Chess champion Fischer dies aged 64

Controversial former world chess champion Bobby Fischer has died at the age of 64 in his adopted home of Iceland.

American-born Fischer, who renounced his US citizenship, moved there in 2005.

His spokesman said Fischer died in a Reykjavik hospital yesterday. There was no immediate word on cause of death.

Fischer, a fierce critic of his homeland, became world-famous when he defeated the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky in 1972.

Fischer was wanted in the US for playing a 1992 rematch against Cold War rival Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions.

An American chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15, Fischer became an symbol of Western dominance when he dethroned the Soviet Union's Spassky in 1972 in a series of games in Iceland's capital, Reykjavik, to claim America's first world chess championship in more than a century.

But his reputation as a genius of chess soon was eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.

A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Russian, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it. He then fell into obscurity before resurfacing to play the exhibition rematch against Spassky on the exclusive Montenegro holiday island of Sveti Stefan.

Fischer won, but the game was played in violation of US sanctions imposed on Slobodan Milosevic, then president of Yugoslavia.

Former Russian chess champion Garry Kasparov said today that Fischer’s ascent of the chess world in the 1960s was “a revolutionary breakthrough” for the game.

“The tragedy is that he left this world too early, and his extravagant life and scandalous statements did not contribute to the popularity of chess,” he said.

In July 2004 Fischer was arrested in Japan and threatened with extradition to the US to face sanctions-busting charges. He spent nine months in custody before the dispute was resolved when Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph, granted him citizenship.

In his final years, Fischer railed against the chess establishment, alleging that the outcomes of many top-level chess matches were decided in advance.

Instead, he championed his concept of random chess, in which pieces are shuffled at the beginning of each match in a bid to reinvigorate the game.

“I don’t play the old chess,” he said when he arrived in Iceland in 2005. “But obviously if I did, I would be the best.”