The Chess Thread! (not the record label!!!)

[connoisseur series500]

Thanks for pointing out Korchnoi's rise at a late age. Us old guys need as much confidence as we can get, especially today when we have so many talented youngsters in the game.

I did read about 13-year old Karlson from Norway. He's a tremendous prospect.

Did you watch the "A" group with Anand and Topalov and Kramnik. I really enjoyed watching Victor Bologan come back at the end. Mickey Adams had a terrific result which was good to see, as he is one of the "good guys" in chess. Leko had a good result as well. Really enjoyed watching some of the games live.

I will definitely be looking forward to following the Linares tournament.

Do you play much yourself, Swede?

[Swinging Swede]

Yes, I watched the A group when I could. Saw Svidler resign in a drawn ending against Kramnik! Despite this gift Kramnik only managed a 50 % score, after losing three games. He will drop to third place on the next Elo list behind Anand unless he makes a strong result in Linares.

I haven’t played a tournament in several years (only a few team matches). But maybe your successes will inspire me to make a comeback! Although I feel that I would have to work on my opening repertoire a lot first, and it's difficult for me to find the time for that nowadays. One day maybe…

[connoisseur series500]

But maybe your successes will inspire me to make a comeback!

I'll be pulling for you Brother!!

Analyzed my games from last Saturday and saw some serious errors on my part. My opponents just weren't good enough to take advantage of them, but this does confirm that I was not playing my best at all. One tournament every two months is just not enough practice. I came into Saturday's games very nervous and a bit rusty. I think it showed.

When it counted though, I came through.

For what it's worth:

When I was younger, I went by the motto that "Chess is the search for truth."

Now with my return to tournament play, I now follow Lasker's dicturm: "Chess is a struggle!"

That latter philosophy is much more practical.

It does make a difference in one's attitude, by the way.

I was in serious time pressure all three games. That led to some errors. I was also unfamiliar with two of the openings; so I've got to cut myself a little slack. You can't play perfectly when the time control is quick (game/105 minutes) and you are in unfamiliar territory.

I will play better next time.

Does Linares start today?

[Chrome]

I'm more interested in Bobby Fischer as a nutcase than I am of chess per se, but either way, this was pretty interesting. It's from the New Yorker.

GAME THEORY

by LOUIS MENAND

Spassky vs. Fischer revisited.

Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what’s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. “Then, on move 21, came Black’s crusher: a6!”—totally opaque, as are references to the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, the Giuoco Piano, and the Queen’s Gambit Declined. You can ignore the technical stuff and write about powerful queenside attacks, hammering rook assaults, intense positional struggle, and so on; but the truth is that the game is the technical stuff. A move that counts as dramatic is a move disclosed after an exhaustive analysis of all other possible moves, and the analysis can take forty minutes or more. Then someone reaches out and pushes a little piece of wood two inches. To readers who have not pondered the alternatives themselves, and who already think that the huddles in football take too long, it’s hard to communicate the thrill.

There is also the artificial-intelligence problem, and it’s not trivial. If the “best” move is simply the result of multiple calculations, why isn’t the best chess player the one whose brain is most like a computer? Why isn’t rooting for a chess player like rooting for a microchip? Commentators talk about a player’s daring or originality; but a daring or original move is worthless if it’s not also, from a strictly computational point of view, the optimal move—in which case, a computer could have made it. Since there is so little to look at otherwise, the players’ styles and personalities come to seem important to describe. But what does style or personality have to do with it, really?

An activity this resistant to the usual blandishments of sports journalism attracts public attention only when something besides chess seems to be at stake. No other chess match has ever come close to attracting the kind of attention that the 1972 world-championship match, between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, did. It was advertised as “the Match of the Century.” It inspired a pop song, “The Ballad of Bobby Fischer,” performed by Joe Glazer and his Fianchettoed Bishops. Fischer’s face was on the cover of Life, the Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, and Der Spiegel. Life reported on the match. Arthur Koestler wrote about it. So did George Steiner, for The New Yorker. Books were published about Fischer’s most famous games. People who knew nothing about chess history started referring casually to Fischer’s queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against Donald Byrne in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament in 1956, when Fischer was thirteen. The three American networks sent a correspondent each to Iceland to cover the match. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh allowed to journalists that he was a chess enthusiast. In Belgrade, the positions were shown on a screen in the public square. The games were covered as news in Italy, Great Britain, Argentina.

Many books were published about the match. A new account, “Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time” (Ecco; $24.95), has been written by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, whose book about a quarrel between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” was popular when it came out, a couple of years ago. The authors seem to have started off in the belief that since chess, a game they give no indication of knowing a great deal about, is normally an esoteric pastime, the frenzy surrounding the Fischer-Spassky match must have been due to something besides the chess.

