Birth of Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer was born on 9 March 1943 in Chicago. An American chess grandmaster, Fischer was a prodigy who won the U.S. championship at fourteen and became a grandmaster at fifteen. In 1972 he won the World Championship in Reykjavik by defeating Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union, ending a long period of Soviet dominance in a match that became a Cold War symbol. He then refused to defend his title in 1975, and was stripped of it. He disappeared from public view, played a return match against Spassky in Yugoslavia in 1992 in violation of United States sanctions, and lived afterwards as a fugitive. He ended his life in Iceland, which granted him citizenship.

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