AThe Indianapolis News Indianapolis, Indiana Wednesday, June 28, 1972 - Page 83
World's Eyes Focus On A Chess Board
It will begin quietly next Sunday afternoon, in Iceland.
Promptly at 2 p.m. (Icelandic time), a Russian and an American will sit down to play a game of chess in a small auditorium at Reykjavik.
During the five hours that follow they probably will not exchange a dozen words. Nor will the audience. To a casual observer, it all might seem about as exciting and dramatic as a visit to a mausoleum.
But there will be no casual observers.
For this will be the first in a series of 24 games to decide the chess championship of the world — and this confrontation has drawn more worldwide interest than any other event of its kind in history.
The characters in this drama are pure Dostoyevsky:
1. The present champion, Boris Vasilyevich Spassky; a broad-shouldered bear who knows he must maintain the dominance that Russians have held in world chess since 1937, or face the consequences.
2. The challenger, Robert James “Bobby” Fischer; gangling, Chicago-born “enfant terrible of the chess world” who has called himself the “unofficial world champion” for nearly a decade and who now must prove his claim.
The winner's end of the purse is $100,000 — and that alone could be a fair indicator of the difference between the championship matches of 1972 and those of the past.
When Spassky won the title from another Russian, Tigran Petrosian (in the last championship event three years ago), the purse was only $1,400.
But the real prize is more than money.
“I want the money,” Fischer said recently in an interview at the New York resort where he was undergoing rigorous training. “But I want the title even more. Chess is my life—my hobby, my recreation, my profession. I have proved I am the best in the past … but now I want that fact officially recognized.”
“We take much interest in chess,” Spassky said recently. “It is as much the national sport of Russia as baseball in the United States. I would not care to be the man who allows the championship to go to another nation. It would be
a serious matter, in many ways…”
Just how serious, no one really knows. Certainly it is not likely that Spassky, like the late Alexander Alekhine, would be condemned to death. (Alekhine, one of Russia's great chess masters, was condemned to death by the Bolsheviks after the October, 1917, revolution. He fled to the West and lived in exile until his death in 1948.)
What would happen if he loses the world championship to an American? Spassky has a lot to lose.
His present life, by Soviet standards, is nothing short of luxurious. Spassky lives with his second wife, Larissa, and their four-year-old son on the fifth floor of a 25-story VIP apartment building in Moscow.
His income of 550 rubles per month is about five times the average for a Russian worker. He is one of the few soviet citizens who drives a foreign car (a bright-red Volvo bought after Russia won the 1970 invitational team tournament in West Germany).
He seldom rises before noon (“I'm a sleepy Russian bear, very hard to get moving in the morning”) and his important neighbors frequently complain of the loud American jazz played on the Spassky phonograph at all hours of the night.
More, he has consistently refused to join the Communist party — and he was outspokenly critical of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, which could hardly have pleased Soviet authorities because he was widely quoted in the Western press.
He finished sixth in the Alekhine Memorial Tournament last December, and one American grandmaster who played him said there was “a lackluster, uncertain quality to his play that had not characterized it in the past.”
Tass, the official Soviet news agency, passed this off as “mere camouflage,” saying Spassky had not really been trying, was merely tuning up for the matches with Fischer and “is preparing a big surprise” for the American challenger.
If he is, Fischer apparently won't be the only one surprised.
International chess experts currently see Fischer as the favorite to win by as much as three to one. And Fischer is even more optimistic.
“Three to one?” he said when informed of the most recent prediction. “Those people don't know what they're talking about. The odds ought to be twenty to one at least!”
On past performance, that would be a hard position to defend.
Spassky and Fischer have played five games in the past. Of those, Spassky has won three, two were draws.
But chess is not horse racing. Past performance is seldom, if ever, a reliable index of a chess player's actual chances when he goes to the board.
For one thing, Fischer has been competing of late as though he were leading some kind of crusade.
Their chess strategies, too, are supposed to be wildly different: Spassky is called the “universal player whose rich intuition enables him to effect sharp tactical turns in a fluid, involved position.”
Fischer is supposed to be “a positional genius whose strong point is rapid appraisal and accurate calculation of variations.”
Both learned the game early. Fischer was six when his sister bought a dime store chess set and taught him the moves from the instructions. Spassky was taught chess at an orphanage when he was five.
Both showed considerable early promise. Spassky was a first degree player at 10 and an international grandmaster at 16. Fischer was beating all corners at 10 - second chess when he was 10, was a grand-master at 13 and won the U.S. championship a year later.
Both are strong and emotional competitors. Spassky burst into tears when he lost an important match in 1957; Fischer was still weeping publicly over a loss or a misplay until a few years ago.
And—most important of all, perhaps—their methods of play are not as dissimilar as they might seem on the surface.
Styles among the grandmasters tend to reflect their various personalities. Fischer and Spassky are classicists in the tradition of the great Jose R. Capablanca. Their best games are models of beautiful, clear, remorseless chess with the emphasis on logic (and sometimes the long-delay boobytrap), falling always just short of recklessness.