Both Fischer and Spassky had been on the international chess scene for some time when they met, in Reykjavík, to play for the world title. Spassky had won the crown in 1969, by beating his fellow-Soviet Tigran Petrosian. Petrosian had been the world champion since 1963, the successor to a line of Soviet champions going back to 1948, when Mikhail Botvinnik took the title that had been held by Alexander Alekhine (a Russian, but an anti-Soviet exile). Fischer had qualified for the match by winning six games in a row, with no draws, against Mark Taimanov, a Soviet player, and six games in a row against Bent Larsen, a Danish grand master regarded as the best non-Soviet player after Fischer, and then beating Petrosian by winning five of the nine games they played (three were draws). Fischer had lost one game in three matches against the strongest players, apart from one, in the world. It was said to have been the greatest run in the history of the sport. President Nixon sent a congratulatory letter.

Fischer had never beaten Spassky head to head. Plus, he had a distinctly borderline personality. From an early age, he had been the chess-world equivalent of a hotel-room-destroying rock star. At nearly every tournament, he complained about the accommodations, he complained about the lighting, he complained about the audience. Most of all, he complained about the money. He was apparently of the view that, since he behaved like a rock star, he ought to be paid like one. We are not talking about vast sums. When Spassky won five thousand dollars in a tournament in Santa Monica, the rest of the Soviet chess establishment was sick with resentment. Fischer’s financial demands set off a bidding war for the honor of hosting the world-championship match. Iceland, to its subsequent regret, emerged the winner, after Belgrade, concerned that Fischer wouldn’t show up, pulled out—and, even then, a British tycoon named James Slater had to double the prize money, to a quarter of a million dollars, before Fischer could be induced to play. (The winner got roughly two-thirds.) Fischer stalled: about to board a plane for Iceland, he fled Kennedy Airport and hid out in a friend’s house in Queens. The start of the match had to be postponed. Henry Kissinger phoned Fischer to talk him into going. At some point during all this, the rest of the planet got hooked on the story.

One possible reason for the world’s interest was the Cold War, and for most of their book Edmonds and Eidinow play up the Cold War aspects of the match. This makes it a little surprising when, at the end, they discount the whole idea. They’re perfectly right to do so. American officials, on their side, regarded Fischer mainly with fear and loathing. Kissinger’s intervention seems to have been motivated by personal interest in the game, rather than by grand strategy. The State Department informed the American chargé d’affaires in Reykjavík to spend no government resources on Fischer’s behalf, and the chargé’s own deepest desire was to get Fischer off the island as quickly as possible. Publicly, sentiment in the United States was divided on Fischer, but more or less the way it was divided, during the same period, on Muhammad Ali or, an even better comparison, Evel Knievel. He was definitely a rude fellow, but maybe there was something cool about him. He was tall (six-three); he was physical at the board, snatching pieces off it when he captured them; he wore glitter-green suits with padded shoulders. He was plausibly a certain type of American antihero: rebel, exact cause to be determined.

And, on the other side, Spassky was far from a typical Soviet-era athlete. He was a patriot, but a Russian patriot. He hated the Bolsheviks and had little respect for the Soviet system (though he was careful to extract the rewards to which he believed his accomplishments as a sportsman entitled him). It gave him pleasure to ignore advice offered by Soviet officials, and in Iceland he made his seconds and other handlers miserable with frustration by his insistence on doing things his own way. He later married, for the third time, and moved to Paris. Fischer hated the Soviets—“Commie cheaters,” as he called them—but his understanding of the philosophical differences between the two sides was not great. He thought that Soviet players cheated in tournaments by agreeing to easy draws when they played against each other in order to preserve their energy for games against foreigners, and he wanted to use Iceland to take his revenge. He was not thinking like a diplomat. He was thinking like a high-school student.

The incentive to write another book on the Fischer-Spassky match seems to have been the opportunity to see government documents from the period—F.B.I. files on Fischer and Soviet files on Spassky and on the match itself. There are a lot of files, but they don’t tell us much. The F.B.I. was interested, for many years, in Fischer’s parents, whom it suspected of being Communists, but this interest does not seem to have had any effect on Fischer himself or on the championship. The K.G.B. took more interest in the match than the F.B.I. did, though we have to remember that K.G.B. agents were playing for Spassky mainly the role that the cadre of lawyers and other advisers surrounding Fischer played for the American. They were protecting their client. This involved nutty chores like taking the fruit juice Spassky was being served in Iceland to Moscow for chemical analysis, to see whether he was being doped, and x-raying Fischer’s chair, looking for transmission devices. Edmonds and Eidinow speculate vigorously, but they can’t find any proof that the K.G.B., or anyone on Fischer’s team, did anything underhanded. They also conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that official Soviet involvement in the match was not unusually intense, and that the press coverage was entirely non-ideological. This was, they properly note, a period of superpower détente. In spite of a good deal of analogy-hunting (“as the match ground on, Nixon became engaged in his own desperate game of chess making move after move to save his presidential skin,” they observe, to no particular purpose), the authors do not come up with a novel explanation for why the match was the worldwide sensation it was.

