The Windsor Star Windsor, Ontario, Canada Monday, January 03, 1972 - Page 10
The Game of Bluff
In a topsy-turvy world, even the austere game of chess seems to be subject to sudden change.
It used to be said that chess was the Russian game just as poker was the American game. And there were good comparisons of national characteristics to back up the statement. Chess is slow-moving, ponderous, and cerebral, a contest in which the victor outthinks his opponent. Poker is swift, dependent at least in part on intuition as well as thought, and with a large bonus for successful bluffing.
It was perhaps no surprise, then, that the world champion chess players for the past 23 years have all been Russians, and that the challengers have all been Russian grand masters. But now a new star, an American, has made a strong bid for world chess supremacy.
He is Bobby Fischer, who at 28 defeated a Russian expert in Buenos Aires in October and is now making arrangements to meet the world champion, Russian Boris Spassky. Over the holiday weekend the two men talked by telephone, and the location for the world championship match is soon to be chosen.
Fischer's victory over his last Russian opponent was so easy that some chess experts felt the Russian, at 42, was too old for more appearances in world competition.
How the young American will fare against the present world champion is being debated. But the Russian passion for victory need suffer no reverses—if the world chess championship goes to an American, the Russians can always get up a world poker tournament.
