Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of people who have beaten Bobby Fischer in chess (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. Much as enjoy this article, there is consensus to delete this. I would hope to see a sentence or two in the main Bobby article about the more notable losses, and maybe a cite to Mednis's book. But this level of breathless coverage is inappropriate. -- Y not? 13:14, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

List of people who have beaten Bobby Fischer in chess
AfDs for this article: 
 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

See Articles for deletion/List of people who have beaten Garry Kasparov in chess. The same issues apply here: even top-ranked players get beat, often by people who aren't "better" than they. It's more obviously a problem with Kasparov because he was ranked higher than anyone, but it's just as much of a problem here. This was merged back into Fischer's article the first time around, but its length guarantees that it will keep getting split back out. Best to put selected defeats in his article and junk the rest. Mangoe (talk) 10:25, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Games-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 14:00, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists of people-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 14:00, 10 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Weak Keep - There is at least a book on the subject, making this kind of less whimsical than the other analogous articles. -- cyclopia  speak!  15:28, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * It's amusing but I think really it's better off as a bibliography entry in his article, with perhaps a short section some of the more important losses. I mean, I once beat a reasonably highly-ranked player back in high school, but it was a simultaneous chess demo and my board was much smaller than any of the others. I don't think it was my brilliant play that did the trick; if the persona had an article I wouldn't want that loss listed as though it were something significant, because it was really something of a fluke. Mangoe (talk) 17:08, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Such a game would probably be unverifiable, so I doubt it would make the cut for the list. -- cyclopia  speak!  17:16, 10 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete - Per NOTDIRECTORY. Chess fan cruft. Not an encyclopedic topic. Carrite (talk) 18:27, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete a comprehensive list of one person's defeats or failures seems unencyclopedic, and I have concerns that this could open the door to similar articles. Of course Fisher is notable, but the place to cover his career is on his own page, where the losses are balanced by the wins to feel less POV. Andrew Lenahan -  St ar bli nd  21:20, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * For the record, there are four such articles that are not placed on AfD at the moment: List of people who have beaten José Raúl Capablanca in chess, List of people who have beaten Alexander Alekhine in chess, List of people who have beaten Paul Morphy in chess and List of people who have beaten Emanuel Lasker in chess.
 * And yes, I agree with Quale on the offensiveness of some of the comments here. Toccata quarta (talk) 05:00, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete: Not all the times he was beaten are notable. The ones that are can just be (and probably are) mentioned in Fischer's article  p  b  p  22:25, 10 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Keep. The times that Fischer was beaten are highly notable; notable enough that an entire book is devoted exclusively to discussing them, How to Beat Bobby Fischer, written by respected chess writer GM Edmar Mednis.  (This book is used as a reference for the article, but it is probably not clear there that the book discusses each one of Fischer's 61 losses from his first U.S. Chess Championship victory to 1974 individually.)  Fischer's match and tournament record is also detailed in several books, including Bobby Fischer's Chess Games by Robert Wade and Kevin O'Connell, which in addition to complete game scores tallies Fischer's win/draw/loss record against every opponent he faced.  The article easily passes WP:GNG, and it is not an indiscriminate collection of information.  Personally I find the "whimsical" and "chess fan cruft" accusations to be offensive, and I wonder if the delete voters actually bothered to read the article.  Some excerpts:
 * Pal Benko: All three of Benko's victories were in international play, with two in World Championship cycle games: the 1958 Portorož Interzonal and the 1962 Curaçao Candidates Tournament. Benko defeated Fischer in the first round of the 1962 Candidates Tournament with 1.g3, an opening subsequently named the Benko Opening as Benko also used it to defeat Tal in the same tournament. After this first-round loss, Fischer got off to a poor start in the 1962 Candidates Tournament and his fourth-place finish out of eight was a major disappointment. Fischer was dominant in U.S. play, with a +4−0=3 record against Benko in U.S. Championship games from 1958–1966.[5]
 * Arthur Bisguier (U16): Fischer had a huge plus score against GM Bisguier (+13−1=1), but Bisguier crushed him in their first game, played in round 1 of the 1956 Rosenwald Memorial when Fischer was 13. Their second game ended in a draw, and then Fischer won 13 consecutive games from 1957–70 for what may be the longest consecutive win streak between GM opponents in chess history.[6]
 * René Letelier Martner: Fischer had a +3−1=0 score against Letelier. Letelier defeated Fischer in 1959 at Mar del Plata, in a game which according to Mednis (How to Beat Bobby Fischer), featured Fischer's worst move ever. In a pawn endgame, Fischer moved the less advanced of his two passed pawns, and thereby lost the pawn race for promotion, giving his opponent an extra queen, instead of entering an endgame with a queen on each side. According to Mednis, a "fairy godmother" appeared for Letelier. Fischer gained some revenge by winning a 23-move brilliancy at their next meeting at the 1960 Leipzig Olympiad, a game that Fischer included in My 60 Memorable Games.[31]
 * Wolfgang Unzicker: Fischer had a lifetime record of +4−1=3 against Unzicker. Unzicker defeated Fischer in the disastrous (for Fischer) 1960 Buenos Aires tournament in which Fischer lost four games and finished in a career worst 13th place. Fischer blundered on the 12th move by picking up his h-pawn intending 12...h6??. Realizing before he let go of the pawn that this was a mistake that would be exploited by 13.Bxh6, he was required by the touch-move rule to move the pawn and played 12...h5?, leading to his resignation on move 22.[53][1]
 * There's a lot more, but I'm not going to paste the entire article here. In my opinion, if you don't see how this information is encyclopedic, then you don't understand anything about chess. Quale (talk) 00:02, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * What I'm seeing is that this is a book about the games: other than a statistical breakout of his opponents and a table of the games, the entire rest of the book is devoted to a move-by-move analysis of the game play. Meanwhile at the very beginning the book says that win-loss ratios in high-level chess are really pretty low, and that we are talking 61 losses to 188 draws and 324 wins. Again, I can see that, at an encyclopedic level of detail, there are surely certain important losses to be noted in the narrative of his career. I'm not convinced that every loss is notable, and especially not that every victor is notable. Mangoe (talk) 03:13, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete Non-notable cruft. There is no reason to catalog every single loss that occurred during his career, only the notable ones, which probably are already mentioned at Fischer's own article. Also, while it may be adequately sourced, the article reads very poorly. "Bisguier crushed him in their first game"? "Fischer gained some revenge by winning a 23-move brilliancy"? "at the disastrous (for Fischer) 1960 Buenos Aires tournament"? Are these chess terms or the result of a big chess fan cobbling together an article? It basically reads like something you'd find on a fan wikia. While I can see the work put into it, nothing has convinced me that this is a notable subject. Beerest355 Talk 00:36, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete per all above. Quale - if knowing a lot about chess is a requirement to understand why the article should stay, what does that say about it? Ansh666 02:35, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I see what you mean Ansh666, but this is a misguided argument. We have lots of articles on obscure topics, and rightly so -this is not the point. -- cyclopia  speak!  08:02, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I understand that - it's not a deletion argument. It's telling Quale not to use it as a keep argument, either. Ansh666 18:14, 11 July 2013 (UTC)


