ANew York Times, New York, New York, Thursday, July 13, 1972 - Page 31
Amusement and Then Sadness Reign at Marshall Chess Club by Martin Arnold
The blunder he made in the first game doomed Bobby Fischer so magnificently that the members and visiting kibitzers at the Marshall Chess Club actually laughed when he made it Tuesday.
But by yesterday, when they were again filling into the old brownstone at 23 West 10th Street, the laughter had turned to a certain sadness that the great Bobby — the mighty Casey — had impetuously (could there be any other explanation?) struck out.
For there at the big chessboard, confirming all too sharply what they themselves had proved time and again at their own chessboards at home, through the long night, was 86-year-old Dr. Edward Lasker, a wizened international master (grandmaster by today's rating system) in a seersucker suit. He was saying that “no matter how you count the squares, there's no way Spassky can lose if he doesn't make a mistake.”
Puzzling It Out
Great blunders are made, as Victor Hugo said, “like large ropes, of a multitude of fibers,” so yesterday part of being a Marshall Chess Club member was unwinding the fibers. George Kane, the youngish club champion, who plays chess for a living as well as for a hobby, said that Fischer “makes few oversights, but he wanted to win so badly, psychologically he overlooked something.”
The club, like a British regimental mess, is dark and wooden and there were no women there. But rather than drinking tables, it has chess tables.
There are trophies instead of guns, and in place of the musket that felled the chief of the Fuzzy-Wuzzies, there is, in a position of honor, under glass, Paul Morphy's sn*** box.
Morphy, the American chess genius of the 19th century, is considered by most experts to be the greatest American player ever, except perhaps for Fischer, and his sn*** box is the equivalent of Lord Kitchener's mustache cup.
The club was not crowded yesterday because most of its members had to work, but two members did take their vacations to coincide with the opening of the match and another man, the president of a machine manufacturing company, wandered in off the street so he could in some way be part of the chess adventure taking place in Iceland.
“I played hookey yesterday also,” said Harry L. Bondy.
‘Most Precise Player’
One club member who took his vacation to be at the club was David Joseph, a 48-year-old certified public accountant. He was the only member who refused to concede, before Fischer resigned, that the American grandmaster had made a mistake. “I thought it was a calculated move by the most precise player in the world, who knew exactly what he was doing.”
“The odds of Fischer ever getting a draw are 2 to 1 against,” said Dr. Lasker, moving magnetized chess pieces on the metal board used to follow the match.
The board hung like a picture, flat against the wall, and the black king that was Fischer's kept turning over because the board was an old one and was losing its magnetic qualities.
“That's a premonition,” said Howard Ant, a practicing lawyer who is the club's tournament director and who also took his vacation to be on hand. “Whenever a game is lost we turn over the loser's king,” he remarked.
“He [Fischer] had an easy draw before that 29th move,” — when Fischer took a pawn that could not safely be taken — said Mr. Ant. An hour before the end, trying to unravel the fibers, he said. “Now it's an uphill fight for a draw.”
Around the chess tables the members lounged like so many off-duty soldiers, moving pieces, trying in some way to conceptualize what was going on in Fischer's mind an ocean away.
Of course, they couldn't. But Steve Brandwein, a member, kept returning to that fatal 29th move. “He played a move that no other grandmaster in the world would have made,” he said, adding:
“I guess he decided he didn't want a draw—that must be it.”
