I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. For several years earlier this decade, I had an extra reason to make a trip: Bobby Fischer, who moved to Iceland in 2005 after a series of international incidents. As I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, Fischer and my father were friends and colleagues on the U.S. chess circuit in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bobby wasn’t exactly known for being a friendly guy. But I still imagined visiting Reykjavik, spotting him on a park bench, and walking up to him to say, “Bobby, I’m Eliot Hearst’s son.” He’s a major figure in the mythology of my family, so of course I always wanted to meet him.

It was not to be: Fischer died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008.

Fischer is buried in Selfoss, a small town about 40 miles from Reyjavik. I have an Internet pal in Reykjavik named Halldor, and he passed along these photos of Bobby’s grave. They were taken by an American friend of his named Judith Gans, a singer and Icelandic music expert:

As I mentioned late last year, my father, Eliot Hearst, recently published a book called Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games. He spent many years writing the book with help from a co-author, John Knott, and it now stands as the definitive work about the topic. Blindfold chess is the art of playing without sight of the board or pieces—an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history.

I recently designed a full-fledged website for the book; this new site superseded the placeholder site I created last fall. You can now read the entire introduction, which gives a great overview of the psychology and history of blindfold chess, including the record-setting simultaneous exhibition performed by the legendary Miguel Najdorf in 1947. In that astonishing performance, Najdorf played 45 games at once without ever looking at a board.

My father just posted a blog item about Bobby Fischer’s skill at playing blindfolded. As I explained in a post of my own in 2007, Bobby and my father were friends on the professional chess circuit in the ’50s and ’60s. My father’s blog post about Bobby begins like this:

In our book Bobby Fischer is only rarely mentioned and, strangely enough, never in any direct connection with blindfold chess. This omission was mainly due to Bobby’s failure to play any serious, formal blindfold games or exhibitions. However, friends were familiar with his playing without sight of any board and pieces in all kinds of informal settings: taking a walk, riding on a train or plane, having dinner, partying, or relaxing on a day off in a tournament. His master opponents often had no chess set available, either. Virtually none of the scores of those many games were recorded for posterity. But, to no one’s surprise, Bobby was a formidable blindfold player.

For more about my father’s book, visit blindfoldchess.net.

I wrote a post last year about my father’s professional chess career in the ’50s and ’60s and his connection to Bobby Fischer. At the end of that post, I mentioned that he’s spent many years working on a big, definitive book about blindfold chess—the art of playing without sight of the board or the pieces. It’s an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history, and it’s deeply related to my father’s other main lifelong interest, psychology. (He retired from Indiana University in the mid-’90s after many years as a distinguished professor of psychology.) The book, which my father wrote with a co-author, John Knott, is now in the final stages of publication, and it should be out by the end of the year. I’ve designed a teaser site, blindfoldchess.net, that features a summary of the book and links where you can preorder a copy. I pushed the site live yesterday. Check it out.

When the book comes out, I’ll be posting an in-depth Q&A with my father about the rich intellectual and psychological history of this amazing skill.

Here’s a reprint of the book summary from the site:

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Last month I went to Tucson, Arizona, to help my father, Eliot Hearst, celebrate his 75th birthday. After retiring from his job as a distinguished professor of psychology at Indiana University, he moved to New York for three years and then re-retired to Arizona in 1998. He was born in Manhattan and grew up in Chelsea, long before the neighborhood’s gentrification.

During my Tucson visit, I spent an afternoon making scans of some highlights from his photo collection, and I was finally able to digitize the most treasured image from the Hearst family archive: a photograph of my father playing a casual game of chess with Bobby Fischer in August 1962. This is no novelty shot; my father was one of the top players in the United States in the 1950s and early 1960s, eventually earning the title of Life Senior Master. Both he and Fischer spent time at the Marshall Chess Club, which is still located on West 10th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, as it was back then.

My dad’s on the right:

At the time the photo was taken, my father was about to serve as the captain of the 1962 U.S. Olympic chess team; Bobby was the squad’s star player. It would be ten more years before Bobby’s cold-war proxy battle with Boris Spassky in Rejkjavik made him the most famous chess player in the world.

My father was a columnist for Chess Life for several years in the 1960s. After the 1962 Olympiad, which took place in Varna, Bulgaria, he wrote a column about the tournament, and his column was accompanied by this illustration of the team. My dad’s in the center, Bobby’s at upper right:

Here’s a list of all the chess luminaries in the illo, from left to right: Larry Evans, Pal Benko, Edmar Mednis, Eliot Hearst, Robert Byrne (the chess columnist for The New York Times from 1972 to 2006), Bobby Fischer, Donald Byrne.

My father beat Fischer in a tournament game in 1956, a mere three rounds after young Fischer defeated Donald Byrne in what became known as The Game of the Century. At chessgames.com, you can play through the game where my father defeated Fischer.

For many years my father and a co-author have been writing a huge book about the history and psychology of blindfold chess. At this point he’s clearly one of the world’s top experts on the subject. He recently completed work on all but the smallest details, and the book is scheduled to be published sometime next year. I’ll definitely be posting more info when the time comes.