ANew York Times, New York, New York, Friday, July 7, 1972 - Page 14
Chess Is Game of Skill — With Some Luck by Richard Roberts
Unlike poker, craps, Monopoly, bridge or love, chess is absolutely devoid of the element of chance. Or so most people think.
It is a game of skill, all skill and nothing but skill; cool, absolutely, totally logical. A game in which two minds meet and clash in a never-never land of pure reason.
And so it is—up to a point.
True, there is no luck of the deal, as there is in poker or bridge, and there are no repeated throws of the dice, the way there are in craps or Monopoly (though there were, in the Middle Ages).
But there is a good deal of emotion—with some people it is passion—which perhaps makes chess closer to love than to poker. And there is at least one small element of luck, in the form of the first move.
The privilege of making the first move is determined by a drawing of lots, a flip of a coin, a toss of a die. And to the winner of the draw, the flip or the toss goes a host of advantages, some almost tangible, some as difficult to define or formalize as the shifting shapes of an early-morning mist.
The player who makes the first move—and it is always with the white pieces— chooses the king of game that will follow. Not the details, of course, because the tactics, the specific moves, must be worked out as the game develops. But he sets the over-all tone, the strategy.
If he is strong on speed and hard-hitting tactics, he will choose an opening that suits that style of play. If his forte is quiet, positional chess—the kind that builds slowly, unspectacularly but inexorably—he will steer the game into those channels.
The first player, too, is always one move up on his opponent — unless he missteps and throws a move away.
That advantage of being a move ahead is known in the chess world as the initiative. It is the second player's — Black's — job to wrest the initiative from White, or at least to neutralize it.
After the first game of a match, in which chance determines who plays white, the players alternate in having the first move.
In a theoretical game between two theoretically equal players making theoretically correct moves, the theoretical ending is foregone: White, the player holding the initiative, must win.
But theory quickly parts company with reality over the chessboard. Players—even grandmasters—slip up, overlook opportunities, blunder. They underestimate their opponents or overestimate themselves.
Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky have met before. Spassky has won three of their last five games, and two have been drawn. The Fischer mystique has not seemed to work in Spassky's case.
But then, Fischer and Spassky have not met since Fischer's mystique began working full time.
The winner of the coin-toss (or whatever else is used to pick White in the first game) will enjoy the almost-tangible advantage of the initiative. He will also enjoy the psychological advantage of, in a sense, calling the tune. And, if he plays without error, nursing his one-move advantage, he will wind up with the much more potent psychological advantage of taking the lead in the match.
[Caption: Gudmundur Thorarinsson, head of the Icelandic Chess Federation, directs Boris Spassky, right, and Bobby Fischer in drawing for first move at formal start of Reykjavik match.]
