Fischer had the best 2 years in a row EVER!!! Prove me wrong.

Greetings fellow chess connoisseurs! 👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼Please invest a few minutes and read the following summary on Bobby Fischer’s supremacy over his peers right before the 1972 World Championship match.  I challenge you to find another GM since Fischer that has had such an astonishing 24-month run.

In 1970 and 1971, Fischer dominated his contemporaries to an extent never seen before or since. The unofficial World Championship of Lightning Chess (5-minute games) was held at Herceg Novi (then Yugoslavia). Petrosian and Tal were considered the favorites, but Fischer overwhelmed the super-class field with 19/22 (+17−1=4), far ahead of Tal (14½), Korchnoi (14), Petrosian (13½), and Bronstein (13). Fischer lost only one game!😳

Fischer crushed such blitz kings as Tal, Petrosian and Smyslov by a clean score. Tal marveled that, "During the entire tournament he didn't leave a single pawn en prise, while the other players blundered knights and bishops galore!"

Fischer then won the Interzonal (held in Spain in November and December 1970) with 18½/23 (+15−1=7), far ahead of Larsen, Geller, and Hübner with 15/23. Fischer finished the tournament with seven consecutive wins. His victory gave him a string of 8 consecutive first prizes in tournaments!🤯

Former World Champion Mikhail Botvinnik was not impressed by Fischer's results, stating: "Fischer has been declared a genius. I do not agree with this. In order to rightly be declared a genius in chess, you have to defeat equal opponents by a big margin. As yet he has not done this." Despite Botvinnik's remarks, Fischer began a mind-blowing year in the history of chess.

In the 1971 Candidates matches, Fischer was set to play against Soviet grandmaster and concert pianist Mark Taimanov in the quarter-finals. The match began in May in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Taimanov had reason to be confident. He was backed by the firm guidance of Botvinnik, who had thoroughly analyzed Fischer's record and put together a 'dossier' on him.

After Fischer defeated Taimanov in the second game of the match, Taimanov asked Fischer how he managed to come up with the move 12. N1c3, to which Fischer replied "that the idea was not his—he had come across it in the monograph by the Soviet master Alexander Nikitin in a footnote." Taimanov said of this: "It is staggering that I, an expert on the Sicilian, should have missed this theoretically significant idea by my compatriot, while Fischer had uncovered it in a book in a foreign language!" Fischer beat Taimanov by the score of 6–0!🤯🤯

Upon losing the final game of the match, Taimanov shrugged his shoulders, saying sadly to Fischer: "Well, I still have my music." As a result of his performance, Taimanov was thrown out of the USSR team and forbidden to travel for two years. Communist authorities banned him from writing articles and deprived him of the monthly stipend. The crushing loss virtually ended Taimanov's chess career.

Fischer was next scheduled to play against Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen.  Before the match, Botvinnik told a Soviet television audience:  "It is hard to say how their match will end, but it is clear that such an easy victory as in Vancouver against Taimanov will not be given to Fischer. I think Fischer will want to do just the same to Larsen and this is impossible." Fischer beat Larsen by the identical score of 6–0! 🤯🤯🤯

Garry Kasparov said that “no player had ever shown a superiority over his rivals comparable to Fischer's incredible 12–0 score in the two matches.” Chess statistician Jeff Sonas concluded that the victory over Larsen gave Fischer the "highest single-match performance rating ever."

On August 8, 1971, while preparing for his last Candidates match with former World Champion Petrosian, Fischer played in the Manhattan Chess Club Rapid Tournament, winning with 21½/22 against a strong field. Despite Fischer's results against Taimanov and Larsen, his upcoming match against Petrosian seemed a daunting task. Nevertheless, the Soviet government was concerned about Fischer. Petrosian, similar to Botvinnik, said:  "He is a great chess player but no genius."

Fischer won the first game after Petrosian faltered. This gave Fischer a run of 20 consecutive wins against the world's top players (in the Interzonal and Candidates matches), a winning streak topped only by Steinitz's 25 straight wins in 1873–1882. Petrosian won the second game, finally snapping Fischer's streak. After three consecutive draws, Fischer swept the next four games to win the match 6½–2½ (+5−1=3). Sports Illustrated ran an article on the match, highlighting Fischer's domination of Petrosian.

Upon completion of the match, Petrosian remarked: "After the sixth game Fischer really did become a genius."  Some experts kept insisting that Petrosian was off form to which Fischer replied, "People have been playing against me below strength for fifteen years." LOL  😂🤣Fischer gained a far higher rating than any player in history up to that time. On the July 1972 FIDE rating list, Fisher’s Elo rating of 2785 was 125 points above World No. 2 Spassky's rating of 2660! To give you some perspective, as of the July 2020 FIDE ratings, World #1 and current World Champion Carlsen is just 28 points ahead of World #2 Caruana.

Fischer’s results put him on the cover of Life Magazine and allowed him to challenge World Champion Boris Spassky in 1972…whom he had never beaten up to that point (+0−3=2).  And as they say, the rest is history 🤓

Thank you 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼 for taking the time to read this. My challenge stands…find another GM since Fischer that has had such an astonishing 24-month run.