Since Edmonds and Eidinow essentially finesse the games themselves, avoiding technical analyses and relying mostly on the characterizations of various experts, there is not much left to the story but tears and rage. In every respect but one, the match was a fiasco—“a world-shatteringly silly event,” as one participant, a lawyer for Fischer, later put it. Fischer arrived late for the first game and lost it when he took a poisoned pawn, one of the most elementary mistakes in chess. (He took an exposed pawn with his bishop, which was trapped after his opponent’s next move.) Fischer didn’t show up at all for the second game, and forfeited it. He insisted that the third game be played not in the exhibition hall, which the Icelandic Chess Federation had arranged expressly for the match, hoping to recover some of its costs by charging admission, but in a small room at the back of the building. Spassky, claiming indifference to location, agreed, and Fischer promptly destroyed him. Spassky never really recovered. The match was returned to the main hall, but by the tenth game Fischer had come back from 0-2 to take a 61/2- 31/2 lead. (Draws counted for half a point.) He coasted from there, winning the match by four points and filing abusive protests almost up until the last game. Spassky had played as though he were in a fog for the better part of the match, and phoned in his resignation. Fischer was late to the closing ceremonies; when he was handed his check, he opened it and examined it on the spot. During the speeches, which he ignored, he pulled out a pocket set and showed Spassky where he had gone wrong in the final game.

Though a percentage of television revenues had been one of Fischer’s demands before the match started, the presence of television cameras in the hall became one of his most persistent causes of complaint. (It was on this ground that the third game was played in a back room.) An independent producer named Chester Fox had managed to get exclusive rights to film the proceedings. He was, on Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, a persistent character, but he was no match for Fischer, and he ended up with nothing. The members of Fischer’s entourage, possibly anticipating a windfall if their man won and went on to sign major book and appearance contracts, received nothing for their service. These included an Icelandic policeman, who signed on as Fischer’s bodyguard, and even worked for him, in the United States, after the match. When he left to go back to Iceland, the American Chess Federation gave him five hundred dollars, which Edmonds and Eidinow say works out to three dollars a day for the time he had spent with Fischer. Back in Moscow, Spassky and his team were subjected to a humiliating postmortem, and Spassky’s travel privileges were suspended (a standard Soviet response to failure in international competition). Spassky had apparently believed that he was capable of intuiting a way to beat Fischer during the match. What he realized after the third game, he later said, was that Fischer was “an animal.” He hadn’t calculated that variation.

After Reykjavík, and a few grudging public appearances, Fischer went off the radar screen. He refused to sign any of the contracts offered by publishers and others, and he declined to defend his championship against the next challenger, Anatoly Karpov. He was deposed in absentia in 1974. In 1992, he turned up in Yugoslavia for a rematch with Spassky; the competitors proved to be well past their primes. Fischer’s presence in Yugoslavia at a time of civil war there violated an executive order; he spat publicly on the letter warning him not to play, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Edmonds and Eidinow say it is still outstanding. Fischer gave an interview on a Philippine radio station on September 11, 2001, in which he said that “America got what it deserved.” He has become a vociferous anti-Semite. In the end, he revealed himself to be not a rebel or a mad genius but—what was fairly obvious all along—a delusional paranoid. His behavior in Iceland was not psychological warfare (though it may have had the effect of psychological warfare). It was simply his way of dealing with reality. “I don’t believe in psychology,” he told a reporter when he was holed up in Queens while Spassky waited in Iceland. “I believe in good moves.” So, evidently, did Spassky, who never blamed the chaos that seemed to accompany his opponent for his own meltdown at the board. Edmonds and Eidinow quote a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston: “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.”

The one happy effect of the 1972 championship match was the interest it excited in chess. This was due partly to Fischer’s antic behavior, but mostly to television coverage of the games themselves. The BBC devoted a weekly program to the match which attracted a million viewers; in the United States, PBS covered every play of every game, and the program made a star out of an ex-sociology lecturer named Shelby Lyman, an improbable but charismatic television personality. Still, after the truth about Fischer became accepted, American enthusiasm for international chess faded. How many of the people who followed the Fischer-Spassky match as though it were one of the great soap operas of all time even know who the current world champion is? His name, for the record, is Vladimir Kramnik.

[connoisseur series500]

Edmonds and Eidinow quote a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston: “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.”

Wow! I'd say that art accomplishes the same purpose for many as well.

Thanks for the excert, Chrome. Really enjoyed reading this. I never tire of the story of Fischer and Spassky.

From the point of view of the chessworld, Fischer is a has-been; but he's still a legend. (Hmm, that was contradictory.)

[connoisseur series500]

The one happy effect of the 1972 championship match was the interest it excited in chess. This was due partly to Fischer’s antic behavior, but mostly to television coverage of the games themselves. The BBC devoted a weekly program to the match which attracted a million viewers; in the United States, PBS covered every play of every game, and the program made a star out of an ex-sociology lecturer named Shelby Lyman, an improbable but charismatic television personality. Still, after the truth about Fischer became accepted, American enthusiasm for international chess faded. How many of the people who followed the Fischer-Spassky match as though it were one of the great soap operas of all time even know who the current world champion is? His name, for the record, is Vladimir Kramnik.

Count me as one of those brought into chess as a result of the match and its hoopla. I was 12 years old at the time; knew how to move the pieces and was just getting to the stage where I could beat my father (who is still a pretty decent player today) when the Fischer-Spassky match began.