 * Keep per Quale. As for Mangoe's concern, of course the book is mostly about the moves, that is the instructional part that people want to pay for. But the statistics of who beat him, and commentary in the introduction of the book is not trivial coverage. It is directly related to the subject matter in this list, so yes, I think the subject covered by the list is demonstrably notable in accordance with WP:N. Sjakkalle (Check!)  11:53, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete as too highly discriminate data for a general encyclopedia (IINFO). If it was the case that Fischer had a near perfect record that he only lost a few times to, maybe those loses could be documented, but this list implies that he lost much more than 50 times (just in the first section alone). So he is human and loses at chess, news at 11. (The equivalent would be saying something like "Teams that won the World Series over the New York Yankees") I would assume, however, that some of these loses are notable matchups that may be better documented elsewhere, we just don't need ever loss recorded noted. --M ASEM  (t) 13:33, 11 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thoughts. I don't see that the subject (Fischer's losses) is a notable one supported by RSs. Tables of game records are common and just summary info in a comprehensive book like Wade's Bobby Fischer's Chess Games, and to infer those tables are evidence of independent attention from RSs that support article notability, is an invalid argument. The fact Edmar Mednis devoted a book to the subject is the best case for notability in RS, but I think that fails too because it is an isolated source of interest and is tainted in two ways: 1) it's an intesting topic for a book, to get booksales, 2) many books have been written about Bobby Fischer (is there any other player who has had more books written about them!?), so one shouldn't be surprised to find that an author picked up a previously unexplored aspect of Fischer's career. One of the reasons Fischer's losses may seem "special" for investigation or a book, may be because Fischer was completely dominant in his time, with the impressive never-heard-of-before result of two 6–0 sweeps in the Candidates Matches. *However*, in his day, Capablanca was considered "invincible". (Apparently only Alekhine didn't buy that, as he prepared himself to defeat Capablanca, and he did.) But Capa's losses don't have a book by Mednis. (That is easily explained. People still talk about Bobby Fischer as though he were still alive. People don't talk about Capablanca like that. The revenue potential for booksales on Capa are thus not there with equal force.) That said, if the article is deleted, I will miss it. I think it is interesting and fascinating reading. Ditto Mednis's book. And I'd like to see it expanded for even more interest and fascination. But I feel that way because I'm one of many millions of "Fischer fans". (And is therefore my biased POV.) Ihardlythinkso (talk) 05:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC) p.s. Compare this to this. Also this to this.
 * Keep well sourced and WP:N isn't an issue here. Given that nearly all of the folks listed are blue links and given the sourcing including a book dedicated to his losses, I don't see a problem.  I'm not seeing a lot of policy-based arguments other than IINFO.  And I just don't see how that applies.  "...provide encyclopedic value, data should be put in context with explanations referenced to independent sources." seems easily met.  Hobit (talk) 01:45, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Strong Delete. Whimsical, fanboy Cruft, fails GNG. This sort of cruft gives Wikipedia a bad name. Sharkchick B (talk) 02:22, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * How the heck does this fail the GNG? Multiple sources including a book solely on the topic... Hobit (talk) 10:15, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The part that I could see it failing is "Presumed" - the past point of WP:GNG. Ansh666 17:11, 15 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Erb? The GNG tells us when things are presumed notable.  We are past that point.  One may argue (and I have in the past) that meeting the GNG isn't enough even if no specific guideline says otherwise.  But that's not failing the GNG. Hobit (talk) 04:52, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete. Not an encyclopedic topic. Original research, insignificant subject.  This is only interesting for a small niche of gamers.  This sort of thing belongs on a Chesscruft wiki, not on Wikipedia.  The sum of human knowledge will not suffer in the slightest if this trash is extirpated.  Gameknot Chess (talk) 16:17, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment: User:Sharkchick B has only edited this AFD, and User:Gameknot Chess has edited only this AfD, her/his userpage an a noticeboard. This kind of pattern is quite clearly suspicious - new accounts coming at AFD at their first edit, citing guidelines. Could some experienced admin have a look? -- cyclopia  speak!  16:59, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Comment. Well, I came here to work on the article about the "Ancient Aliens Dude" but that page is locked for some reason. So I'm just kind of in limbo until I can edit that page.  I have new sources and information on the Ancient Aliens Guy that I want to add.  I plan to getting the article to Featured article status.  Gameknot Chess (talk) 17:29, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.