AThe San Francisco Examiner San Francisco, California Sunday, January 09, 1972 - Page 188
Chess for Cash
“FISCHER MAGIC” some chess fans called it. Bobby Fischer, the 28-year-old American high school dropout who will play the Soviet Union's World Champion Boris Spassky 24 games for the championship sometime this year, calls it simply, “money.”
Ten nations and 5 cities (4 of them in Yugoslavia) had bid for the two-month long championship match. Highest cash prizes offered (67½ per cent to the winner) in the last 30 years was the $12,000 paid in Buenos Aires last October where Fischer beat Tigran Petrosian for the right to meet Spassky.
Top bid this time was an eye-popping $152,000 from Belgrade, Yugoslavia … (Argentina retracted the reported error that it had bid $100K - Chicago Times). But both Fischer and Spassky could make their own choices from the list, then dicker for a final match site.