I discovered for the first time that chess games were recorded and you could actually play over a game by the best players. That was a huge revelation and I went to the public library to get game scores from the old masters. The addiction began and though the flame has flickered and even burned out for periods of my life, I find myself going back to it.

Thank you Bobby Fischer!

[connoisseur series500]

I'm more interested in Bobby Fischer as a nutcase than I am of chess per se, but either way, this was pretty interesting. It's from the New Yorker.

Check out Bobby's webpage for more proof of his madness.

I posted the link on one of the earlier pages of this thread. He likes to post copies of emails he gets from people (with their names expunged.)

Anyone who studied chess for 14 hours a day, as he reputedly did in the 60s and 70s is a certified wacko.

[Chrome]

What do you make of the "criticism" that chess really comes down to kind of a brute mathematical force kind of thing?

[connoisseur series500]

What do you make of the "criticism" that chess really comes down to kind of a brute mathematical force kind of thing?

I don't see any connection with mathematics at all. I suck at math!

What they talk about is calculation: "if I move here, then my opponent is likely to move there; then I will respond with this; and he will have to do this; then I will do that; and he..." and so on. In clearcut positions, I've been able to calculate ten moves deep. It takes a lot of concentration and is hard work. In more complicated positions, it is highly likely that you will "miss" moves in your calculations.

This is the big edge brute computers have over humans in chess. They can calculate with a much higher degree of accuracy than humans can. Calculating positions involve memory and problem solving skills more than anything else. I don't see any connection with math at all. Memory and concentration are important. "If I move here, and he there; then I there, and he there...etc" involves memory. You have to visualize and remember where the pieces will be in your "fantasy."

All grandmasters can play a chess game in their head. It's called "blindfold chess." Some grandmasters can even play 30 blindfold games at the same time! They hold exhibitions against amateurs doing that. Personally, I know that I can play blindfold chess, because I have done so several times. In fact, I'm unbeaten in blindfold. As a gag at work, I gave a chessboard to a colleague and told him to call out his moves to me in another cubicle while I visualized the board. I would then call out my moves and I eventually won the game. I did that a few times a couple of years ago. I can only think a couple moves ahead in blindfold chess, but my opponents weren't very good.

One grandmaster, David Bronstein once played a beautiful game in his sleep. He woke up and wrote it down.

During a tournament game, I will often carry the position in my head when I go off to the bathroom and I continue to ponder it while I'm going about my business! For a few weeks afterward, I can often replay my tournament games by memory. This is all small potatoes for grandmasters. They remember games played years ago. Bobby Fischer was famous for that.

Fortunately, chess is too complex to be mastered through calculating abilities alone.

Tactics can be calculated. Strategy, on the other hand, is longterm (often "positional") thinking. Kasparov was able to defeat the computer in one game of his last match because the computer had no strategical concept as to how to counter Kasparov's longterm plan.

Of course, chess computer programmers are not stupid, and they have made their machines understand strategical concepts as well.

Right now, it is my opinion that the best human players are still superior to the best computers. This is not borne out in actual match play, because humans feel pressure and they get tired while computers do not. In pure chess understanding, the best humans are still better. If they were to play, one or two games then the best humans could win the match. The computers have the advantage in longer matches owing to human weaknesses and vagarfies.

I believe that chess computers have made chess popular again with the masses. Everyone's got a chess program, and they've been introduced to the game once again.

I am sure that one day, computers will always be able to defeat the best humans. It's got to happen. Right now, they just can't calculate far enough; even with all these massive brute force computers which have been developed for that purpose. Chess is still too complex and hasn't yet been conquered by the machines.

It could still happen though.

Edited February 26, 2004 by connoisseur series500

[connoisseur series500]

Just returned from Pittsburgh, where I won my section in the "Pittsburgh Open."

Had to gut this one out and fight my way out of inferior positions in at least two of the games.

Took home $600.

Still, after hotel costs and entry fees come out, I don't end up with much. I don't do this for money! B)

There were close to 10 grandmasters playing in the Open section. All of them were foreign born.

Take a look at the physics department in your local University and you will see the same thing: most of the students and faculty are foreign born. What's wrong with America? Don't we get involved in brainy stuff anymore?

I play in Columbus in two weeks in another big event. That will be my last one for a while, because I've got to concentrate on my new job. I shouldn't really be playing but I had scheduled this months ago.

I've got to get my priorities straigtened out here.

[ghost of miles]

Interest in Chess Rising Among U.S. Kids

Fri Nov 26, 4:39 PM ET  U.S. National - AP

By MICHELLE MORGANTE, Associated Press Writer

SAN DIEGO - There may be stiff competition from video games, television and computers these days, but chess enthusiasts say the ancient game of kings is enjoying a revival among American children.

Players gathered in San Diego this week for the U.S. Chess Championship say youth membership in the U.S. Chess Federation has more than doubled since 2000 and sales of chess sets in the U.S. have increased steadily in the last five years.

"It's a fun game. It has a lot of strategy involved," said 9-year-old Caleb Guy, who will join 300 other young players on Saturday to face off against some of the world's best adult players at the championship.

