One game I never took the time to learn to play is Chess. Maybe this year will be the year that I learn, huh? Well, the troubled American chess master, Bobby Fischer is dead. (He was born an American but renounced his citizenship and moved to Iceland). He died at 64, which is awfully young! Given his history of peculiar behavior, I hope it was not suicide:

Bobby Fischer, the reclusive American chess master who became a Cold War icon when he dethroned the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky as world champion in 1972, has died. He was 64. Fischer died Thursday in a Reykjavik hospital, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said. There was no immediate word on the cause of death. Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, Fischer was a U.S. chess champion at 14 and a grand master at 15. He beat Spassky in a series of games in 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 by his idiosyncrasies. A few years after the Spassky match, he forfeited the title to another Soviet, Anatoly Karpov, when he refused to defend it. He dropped out of competitive chess and largely out of view, emerging occasionally to make erratic and often anti-Semitic comments. Fischer, whose mother was Jewish, once accused “the Jew-controlled U.S. government” of ruining his life. Read remainder of story HERE