AThe Windsor Star Windsor, Ontario, Canada Wednesday, July 12, 1972 - Page 30
Running at a Draw by Jack Dulmage, Sports Editor
WELL, THEY ARE OFF and running at Reykjavik. And Boris Spassky is still ahead.
Spassky was ahead before they started the clocks because he requires only 24 draws to keep his world chess championship while Bob Fischer must do better if he is to take the title from him.
This could be a long, drawn-out affair involving a lot of draws. Russian players, working behind an edge, are known to play for drawn positions. Spassky may be no different.
Fischer has a history of win-at-all-costs play which sometimes has resulted in poorer tournament finishes than he might otherwise have readily achieved. But, it has also resulted in brilliance which has sometimes won tournaments and staggered the world's leading players.
This being a head-to-head match over 24 games, Fischer is generally favored. Apart from whatever technical equivalence may hold, there is considerable difference between the two in their approach to chess.
Call it a philosophical difference if you will, but in essence Fischer is motivated to acquire the crown for the greater glorification of Fischer, while Spassky hopes to prevail for the greater glorification of the Soviet Union.
AS IN ALL competition between Americans and Russians, whether it be the cold war, the arms race or chess, the rules may be the same but the ideas behind the rules are not.
If Spassky loses, he will have the right to demand a rematch. If Fischer loses, he will be back in the qualifying boondocks, not to mention what it might do to his enormous ego.
Fischer does not conceive that it is possible for him to lose to anybody over the board in match play.
FISCHER IS SIMPLY not prepared to lose which is not the case with Spassky, however much he wouldn't care for the idea.
Fischer considers himself the world's greatest chess player, and in fact concedes nothing to the greatest of legendary players of the past ([this is patently untrue as Fischer had given earlier chess players their honorable dues on many occasions]). He is good enough that his contemporaries don't take issue on that. Some thought he would have won the world title when he would have been the youngest to do so. He is now 29.
Starting with the white pieces, Spassky didn't give Fischer any opportunities to create an opening masterpiece. Presumably, the styles will change when Fischer plays white, starting Thursday and on all the even numbered games.
For run-of-the-mill chess players, white or black doesn't make much difference. To grandmasters, however, the initiative afforded by white moving first can dictate a number of things including a decisive edge if black fails to equalize, as they say.
SPASSKY THEN PLAYED very straightforward chess, developing rapidly, against which Fischer used what is known as the Nimzo-Indian-Q-Indian Complex defence.
They have names for these things, attacks and defenses. Grandmasters invariably use text-book moves in the openings which can involve, as Fine demonstrates, 55 pages of variations. These guys are familiar with all of them, so their game usually proceeds on more of less automatic lines for perhaps a half-dozen moves before one or the other strikes out in the direction of uncertain invention.
FISCHER DIDN'T DO anything reckless until they reached the end game. And then it wasn't so reckless. He was heading into a draw when he sacrificed his last piece (a bishop) in order to gain a pawn majority.
A pawn majority in an end game when the board is relatively open can sometimes be effective. In this case, it doesn't look effective, but it also doesn't look as if the sacrifice (some observers called it a blunder) will hurt his draw chances when adjourned action is resumed today.
As Harry Golombek, a grandmaster who writes chess for The Times of London, says, “…a position which holds out unclear winning possibilities for the champion, but only drawing chances for Fischer.”
I'm no Golombek, but for what it's worth, I agree with him. Spassky has the immediate problem of preventing a passed black pawn, so I'm betting he'll exchange pawns on his king bishop square, then liquidate the two black pawns on the open files.
THAT WOULD LEAVE him with an insufficient bishop-king versus king ending with the nebulous (unclear as Golombek puts it) prospect of trying to walk across the board with both pieces to get at the queen-side pawn skeleton in the hope of promoting one of his own two remaining pawns.
TO DO THAT, Spassky would have to stickhandle past the black king, now in the center of the board. Fischer might stalemate him in the process. I don't know. I debated this thing with George Ort for half an hour and got nowhere, but then George and I are not exactly grandmasters.
Anyway, Spassky hasn't got anything to worry about, yet. Let's see he does with the black.
Running At A Draw 12 Jul 1972, Wed The Windsor Star (Windsor, Ontario, Canada) Newspapers.com
