In the game, he sacrificed his queen and won. He was 13 when he played a game against an American player named Donald Byrne. He became well known around the world in 1956. Several years later, he began to play at the Manhattan Chess Club. Bobby learned how to play from the instructions. Chess career įischer learned to play at the age of six.
Fischer later told the chess player Zita Rajcsanyi that Nemenyi sometimes came to his Brooklyn apartment and took him to places. Regina and Nemenyi had had an affair in 1942, and he gave her money to help her raise her child every month, paying for Fischer's schooling until he died in 1952. The next year, they moved to Brooklyn, New York.Ī 2002 article in The Philadelphia Inquirer said that Paul Nemenyi, a doctor, was Bobby's biological father, not Hans-Gerhardt. In 1948, the family moved to Mobile, Arizona, where Regina taught in an elementary school. They divorced in 1945 when Bobby was two years old, so he grew up with his mother and older sister. The two married in 1933 in Moscow, USSR, where Regina was studying medicine at the First Moscow Medical Institute. Louis, Missouri, and later became a teacher, a nurse, and a doctor. His mother, Regina Wender Fischer, was a Polish-Jewish American citizen. His birth certificate said that his father was Hans-Gerhardt Fischer, a German. Fischer was born in Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, Illinois on March 9, 1943.