Bobby Fischer, the iconoclastic genius who was one of the greatest chess players the world has ever seen, has died, a close friend, Gardar Sverrisson, confirmed today. He was 64 and died of an unspecified incident yesterday in a hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Fischer, the most powerful American player in history, had moved to Iceland in 2005. He had emerged briefly in 1992 from a mysterious seclusion that had lasted two decades and defied an American ban on conducting business in war-torn Yugoslavia to play a $5 million match against his old nemesis, the Russian-born grandmaster Boris Spassky.

After he won handily, he dropped out of sight again. He avoided arrest on American charges over his Yugoslavia appearance. He lived in Budapest — and possibly the Philippines and Switzerland — and emerged now and then on radio stations in Iceland, Hungary and the Philippines to rant in increasingly belligerent terms against the USA and against Jews.

Fischer’s 1992 victory against Spassky was a sad reprise of his most glorious triumph. It was in summer 1972, in a match played in Reykjavik, that he wrested the world championship from Spassky, becoming the only American till date to win the title.

In July 2004, he was seized by the Japanese authorities when he tried to board a plane from Japan to Manila and was accused of trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He was detained in prison for nine months.

In 1999, in a series of telephone interviews he gave to a radio station in the Philippines, he rambled angrily and profanely against Jews.

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