The A has just entered the Sign of the l.
If you ask an astrologer how a person born between in the Sign of Pisces fights (usually between February 19 and March 20), he’ll probably reply, “Preferably, this native avoids all confrontation!”
Typical Pisceans actually feel far too sensitive and delicate to fight. They are neither cold analysts nor passionate warriors. This doesn’t make them stupid or cowardly. But they are often eccentric, quirky and genial. Albert Einstein (born on March 14), who also had a passion for chess, is not exactly considered a fool; rather, he is remembered as one of the greatest thinkers of his time. And yet, the best-known portrait of him is the one in which he sticks out his tongue for a long time… fish are generally strange birds!
Albert Einstein was a good chess player, and a friend of Emmanuel Lasker’s. Photo: Rob de Roy/Pixabay.
Their strategic recipe (if there is one) is: deceive, camouflage and confuse. This is how the hunted, the victims, are most likely to act. And indeed, a true Pisces is ready to win the battle by sacrificing himself – or one of his officers. If the Pisces fighter does it right, even his opponent’s conscience will be wrinkled in the end.
Ladies and sacrifices from ♕
Thus, Danish Grandmaster Bent Larsen, born on a March 04, was able to make a magnificent ♕ sacrifice in one of his most memorable games, against Tigran Petrosyan, Los Angeles 1966.
Born on March 12, Azeri Grandmaster Teimour Radjabov defeated not only Garry Kasparov in 2003, but also another long-time world champion, Viswanathan Anand, with Black pieces to boot and another fantastic ♛ sacrifice:
The greatest strength of Pisces natives is thus the closeness and confidence they can have in their intuition, which perhaps explains why there are so many female GMs born in this Sign in the business: Hou Yifan (February 27), Anna Muzychuk (February 28) or Lei Tingjie (March 03).
For years, Hou Yifan has been at the top of the women’s ELO list. In 2016, she visited Hamburg’s ChessBase studio and her close friend Frederic Friedel.
Genius and madness
Overdeveloped sensitivity is, of course, the weak point of this astrological sign. Where the Gemini chess player can be irritated by intellectual distractions, Pisces is touched to the core. This is how Ukrainian Grandmaster Vasyil Ivanschuk (March 18) built his reputation as a genius above all on original creative ideas. But when the going gets too tough, he can’t take it – as we saw in 1991, in his ¼-final match in the Tournament of Candidates against Aquarian Artur Youssoupov.
Incidentally, there’s a wonderful video in which Ivanchuk, in 2016 in Doha, almost misses his own awards ceremony, so engrossed is he in a game of Checkers against Sagittarius Baadur Jobava. Finally, the announcer’s voice reaches his consciousness as the Ukrianian gallops off, leaps onto the podium, twirls the gold medal around him, the bouquet of flowers in his hand; but his mind is totally elsewhere: he’s planning his next moves in the endgame of Checkers against the Georgian GM. With the ceremony barely over, he returns to the chessboard to crush his opponent. It’s all very crazy – and extremely endearing:
Bobby Fischer
Probably the most legendary chess genius of all time, Robert James – or rather Bobby Fischer, born on March 09 – wasn’t so kind. He expressed opinions that made his listeners’ hair stand on end: among other things, he said that Hitler was a good guy, that the events of September 11 in New York were welcome, and that women were inherently limited beings. Did he really say this because it corresponded to his inner conviction, or rather to provoke?
Probably the most famous and controversial person in the history of chess: Bobby Fischer.
It’s certain that he had a strained relationship with his mother, which explains most of his aversions. Mom was Jewish – Bobby couldn’t stand Jews (although he was half-Jewish himself). Mom had grown up in America – Bobby thought America was stupid (despite having been born and raised there himself). Mom was an enthusiastic communist and supporter of the Soviet Union – Bobby hated the Russians and communism. What’s more, his mother was a woman – so Bobby didn’t have much regard for that sort of living creature (although he’d apparently had plenty of affairs with the species, his somewhat dark and whimsical charm seemed to attract a certain segment of the female gender).
In 1972, Bobby found himself up against Russia’s Boris Spassky, born under the Sign of Aquarius, in the “match of the century” in Reykjavík. At the time, in the midst of the Cold War, every child knew that people from the Soviet Union were a) mean and b) could never be beaten at chess. But the American who despised the USA as much as the USSR defeated Spassky.
He did it again twenty years later (after a long period of abstinence). Fischer’s first victory over Spassky had earned the Russian a disgrace in his homeland; his homeland reproached him for not having prepared sufficiently. The second victory, surprisingly, got Fischer into trouble in his own country: as the match took place in Yugoslavia – not yet broken up by the disastrous NATO intervention – parts of it – including Macedonia – were on an American sanctions list. Fischer was the subject of an international arrest warrant for taking part in this rematch. He plunged into exile (Japan, then Iceland) and became, according to those who met him, increasingly strange. Pisces natives are simply too sensitive to constant external pressures.
In “Frederic’s Mates” – Frederic Friedel’s video series – the co-founder of ChessBase tells how he met Bobby Fischer.
Bobby Fischer’s life seemed to be made of harsh white light and heavy black shadows – a painful checkerboard to carry. He died after 64 years – the number of squares on a chessboard…
Famous chess players with the A natal in l:
Konstantinopolsky, Alexander – 19.02.1910
Bronstein, David – 19.02.1924
Gurevich, Mikhail – 22.02.1959
Lutz, Christopher – 24.02.1971
Granda Zúñiga, Julio E – 25.02.1967
Hou Yifan – 27.02.1994
Muzychuk, Anna – 28.02.1990
Golombek, Harry – 01.03.1911
Conquest, Stuart C. – 01.03.1967
Maróczy, Géza – 03.03.1870
Lei Tingjie – 03.03.1997
Van Foreest, Lucas – 03.03.2001
Larsen, Bent – 04.03.1935
Vasiukov, Evgeni – 05.03.1933
Minić, Dragoljub – 05.03.1937
Fernandez, Daniel Howard – 05.03.1995
Artemiev, Vladislav – 05.03.1998
Ashley, Maurice – 06.03.1966
Geller, Efim – 08.03.1925
Fischer, Robert James – 09.03.1943
Wu Wenjin – 10.03.1976
Radjabov, Teimour – 12.03.1987
Lê Quang Liêm – 13.03.1991
Mendonca, Leon Luke – 13.03.2006
Bellahcene, Bilel – 14.03.1998
Topalov, Veselin – 15.03.1975
Knaak, Rainer – 16.03.1953
Azmaiparashvili, Zurab – 16.03.1960
Lagarde, Maxime – 16.03.1994
Ivanchuk, Vasyl – 18.03.1969
