Arvid Härnqvist – 21st October 2011

 

 

 

 

 

The last couple of weeks I’ve been, mildly speaking, obsessed with Bobby Fischer.

For those of you reading this who don’t know who he was, Bobby Fischer is widely considered the best chess player of all time. He won his first of eight U.S. Championships at the age of 14 and was crowned world champion between 1972-1975. In the 1963–64 U.S. Championship Bobby Fischer won the final game 11–0, the only perfect score in the history of the tournament.

Bobby Fischer played and won the most famous chess game of all time against Soviet rival Boris Spassky in 1972. The game was broadcasted all over the world, since it was considered a Cold War confrontation between America and the Soviet Union.

So, why am I writing about Bobby Fischer, you may ask?

Well, there was one thing about Bobby Fischer’s game style that made him completely different to any chess player before or after.

Every official chess game played is stored in a huge database. This database records every player’s exact moves. And it’s very common that a chess game plays out the exact same way as one that took place 10 years earlier.

What made Bobby Fischer special was that in almost every game of chess that he played, he did something radical, a move in the game that no one had seen before.

When a move like this is played, it creates something called a novelty game.

Novelty games are the key to both Bobby Fischer’s fame and his success.

And that is really the point that I’m trying to make here. That whatever you do in life, whether it’s about advertising, shopping or love, you have to differentiate. You have to take a look at the world around you, see what they are doing, and then do the complete opposite.

And you have to love every second of it.

PS:

After the game against Spassky a journalist came up to a thrilled Fischer and asked him: “Now that you are the world champion, what do you wanna do now?”

Fischer answered: “I just wanna play more chess”.