The kids have a slight advantage: each adult competitor will simultaneously play 10 games or more against their younger opponents.

Not too long ago, there was a fear that chess was slipping in popularity. Interest in the game peaked in the U.S. after Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky to win the World Chess Championship in 1972, but it has waned since then. The U.S. championship itself was even in danger of extinction, largely due to financial problems.

Unwilling to see the tournament die, Seattle venture capitalist Erik Anderson paired with U.S. chess master Yasser Seirwan in 2000 to buy the rights to the championship and orchestrate its revival. The new attention to the game has spilled over to casual players, particularly children.

Sales of chess sets are on the rise, the most popular featuring the faces of characters from "The Simpsons," "The Lord of the Rings," or "Shrek." This year, the "Star Wars" set is expected to be a top holiday seller.

"Chess sets are a consistent seller day in and day out," said Joan Cear of the G.S. Schwartz public relations firm, which represents toy industry clients.

Chess is also being used as an educational tool in public schools and private programs for children in cities like New York, Seattle and San Diego. The programs use chess to teach critical thinking and strategy, math, history, and even English skills by having students write out their moves.

"The goal is to be in every second- and third-grade class in America," Anderson said. "The future is incredibly bright."

Alan Kantor, who organizes youth events and membership for the U.S. Chess Federation, said the organization has seen its 14-and-under membership rise from about 15,000 in 2000 to more than 36,000 today. It's the largest segment in the federation's overall membership.

A national youth tournament in Florida next month is also expected to draw more than 1,500 players, he said.

Julie Livingston, a spokeswoman for the Toy Industry Association in New York, said she will be one of the "chess moms" there, rooting for her 7-year-old son, who learned the game in his elementary school.

"I initially thought it was so boring, and I also thought it would be way over their heads," she said. "But kids actually latch onto it so quickly. It's amazing."

Caleb, who like many young players names Bobby Fisher as a hero, acknowledges that some of his friends don't understand his passion for chess.

"I have one friend who thinks it's boring, but I try to tell him it's fun," he said. "But I think I've beaten him too much."

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

I played a quick game with my 7-year-old daughter yesterday morning. I'd only put down a half cup of coffee and wasn't fully focused and she nailed my Queen (at least that's my excuse).

[ghost of miles]

I played a quick game with my 7-year-old daughter yesterday morning. I'd only put down a half cup of coffee and wasn't fully focused and she nailed my Queen (at least that's my excuse).

That's about the age I was when I started beating my dad... you gotta watch these tykes, they're deadly! B-)

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

I'll take away her little fluffy stuffed puppy for the day....that'll teach her to get uppity w/me!!!!

[ghost of miles]

I'm more interested in Bobby Fischer as a nutcase than I am of chess per se, but either way, this was pretty interesting. It's from the New Yorker.

GAME THEORY

by LOUIS MENAND

Spassky vs. Fischer revisited.

Chess is not friendly to prose. Chess is, after all, a sport, but there is almost no way to convey what’s exciting about it to people who are not themselves deep students of the game. “Then, on move 21, came Black’s crusher: a6!”—totally opaque, as are references to the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense, the Giuoco Piano, and the Queen’s Gambit Declined. You can ignore the technical stuff and write about powerful queenside attacks, hammering rook assaults, intense positional struggle, and so on; but the truth is that the game is the technical stuff. A move that counts as dramatic is a move disclosed after an exhaustive analysis of all other possible moves, and the analysis can take forty minutes or more. Then someone reaches out and pushes a little piece of wood two inches. To readers who have not pondered the alternatives themselves, and who already think that the huddles in football take too long, it’s hard to communicate the thrill.

There is also the artificial-intelligence problem, and it’s not trivial. If the “best” move is simply the result of multiple calculations, why isn’t the best chess player the one whose brain is most like a computer? Why isn’t rooting for a chess player like rooting for a microchip? Commentators talk about a player’s daring or originality; but a daring or original move is worthless if it’s not also, from a strictly computational point of view, the optimal move—in which case, a computer could have made it. Since there is so little to look at otherwise, the players’ styles and personalities come to seem important to describe. But what does style or personality have to do with it, really?

An activity this resistant to the usual blandishments of sports journalism attracts public attention only when something besides chess seems to be at stake. No other chess match has ever come close to attracting the kind of attention that the 1972 world-championship match, between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer, did. It was advertised as “the Match of the Century.” It inspired a pop song, “The Ballad of Bobby Fischer,” performed by Joe Glazer and his Fianchettoed Bishops. Fischer’s face was on the cover of Life, the Times Magazine, Newsweek, Time, and Der Spiegel. Life reported on the match. Arthur Koestler wrote about it. So did George Steiner, for The New Yorker. Books were published about Fischer’s most famous games. People who knew nothing about chess history started referring casually to Fischer’s queen sacrifice on the seventeenth move of his Grünfeld Defense against Donald Byrne in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Tournament in 1956, when Fischer was thirteen. The three American networks sent a correspondent each to Iceland to cover the match. The Prime Minister of Bangladesh allowed to journalists that he was a chess enthusiast. In Belgrade, the positions were shown on a screen in the public square. The games were covered as news in Italy, Great Britain, Argentina.

