Anthony Saidy


Anthony Saidy is an International Master of chess, a retired physician and author. He competed eight times in the U.S. Chess Championship, with his highest placement being 4th. He won the 1960 Canadian Open Chess Championship. The same year, he played on the U.S. Team in the World Student Team Championship in Leningrad, USSR. The U.S. team won the World Championship, the only time the U.S. has ever won that event.
Saidy is the author of several chess books, including The Battle of Chess Ideas, and The World of Chess. His most recent book, , is a work of "what if" political fiction inspired by Saidy's four sojourns in the USSR, during which he was able to get to know Russians from all walks of life in both public and intimate settings. Harrison Salisbury, Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, said that it had the "ring of truth."
As an older mentor he befriended Robert James Fischer. It was in Saidy's family home in Douglaston, Long Island that Fischer secluded himself prior to the World Chess Championship 1972. Saidy et al. successfully encouraged the apparently reluctant Fischer to go to Iceland, where he won the world crown in a match against holder Boris Spassky.
Saidy is the son of playwright Fred Saidy.

Books