The Record Hackensack, New Jersey Sunday, September 03, 1972 - Page 1
Many Experts Say Game 13 Blunder Was Turning Point. For Spassky, 13 Proved to be a Fatal Number.
From the Record Wire Services, Reykjavik — A blunder that cost Boris Spassky the 13th game against Bobby Fischer will go down in chess history as the pivot point of the 1972 world championship, many grand masters believe.
Spassky, playing white in that game, Aug. 11, was in peak form, having taken 1½ of a possible 2 points from the two preceding games to stand at 5-7.
After nine hours' play, he had turned a losing position into a probable draw with a brilliant defense. Fischer, who had gained the initiative when he breached a make-or-break Russian attack, was also playing what aides said was the “most exquisite endgame of his life.”
Inexplicably, on the 69th move, the champion erred. He checked the American king with a rook on his own queen-one square, instead of checking the king by moving the rook to the third rank.
A draw would have kept Spassky in contention. In defeat 5-8 down, he sat alone at the board until referee Lothar Schmid showed him the drawing move and, taking his arm, helped him away.
“Spassky should have drawn and the whole match would have been different,” said Denmark's Jens Enevoldsen, a chess master. “That defeat shook him so much that he lost a win for a draw in the next game.”
Psychologically, Spassky's worst hour may have come in the third game, when he appeared to be holding all the cards.
He had never in his life lost a game to Fischer. he was two points up in the match, having won the first game over the board and the second on a Fischer forfeit. He was first with white. Yet Spassky lost.
Fischer took the game out of the well known “book lines” with an abnormal 11th move that sacrificed a knight that offered a knight sacrifice to open a file toward the Russian's king. A pawn down on adjournment, Spassky resigned as soon as he saw Fischer's resuming move.
“He never expected Bobby to come back and to come back so strongly,” said Father William Lombardy, Fischer's second. Grand masters generally were satisfied with the quality of play in the championship, despite Spassky's poor showing in the first half.
“This match was better than most others,” said Max Euwe, a former world champion and president of the International Chess Federation, the world's ruling chess body. “There was more struggle and fewer draws.”
(Caption:Family Man—Boris Spassky was photographed in June with his son Vasya in Iceland. He was world champion then.) ★
