For most of the past 30 years the American chess genius Bobby Fischer has lived in exile following his epic defeat of the Russian world champion Boris Spassky in a contest billed as the battle of the superpowers. But now it has emerged that Fischer may have made an eccentric return to global chess by anonymously taking on some of today's best players on the Internet. The British grandmaster Nigel Short said yesterday he was "99 per cent sure" that he had played about 50 games of three-minute "blitz" chess against Fischer on the net - and been comprehensively beaten by him.