Many books were published about the match. A new account, “Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time” (Ecco; $24.95), has been written by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, whose book about a quarrel between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, “Wittgenstein’s Poker,” was popular when it came out, a couple of years ago. The authors seem to have started off in the belief that since chess, a game they give no indication of knowing a great deal about, is normally an esoteric pastime, the frenzy surrounding the Fischer-Spassky match must have been due to something besides the chess.

Both Fischer and Spassky had been on the international chess scene for some time when they met, in Reykjavík, to play for the world title. Spassky had won the crown in 1969, by beating his fellow-Soviet Tigran Petrosian. Petrosian had been the world champion since 1963, the successor to a line of Soviet champions going back to 1948, when Mikhail Botvinnik took the title that had been held by Alexander Alekhine (a Russian, but an anti-Soviet exile). Fischer had qualified for the match by winning six games in a row, with no draws, against Mark Taimanov, a Soviet player, and six games in a row against Bent Larsen, a Danish grand master regarded as the best non-Soviet player after Fischer, and then beating Petrosian by winning five of the nine games they played (three were draws). Fischer had lost one game in three matches against the strongest players, apart from one, in the world. It was said to have been the greatest run in the history of the sport. President Nixon sent a congratulatory letter.

Fischer had never beaten Spassky head to head. Plus, he had a distinctly borderline personality. From an early age, he had been the chess-world equivalent of a hotel-room-destroying rock star. At nearly every tournament, he complained about the accommodations, he complained about the lighting, he complained about the audience. Most of all, he complained about the money. He was apparently of the view that, since he behaved like a rock star, he ought to be paid like one. We are not talking about vast sums. When Spassky won five thousand dollars in a tournament in Santa Monica, the rest of the Soviet chess establishment was sick with resentment. Fischer’s financial demands set off a bidding war for the honor of hosting the world-championship match. Iceland, to its subsequent regret, emerged the winner, after Belgrade, concerned that Fischer wouldn’t show up, pulled out—and, even then, a British tycoon named James Slater had to double the prize money, to a quarter of a million dollars, before Fischer could be induced to play. (The winner got roughly two-thirds.) Fischer stalled: about to board a plane for Iceland, he fled Kennedy Airport and hid out in a friend’s house in Queens. The start of the match had to be postponed. Henry Kissinger phoned Fischer to talk him into going. At some point during all this, the rest of the planet got hooked on the story.

One possible reason for the world’s interest was the Cold War, and for most of their book Edmonds and Eidinow play up the Cold War aspects of the match. This makes it a little surprising when, at the end, they discount the whole idea. They’re perfectly right to do so. American officials, on their side, regarded Fischer mainly with fear and loathing. Kissinger’s intervention seems to have been motivated by personal interest in the game, rather than by grand strategy. The State Department informed the American chargé d’affaires in Reykjavík to spend no government resources on Fischer’s behalf, and the chargé’s own deepest desire was to get Fischer off the island as quickly as possible. Publicly, sentiment in the United States was divided on Fischer, but more or less the way it was divided, during the same period, on Muhammad Ali or, an even better comparison, Evel Knievel. He was definitely a rude fellow, but maybe there was something cool about him. He was tall (six-three); he was physical at the board, snatching pieces off it when he captured them; he wore glitter-green suits with padded shoulders. He was plausibly a certain type of American antihero: rebel, exact cause to be determined.

And, on the other side, Spassky was far from a typical Soviet-era athlete. He was a patriot, but a Russian patriot. He hated the Bolsheviks and had little respect for the Soviet system (though he was careful to extract the rewards to which he believed his accomplishments as a sportsman entitled him). It gave him pleasure to ignore advice offered by Soviet officials, and in Iceland he made his seconds and other handlers miserable with frustration by his insistence on doing things his own way. He later married, for the third time, and moved to Paris. Fischer hated the Soviets—“Commie cheaters,” as he called them—but his understanding of the philosophical differences between the two sides was not great. He thought that Soviet players cheated in tournaments by agreeing to easy draws when they played against each other in order to preserve their energy for games against foreigners, and he wanted to use Iceland to take his revenge. He was not thinking like a diplomat. He was thinking like a high-school student.

The incentive to write another book on the Fischer-Spassky match seems to have been the opportunity to see government documents from the period—F.B.I. files on Fischer and Soviet files on Spassky and on the match itself. There are a lot of files, but they don’t tell us much. The F.B.I. was interested, for many years, in Fischer’s parents, whom it suspected of being Communists, but this interest does not seem to have had any effect on Fischer himself or on the championship. The K.G.B. took more interest in the match than the F.B.I. did, though we have to remember that K.G.B. agents were playing for Spassky mainly the role that the cadre of lawyers and other advisers surrounding Fischer played for the American. They were protecting their client. This involved nutty chores like taking the fruit juice Spassky was being served in Iceland to Moscow for chemical analysis, to see whether he was being doped, and x-raying Fischer’s chair, looking for transmission devices. Edmonds and Eidinow speculate vigorously, but they can’t find any proof that the K.G.B., or anyone on Fischer’s team, did anything underhanded. They also conclude, somewhat reluctantly, that official Soviet involvement in the match was not unusually intense, and that the press coverage was entirely non-ideological. This was, they properly note, a period of superpower détente. In spite of a good deal of analogy-hunting (“as the match ground on, Nixon became engaged in his own desperate game of chess making move after move to save his presidential skin,” they observe, to no particular purpose), the authors do not come up with a novel explanation for why the match was the worldwide sensation it was.

