NIC Podcast #92: IM John Donaldson
In today’s episode of the New In Chess podcast, I talk to International Master and prolific chess author John Donaldson. The first time John appeared on the podcast, I had invited him as the captain of the American team on the eve of the 2024 Budapest Olympiad. John has been the captain of the American team for many years and Budapest was his 15th Olympiad, a truly impressive number!
This time I have invited John to talk about his latest book on what may safely be called his hero, Bobby Fischer. John has written a lot about Fischer and in 2022 he published his magnum opus Bobby Fischer and His World, a thick book of 644 pages bringing together an enormous amount of material about the 11th World Champion.
Now he has published a new book that is similar in appearance to Bobby Fischer and His World, and is called Inside the Mind of Bobby Fischer. In a voluminous book of 400 pages, John revisits everything he could find that Fischer has written as a chess analyst. Which means that he not only presents annotated games from Fischer’s very first book, Bobby Fischer’s Games of Chess, but also all the columns he wrote for Boys’ Life, a magazine for the boy scouts of American, and his columns in Chess Life. And there is much more that anyone interested in Fischer would like to see or revisit.
As I interviewed John about the book, various other subjects were touched on, such as the enormous chess library of grandmaster Lothar Schmid, who was the arbiter at the 1972 Match of the Century between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer. And the sale, at Sotheby’s of the finest items from his collection, including two scoresheets from the match that sold for an incredible 160,000 euros! And there are more stories you don’t want to miss.
So, if you are looking for a sneak peek or a few teasers of John Donaldson’s fascinating new book, then this podcast is a good place to start!
0:00 – Intro
2:20 – What inspired John to write a new Fischer book?
14:26 – Fischer’s incredible dedication and discipline as a teenager
18:02 – Fischer’s mother Regina
26:25 – Fischer’s lost games
40:50 – AD BREAK
41:23 – The value of Fischer memorabilia
1:01:03 – AD BREAK
1:02:05 – How did John go about analysing Bobby’s old annotations?
1:08:10 - Dimitrije Bjelica
1:11:05 – Is John contemplating a next book about Fischer?
1:17:38 – Outro