
He joined the fringe Worldwide Church of God in his early 20s and was drawn to conspiracy theories about a global Jewish cabal.

īy the time he faced Spassky in 1972, the 30-year-old Fischer had grown paranoid, accusing opponents of trying to poison him.

As a teen, he obsessed over chess every waking hour, pouring through the archives at New York City's Marshall Chess Club to replay thousands of old games and develop new strategies. With a reported IQ of 181, Fischer was bored and restless in school, dropping out of high school at 16. Sadly, Fischer's preternatural genius at chess came at a cost to his personal life. But the match that cemented Fischer as America's first - and arguably its only - bona fide chess superstar was his much-hyped trouncing of the Soviet chess master Boris Spassky in 1972 to become the reigning world chess champion.
