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Pawn Sacrifice, a new film directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai , Blood Diamond) and featuring Tobey Maguire as Fischer, carefully draws out that initial trajectory, hitting the familiar beats of his prodigy and uneven psychosis, culminating with the win in Iceland. It's a tidy distillation, and not entirely bad in a good sports-movie kind of way, but ultimately Pawn Sacrifice refuses to engage with the deeper weirdness that colors the discourse on American Hero Bobby Fischer, the stickier parts that don't really go anywhere but in a sad circle.Fischer had an IQ of 181 and a devastatingly beautiful sensibility over a chessboard, but he was also a creep and a Holocaust denier who kept boxes of Nazi propaganda.
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According to Frank Brady's recent Fischer biography Endgame, Fischer had four serious relationships with women, all relatively late in life, and all unsurprisingly bizarre in their own way. The first was a young woman named Petra Stadler, introduced to him by Boris Spassky in 1988. They were involved for much of 1990; two years later she married Russian grandmaster Rustem Dautov, and in 1995 she wrote a book, published in Germany as Bobby Fischer—Wie er wirklich ist—Ein Jahr mit dem Schachgenie (Fischer as He Really Is: A Year with a Chess Genius).The second was with a young Hungarian chess player named Zita Rajcsanyi, who sent a letter to Bobby in 1991, when she was 17. They began to correspond, and at some point in the next three years, he fell into a love that was ultimately unrequited. He proposed to her at least twice, even after she had a child with another man. There is nothing more humanizing than heartbreak, and it is hard to not feel a twang of empathy upon this 1994 note of apology, written to Zita after what one imagines a typically awful night: "Please forgive all of the prideful mistakes I have made regarding you, I am now paying for everyone a thousandfold. I still hope to win you back someday soon and if I do I'll never let you go, to be sure. I'm sorry I behaved like such an ass with your sister. I never seem to learn. That's why I'm such a loser in the game of life."On Motherboard: The Slow Race to Solve Chess
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