On October 17, 1956, an extraordinary chess game played in New York City quickly echoed across the entire globe. Played by a 13-year-old chess upstart from Brooklyn, this masterpiece literally took the chess world by storm with its stunning sacrificial onslaught. Regarded as one of the most famous games of all time, the architect of this encounter was none other than Robert James "Bobby" Fischer.
The Birth of the "Game of the Century"
The sheer brilliance of his victory over the highly experienced Donald Byrne at the third Lessing J. Rosenwald Trophy led Hans Kmoch to bill the encounter as the "Game of the Century" in the December 1956 issue of Chess Review, a title that permanently stuck. In an interesting misprint, although the magazine featured a front-cover picture of a young Fischer and instructed readers to go to page 370, the game on that page turned out to be the equally impressive Smyslov-Pachman encounter from the 1956 Moscow Olympiad. Nevertheless, Fischer's breathtaking performance proved to be his calling card as a potential world champion-in-the-making.
Global Impact and the Soviet "Fischer File"
Such was the impact of this game that it even featured prominently in the leading Soviet chess magazines of the day, prompting the Russians to start compiling a "Fischer file." Before this game, Fischer was untitled and little-known outside of New York, let alone the United States. However, after this victory, everyone knew who he was. Just a little more than two years after this first blow of his trumpet, he was playing in the Candidates tournament as the world's youngest grandmaster and was seriously talked up as a future world title contender.
Fischer's opponent in this historic match, Donald Byrne, was a formidable player in his own right. He was the younger and more affable of the famous playing Byrne brothers, while his eldest brother, Robert, went on to become a grandmaster and a world title Candidate. Despite being a professor at Penn State University, a very strong amateur who gained the International Master (IM) title, and the winner of the 1953 US Open, even Donald Byrne could not foresee the true depth of young Fischer's stunning sacrificial attack.
Editorial assessment
This encounter holds immense importance in chess history not only as an aesthetic and deeply calculated sacrificial game, but also because it symbolizes the international arrival of a player who would shift the balance of power in world chess. The fact that an untitled 13-year-old defeated an experienced International Master-level opponent with such a profound onslaught immediately caught the attention of the Soviet chess establishment, prompting them to closely monitor the young American. In short, this game marks the starting point of Fischer's rapid ascent to becoming the world's youngest grandmaster and a World Championship Candidate in just over two years.