Lothar Schmid, chess grandmaster, the world’s greatest collector of chess books and the only arbiter trusted by Bobby Fischer, died earlier this year, and the chess world lost one of its great characters.
Schmid (born 1928) officiated as arbiter at three of Fischer’s matches, including the 1972 Match of the Century, where Fischer wrested the crown from Boris Spassky. The difficulties and challenges in 1972 would have exhausted the patience of a stylitic anchorite, but he went on to arbit further stormy matches between Karpov, Korchnoi and Kasparov.
Schmid returned as arbiter for Fischer’s 1992 swansong against Spassky in the former Yugoslavia, but this time he faced no problems. The players were on their best behaviour during the match because of the $5 million world record prize fund. At the press conference Fischer hurled most of his abuse in the direction of the United States. In fact he was playing in violation of a prohibition by the US State Department, which later resulted in his incarceration in a Japanese jail, before he was freed after the grant of Icelandic citizenship.
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