Bobby Fischer, Caissa's favorite son. (The game of the century)

On October 17, 1956, Bobby Fischer, 13 years old and playing with the black pieces, defeated 26 year old American master Don Byrne (who had won the national championship just a few years earlier) with a queen sacrifice to win the Rosenwald Trophy in New York. At such a tender age, Fischer, through a combination of genius, obsession for the game, and cold blood, won the brilliancy of the century.

It's a common misconception that Byrne was completely suckered by the sacrifice. Although it's a seductive notion that Byrne so underestimated his unnervingly weird, precociously supercilious, little opponent that he blindly assumed Fischer had made a terrible blunder, the fact that Byrne saw the risk in accepting the sacrifice and played it anyway makes Fischer's nerve, and his understanding of hypermodern chess theory, even more impressive. Early in the game, Byrne moved the same bishop twice in a row, and lost tempo. Fischer pounced on the mistake, which must have seemed trivial to Byrne at the time. To try to disrupt Fischer's efforts to take advantage of Byrne's laggardly development and failure to castle his king, Byrne placed Fischer's queen in jeopardy. Fischer shrugged, moved his own bishop, and dared Byrne to take the queen. Going into the exchange, Byrne was aware that the queen sacrifice was likely to be a clusterfuck but he clung to the notion, that was about to be spectacularly discredited, that gaining a queen was worth almost any complications with regard to positional development.* Put simply, he was a master level player and thought the little kid was a sitting duck with his queen off the board. When the dust settled, Fischer had captured a rook and both Byrne's bishops, maintained his position advantage and controlled the tempo. Twenty moves or so later, Byrne was mated.

Fischer's life did not begin under happy circumstances, nor did Fischer turn out alright in the end. Geniuses don't always have happy endings. Fischer's last days were stained by bitter paranoia, appalling anti-semitism, and bouts of outright lunacy. Being good at a game, even being brilliant at a game, doesn't excuse any of this. But at the same time, nothing can take away from the audacious brilliance he displayed as a teenage prodigy. Teenage dreams, so hard to beat.

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* In a game Byrne ought to have been familiar with, and which 13 year old Fischer already was familiar with, Fischer's hero, Paul Morphy, 99 years earlier, had defeated Paulsen with a similar queen sacrifice. Fischer's ability to synthesize modern chess theory with the elegance of the romantic school makes me a little giddy.