Since Edmonds and Eidinow essentially finesse the games themselves, avoiding technical analyses and relying mostly on the characterizations of various experts, there is not much left to the story but tears and rage. In every respect but one, the match was a fiasco—“a world-shatteringly silly event,” as one participant, a lawyer for Fischer, later put it. Fischer arrived late for the first game and lost it when he took a poisoned pawn, one of the most elementary mistakes in chess. (He took an exposed pawn with his bishop, which was trapped after his opponent’s next move.) Fischer didn’t show up at all for the second game, and forfeited it. He insisted that the third game be played not in the exhibition hall, which the Icelandic Chess Federation had arranged expressly for the match, hoping to recover some of its costs by charging admission, but in a small room at the back of the building. Spassky, claiming indifference to location, agreed, and Fischer promptly destroyed him. Spassky never really recovered. The match was returned to the main hall, but by the tenth game Fischer had come back from 0-2 to take a 61/2- 31/2 lead. (Draws counted for half a point.) He coasted from there, winning the match by four points and filing abusive protests almost up until the last game. Spassky had played as though he were in a fog for the better part of the match, and phoned in his resignation. Fischer was late to the closing ceremonies; when he was handed his check, he opened it and examined it on the spot. During the speeches, which he ignored, he pulled out a pocket set and showed Spassky where he had gone wrong in the final game.

Though a percentage of television revenues had been one of Fischer’s demands before the match started, the presence of television cameras in the hall became one of his most persistent causes of complaint. (It was on this ground that the third game was played in a back room.) An independent producer named Chester Fox had managed to get exclusive rights to film the proceedings. He was, on Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, a persistent character, but he was no match for Fischer, and he ended up with nothing. The members of Fischer’s entourage, possibly anticipating a windfall if their man won and went on to sign major book and appearance contracts, received nothing for their service. These included an Icelandic policeman, who signed on as Fischer’s bodyguard, and even worked for him, in the United States, after the match. When he left to go back to Iceland, the American Chess Federation gave him five hundred dollars, which Edmonds and Eidinow say works out to three dollars a day for the time he had spent with Fischer. Back in Moscow, Spassky and his team were subjected to a humiliating postmortem, and Spassky’s travel privileges were suspended (a standard Soviet response to failure in international competition). Spassky had apparently believed that he was capable of intuiting a way to beat Fischer during the match. What he realized after the third game, he later said, was that Fischer was “an animal.” He hadn’t calculated that variation.

After Reykjavík, and a few grudging public appearances, Fischer went off the radar screen. He refused to sign any of the contracts offered by publishers and others, and he declined to defend his championship against the next challenger, Anatoly Karpov. He was deposed in absentia in 1974. In 1992, he turned up in Yugoslavia for a rematch with Spassky; the competitors proved to be well past their primes. Fischer’s presence in Yugoslavia at a time of civil war there violated an executive order; he spat publicly on the letter warning him not to play, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Edmonds and Eidinow say it is still outstanding. Fischer gave an interview on a Philippine radio station on September 11, 2001, in which he said that “America got what it deserved.” He has become a vociferous anti-Semite. In the end, he revealed himself to be not a rebel or a mad genius but—what was fairly obvious all along—a delusional paranoid. His behavior in Iceland was not psychological warfare (though it may have had the effect of psychological warfare). It was simply his way of dealing with reality. “I don’t believe in psychology,” he told a reporter when he was holed up in Queens while Spassky waited in Iceland. “I believe in good moves.” So, evidently, did Spassky, who never blamed the chaos that seemed to accompany his opponent for his own meltdown at the board. Edmonds and Eidinow quote a chess-playing psychologist, William Hartston: “Chess is not something that drives people mad; chess is something that keeps mad people sane.”

The one happy effect of the 1972 championship match was the interest it excited in chess. This was due partly to Fischer’s antic behavior, but mostly to television coverage of the games themselves. The BBC devoted a weekly program to the match which attracted a million viewers; in the United States, PBS covered every play of every game, and the program made a star out of an ex-sociology lecturer named Shelby Lyman, an improbable but charismatic television personality. Still, after the truth about Fischer became accepted, American enthusiasm for international chess faded. How many of the people who followed the Fischer-Spassky match as though it were one of the great soap operas of all time even know who the current world champion is? His name, for the record, is Vladimir Kramnik.

