Former world chess champion Bobby Fisher died on 17th January in Iceland at the age of 64. The United States’ first and only world champion, he is still regarded as the greatest natural chess player the world has ever witnessed.

At 14, he became the youngest ever U.S. open champion. He became the youngest international grandmaster at the age of 15. In 1972, he became the world chess champion after beating Russian Boris Spassky in a classic cold war showdown. An eccentric person, he refused to defend his title in 1975, when FIDE, the international chess federation did not accept his numerous conditions (64, supposedly) for the match, resulting in FIDE awarding the title to his challenger Anatoly Karpov.

In 1992, he competed against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia despite the United Nations sanctions on that country, thus alienating the United States authorities who issued an arrest warrant for him. He never returned to the United States.

Fisher always insisted that he was still a world champion because he had lost a title match. He also charged that all matches sanctioned by FIDE involving Karpov and Kasparov were fixed. In the latter stages of his life, he became well-known for his anti-American and anti-semitic outbursts and after the September 11 attacks, in a live radio interview with a radio station in Philippines, he praised the strikes.

He was detained in Japan for a few months in 2005 for allegedly using a revoked U.S. passport but managed to gain Icelandic citizenship and remained in Iceland until his death. A moody and flaky genius, Bobby Fisher will forever be remembered as one of the greatest chess players ever to have played the game.