My Degrees
Mathematicians have been known to note a certain type of relationship, their Erdös numbers and for movie stars there are degrees of Kevin Bacon. We may define a similar number for chess players – the number of steps we need to go through to find a player who played us who played somebody (or chain of somebodies) who played the target. My Bobby Fisher number is two, as is my Alexander Alekhine number, since I have played chess players who played each of them. Via Fisher and Alekhine and a few others, I have second or third degree connections with most of the other twentieth century World Chess Champions.
This, of course, doesn’t make me any less of a fish = weakie chess player.
While playing in some kind of (bridge?) tournament when I was in the Army, I met another soldier who played chess, and we decided to form a chess team. He turned out to be a very strong player (a former national junior champion), and was acquainted with our mutual contemporary, Fisher. I think that they had been to some international junior tournaments together. He used to say “I beat Bobby Fisher once” – pausing before adding – “at miniature golf.” He was my link to Fisher.
Since he was a psychologist, I often discussed Fisher’s pathology (already evident in those nine or ten years pre-world championship) with him.
Reading about Fisher lately, I thought back on him and decided to look him up on the internet. It turned out that he had been a psychology professor for some thirty years, so I suspect he might have had more to add to the story – unfortunately, the source in which I encountered that information turned out to be his obituary. Like Fisher, and an increasing number of my contemporaries, he has passed beyond this particular vale.