PART 1 • Stone knives and bearskins – what did chess players do before computers?
er, Reti, and Tartakower among them) were based in Vienna. In America, New York was traditionally the center of chess activity( this is now beginning to change, however); when Fischer was a kid, he made his home in New York and belonged to the city ' s major chess clubs. In fact, Bobby was practically raised by Jack Collins whose house was essentially a chess library and museum, and the base for the small Hawthorne Chess Club. New York was the home of many strong players at the time Bobby was growing up.
That brings me to the second point: practically all Bobby did, from the time he was quite young to adulthood, was to play, read about, and think about chess. He did poorly in school because nearly everything except chess bored him terribly. His nearly monomaniacal obsession with chess is well-documented. He amassed a sizable chess library, books and magazines which he pored over and annotated( chess books which Fischer owned containing notes he ' d scrawled in the margins are highlypriced collector items today).
Of course, being obsessed with a hobby or pursuit, or devoting your life to it, is not a guarantee that you ' ll be in any way successful at it – and that brings me to the third point. Bobby was gifted with a natural talent for the game, and it was a happy accident that he discovered chess given that he already innately possessed the“ right tools for the job”.
Bobby ' s success can be attributed to the combination of several factors: being the right person in the right place at the right time with the right specific interest. And by far the biggest factor in his success was his own hard work – tons and tons of it, made especially hard by the absence of computerized chess tools.
The advent of chess computers, especially of playing and database programs, not to mention Internet communications( much of which will be considered later in Part One of this book), eliminate at least a couple of the hurdles which Fischer was forced to herculean lengths in order to overcome, and which held back many young players like myself in the pre-computer era. Among those hurdles are opportunity, feedback, and time, which we ' ll revisit later in Part One. Owning a chess playing software program provides you with limitless opportunities to play chess, opportunities which were few and far between for those of us who weren ' t blessed to live in a major city with a thriving chess scene. A chess playing program will also analyze your games, showing you where you went wrong and how you could have played better, thereby giving you feedback on your chess play. Chess programs with database capabilities save you literally hours of time: instead of
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