I was definitely part of the "Fischer generation"--age 6 in the summer of 1972, and I remember watching the Spassky match on TV (ABC?) in my grandparents' camper up at the Straits of Mackinac. When I started playing chess in grade-school I read the strategy book that Fischer wrote--pretty useful, actually, as I recall. He sure did go off the rails, though. Is he still seeking asylum in Japan?

[ghost of miles]

I'll take away her little fluffy stuffed puppy for the day....that'll teach her to get uppity w/me!!!!

Exactly! These bright-eyed runts get to thinking that they're smarter than their parents... and before you know it, all authority has crumbled and you find yourself turning all your earnings over each week and asking them for an allowance.

[connoisseur series500]

Chess veterans are grousing over this growth of scholastic chess. I shrug my shoulders and think it's fine. There's no doubt that chess has taken off in the schools.

As I sit here and type, I am waiting for the arrival of my chess student who comes down from Troy, Michigan every two weeks for chess lessons. His father is bringing his daughter today as well for the first time. Hmm, should I charge him more for the lessons now? -_-

Wish my own kid showed more interest...

Damn, if I had a good player giving me lessons as a kid...

[ghost of miles]

Chess veterans are grousing over this growth of scholastic chess. I shrug my shoulders and think it's fine. There's no doubt that chess has taken off in the schools.

Interesting, Conn--why is that? I don't recall that being the case in the late 1970s when I was playing regularly. If anything, the older players seemed excited by the enthusiasm that Fischer had generated for the game among the young.

And what do you think accounts for this wave of activity? You know what else has been big with the kids for the past couple of years--poker!

[connoisseur series500]

Chess veterans are grousing over this growth of scholastic chess.  I shrug my shoulders and think it's fine.  There's no doubt that chess has taken off in the schools. 

Interesting, Conn--why is that? I don't recall that being the case in the late 1970s when I was playing regularly. If anything, the older players seemed excited by the enthusiasm that Fischer had generated for the game among the young.

And what do you think accounts for this wave of activity? You know what else has been big with the kids for the past couple of years--poker!

Don't know if I'm qualified to answer these questions, but I have had long discussions with people like IM Calvin Blocker about it. He told me that event sponsors only cater to scholastic tournaments and that there is little interest for "chess professionals" at his rating level 2470. He bemoans the great influx of foreign chess grandmasters and feels that local talents have been ignored.

Blocker will show up at a local tournament and will find few masters to compete with him. He feels the money is spent on Scholastic chess.

I don't know whether any of this means anything. I do know from my personal experience that a lot of chess parents like to place thier juniors in higher rated sections. So I might encounter some 1700 or 1800 juniors in my Under 2200 section, or Open sections. I think in general that adults sometimes feel intimidated about playing a lower rated junior. The kid could be on the verge of a big rating growth spurt of something. USCF ratings are always slow to catch up to real results. They tend to fall 3-4 months behind.

I don't know. It doesn't really bother me to play juniors. I've played many of them. I am not a big fan of having to play a junior several hundred rating points below me when I'm in a high section. I normally don't get the chance to play others in my rating group, so I do get annoyed if a chess Dad decided to place his kid in my section when he could have played in his own rating section. Parents do that in order to maximize the junior's chances of gaining rating points.

I have received several offers from around the country to teach chess to juniors. The pay is around $25,000-30,000 per year. Not enough for me! But I point this out to highlight the tremendous interest in Scholastic chess. I am only a rated expert, for crying out loud! How many offers to grandmasters and masters get? I just think it's terrific that these employment opportunities now exist for professional chessplayers. As mentioned, I do have a paying chess student. These kinds of things would not have been possible 15 years ago. The growth of scholastic chess has given us players the opportunity to have chess students. Long ago, such opportunities would have been confined to grandmasters only.

I don't charge much for my student. His Dad has to drive 1 1/2 hours to come to my place, so I only charge him $10/hr. I use it as an opportunity to stay sharp. Plus, I really want to help the kid.

Today, parents look at chess lessons as they do violin or piano lessons. Personally, I think it's great!

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

As I sit here and type, I am waiting for the arrival of my chess student who comes down from Troy, Michigan every two weeks for chess lessons.

If you wanna really help hone that kids tactical skills give him a quick pre-lesson tour of the political forum and we'll let Ghost, Chris & Groper shatter his rook, pulverize his knight & pilfer his bishop's pockets in no time flat....a helpful lesson he'll never forget.

[connoisseur series500]

tell me about it... -_-

[connoisseur series500]

great website for anyone interested in chess and it's personalities. Lots of pics and very reader-friendly.

http://www.chessbase.com

Edited November 27, 2004 by connoisseur series500

[connoisseur series500]

some great chessbabes as well. Take note Bright Moments!

[connoisseur series500]

lets see if I can post a link. Great photos!

http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=2043

[ghost of miles]

some great chessbabes as well. Take note Bright Moments!

Girls were a rarity when I played during junior-high... I remember a regional tournament where a team with a girl player showed up, and everybody was oooing and ahhing as if she were some sort of exotic specimen. I imagine that's changed by now, but in the late 1970s--in Indiana, anyway--it was an overwhelmingly male arena of competition.