http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080118/ap_ ... it_fischer
REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.
Fisher died in a Reykjavik hospital on Thursday of kidney failure after a long illness, his spokesman, Gardar Sverrisson, said Friday.
Born in Chicago and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., Fischer faced criminal charges in the United States for playing a 1992 rematch against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia in defiance of international sanctions. In 2005, he moved to Iceland, a chess-mad nation and site of his greatest triumph.
As a champion, he used his eccentricities to unsettle opponents, but Fischer's reputation as a genius of chess was soon eclipsed, in the eyes of many, by his idiosyncrasies.
"Chess is war on a board," he once said. "The object is to crush the other man's mind."