15. Bobby Fisher rose to the very top of the chess world while still in his teens and many still regard him as the greatest player of all time
According to many historians of the game, Bobby Fisher is almost the greatest chess player who ever lived. Despite his humble background, he became the United States Chess Champion at the age of 14. What’s more, he became Grandmaster at the age of 15, the youngest person to be the best player on the planet up until that point. Famously, he taught himself fluent Russian so that he could study their chess literature and then he achieved the only perfect score (11 wins in 11 games) at the 1663-64 US Championship. He was a true child prodigy, and one who would never live up to his teenage achievements.
Fisher was born in 1943 in Chicago and raised by a single mother. His sister bought him a $1 plastic chess set when he was just six and he immediately became hooked. Fisher would play night and day, usually by himself. Quite simply, he was obsessed by chess, sacrificing a normal childhood for the sake of becoming the world’s best. His unique abilities brought him acclaim and attention and, by the age of just 12, he was being proclaimed a true genius.
With an IQ of 180, however, Fisher denied being simply a chess prodigy. “I consider myself to be a genius who plays chess,” he famously once said. Certainly, his was a precocious talent, and the pressure Fisher placed on himself did him no favors. In 1975, while still at the peak of his powers, he refused to defend his world title. And by the start of the 1990s, he had retired from competitive chess and disappeared from the public eye altogether. The one-time child genius became a recluse and an international man of mystery. He left the United States for good, eventually ending up in Iceland, where he died in 2008.
