this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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What a supremely-talented dude who turned out to be an utter nonce upon everything else that really mattered in life.
His talent was fed into the propaganda machine in the cold war for chess based victory over Spassky.
When he later wanted a rematch he got kicked out of his own country.
I mean he was pretty erratic either way, but being a pawn of a superpower and then getting sacrificed so easily would make many people a bit extra mad.
He made a big point of publicly spitting on the documentation and then willfully breaking the state's guidelines about playing in a proscripted area, so didn't exactly do himself any favors, there.
I can sympathise with a lot of his procedural grievances against FIDE and some stuff against the state, but he routinely went scorched earth on the big stuff. To me that's just wild, but he also revealed himself as a racist, conspiracy nut, and general weirdo too many times over the years for me to give him any kind of a pass. He went from hero to villain in my book.
True, however it's not entirely ethical (certainly in today's frame of mind) to put a person with overt mental disability in the position they put him in.
You can put his breakdown in that entirely, but it didn't help.