I shed no tears. Good riddance.

Chess legend Bobby Fischer, whose tortured genius earned him both worldwide acclaim and disdain, has died at the age of 64 at his home in Iceland.

“I can confirm that he died yesterday in his home due to an illness,” close friend Gardar Sverrisson told AFP. Fischer was reportedly hospitalised for a period last year.

Einar Einarsson, the chairman of a Fischer support group in Iceland, said the cause of death was kidney failure.

“He was not a man who wanted to seek medical attention. He didn’t believe in Western medicine,” Einarsson told AFP.

US-born Fischer, who made world headlines by defeating Soviet world champion Boris Spassky in a celebrated Cold War chess showdown in Reykjavik in 1972, took Icelandic citizenship in 2005 to avoid being deported to the United States.

Why no tears over Fischer’s death? He was an anti-American, anti-semitic douche. Via Jack:

Here is a taste of the real Bobby Fischer, as profiled by Rene Chun in The Atlantic in 2002: ‘The Jews are a ‘filthy, lying bastard people,’ bent on world domination through such insidious schemes as the Holocaust (‘a money-making invention’), the mass murder of Christian children (‘their blood is used for black-magic ceremonies’), and junk food (William Rosenberg, the founder of Dunkin’ Donuts, is singled out as a culprit).”

And why mourn for a man that celebrated the nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11?

‘This is all wonderful news,” Fischer announced. ”I applaud the act. The US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a [expletive]. Now it’s coming back to the US. [Expletive] the US. I want to see the US wiped out.”

JackM.:

I certainly hope that Fischer was asked to make an accounting for himself today. And I really hope that the last thing his eternal soul heard was God saying “checkmate”.

As for Iceland? They can now retreat back into the obscurity from which they emerged.

At least until another chess-playing, jew-hating, anti-american douchetool re-emerges on the scene. In which case, I have no doubt this land of herring-munching, ice-pricks will be more than happy to claim him as a native son.