died in Reykjavík in 2008, aged 64.