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game that night.
    Despite his defeats, Bobby kept coming back for more. He became a dedicated member, and a bit of a novelty. The tableau of a little boy engaged in mental combat with a judge, doctor, or college professor some eight or ten times his age was often greeted with mirth and wonder. “At first I used to lose all the time, and I felt bad about it,” Bobby said later. He was teased unmercifully by the conquering players. “Fish!” they’d bleat, using the chess player’s derisive term for a really weak player, whenever Bobby made an obvious blunder. The epithet hurt even more because of its similarity to his own name. Bobby himself despised the term. Later he’d refer to a poor player as a “weakie”—or, less commonly, a “duffer” or “rabbit.”
    Nigro, an expert player of near master strength, sensed potential in the boy, and aware that Bobby was without a father, he assumed a mentoring position. He became the boy’s teacher and invited him on Saturdays to his home, where he’d match him up with his son Tommy, just a shade younger than Bobby though a slightly better player. Tommy didn’t mind playing chess with Bobby, but he didn’t want to take lessons from his father. On those teaching days,Nigro would greatly increase his son’s allowance if he’d sit still long enough to learn chess tactics.
    As soon as Bobby began to understand the basics of chess, Nigro wentover specific ways to conduct the part of the game known as the opening, where the first few moves can decide or at least influence the outcome of the contest. These initial moves and “lines” follow well-charted paths that have been chronicled for centuries, and players who want to improve their game attempt to understand and memorize them. Because there are a myriad of such variations, it’s difficult for most players to internalize even a small portion. For example, there are 400 different possible positions after two players make one move each, andthere are 72,084 positions after two moves each—not all good, it must be added. But Bobby approached with dedication the daunting task of learning many of the substantive ones. Referring to the difficult regimen, he later said, “Mr. Nigro was possibly not the best player in the world but he was a very good teacher. Meeting him was probably a decisive factor in my going ahead in chess.”
    Nigro had no problem teaching Bobby. The boy could hardly wait for his weekly lesson, and eventually he began to defeat Tommy. “I started going to Mr. Nigro’s house on Saturdays,” Bobby later wrote, “as well as meeting him on Fridays at the Club.My mother was often on duty on weekends at her job as a nurse, and was glad to have me go [to Mr. Nigro’s house].”
    In 1952, still not yet turned nine, Bobby made his first entrance into competitive chess. A group of Nigro’s protégés won the first match with a score of 5–3; the score of the second match has been lost or forgotten. Auspiciously, Bobby won his first game and drew his second against ten-year-old Raymond Sussman, the son of a dentist, Dr. Harold Sussman, a nationally rated master from Brooklyn.Dr. Sussman was also an amateur photographer, and he captured some portraits of Bobby that worked their way into the Fischer oeuvre years later. Fittingly, Sussman also became Bobby’s dentist. “He had a great set of teeth,” Sussman remembered.
    That summer and fall, Bobby also spent time playing against his grandfather’s septuagenarian cousin Jacob Schonberg, who also lived in Brooklyn. Regina would take the boy with her when she nursed Schonberg and Bobby would play his great-cousin as the old man sat in bed. Years later Bobby could not remember how strong Schonberg was or how many games the two played, butone could tell by the inflection in his voice that he was affected by the experience, not so much by the playing of the games, but by theencounter with a family member, however distant. It was a ritual that was all too rare