Fischer v Spassky

I have bought myself a chess set. I have several chess sets already, but I spotted this one, or one like it, among the remarkable collection of knick-knackery in the Limehouse Library Hotel in London (how many libraries have been converted into hotels?) and was entranced. There was a similar set on eBay and now it is in the living room.

It is a USA v USSR chess set. The red pieces represent the Soviet Union, complete with hammer and sickle. The American pieces are a triumphal red, white and blue. The pieces are painted on wood, which must have been mechanised though they have the feel of something hand-painted. The board comprises the regulation sixty-four squares, divided into quarters with American and Soviet flags. Numbers and letters run along the sides to aid notation. The pieces are a little too large for the board for comfortable play, though not adversely so. The pieces are satisfyingly of the standard Staunton style, and mercifully do not represent actual political figures – as similarly-themed Matryoshka-like sets do. This is a set ready for battle.

There is no date on the set, but it must come from the 1970s or 80s, firstly because the USSR ceased to be in 1991, but more importantly because of the greatest chess contest of them all, Fischer v Spassky. This was the Cold War contest that tore chess away from its cosy corner onto the forefront of the world’s news. People who knew nothing of knights, bishops and pawns could nevertheless recognise a titanic struggle when they saw one, and few could fail to appreciate the political high stakes involved, as representatives of the two superpowers battled for ideological as well as sporting triumph over sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces.

I was eleven years old when Bobby Fischer, the American challenger, met Boris Spassky, the Soviet incumbent world champion in Reykjavík. I could play chess quite well for my age. Certainly I knew enough to appreciate all that was happening on the board while I tried to comprehend all that was happening around it. The circumstances surrounding the match were extraordinary, but then everything to do with Bobby Fischer was extraordinary. A child prodigy who had rocketed his way to the heights of the game playing the kind of dynamic, attacking chess that all we humble followers wished that we could play, his route to the championship match was astonishing. In Candidates matches along that route he defeated each of two Championship contenders Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen by the unprecedented score of 6 wins, no losses and no draws, then defeated former World Champion Tigran Petrosian by five wins, one loss and three draws. This was chess as shock and awe.

But Fischer was the archetypal unstable genius. Having very little grasp of the world away from the chess board, he developed paranoid, even psychopathic tendencies that alarmed all who encountered him. Organisers of chess tournaments were confronted by ever-increasing demands for payment on a par with prominent figures from other sports (not that Fischer had anything to spend money on), and complaints about playing conditions which were never satisfactory for the prickly Fischer. His greatest ire was aimed against the Soviets. He suspected, not entirely without justification, that the Russian grandmasters who dominated world chess collaborated to maintain their dominance, particularly through their habit of frequent draws (Fischer always played to win). It became his personal mission to defeat the Soviet chess hegemony.

Complaints from Fischer about inadequate prize money, noise from spectators, the movements of television cameras and a host of other issues seemed likely to see the contest cancelled before it had begin. It took British businessman Jim Slater, who doubled the money on offer, daring Fischer to back away, to bring him to the table. Even then he turned up six minutes late for the first game, which was won by Spassky – himself a genial, much-liked figure, somewhat prone to laziness, who merited his position as world champion but who was simply not equipped to handle the furious intensity of Fischer’s play. For Game 2, Fischer did not turn up at all, being in dispute over the presence of the TV cameras (despite his having demanded a substantial fee from the TV rights). He lost the game by default. He was playing against the world champion and he was 2:0 down in a contest in which the first to twelve-and-a-half points (half being awarded to each for a draw) would win. But he turned up from Game 3, and won …

The world’s press were agog at Fischer’s antics, the public were gripped by the drama. Politicians kept a watchful eye (Henry Kissinger called Fischer during the match; the KGB hovered over Spassky), and the chess world was thrilled, if a little dumbfounded, by all of the interest. Among the world’s media, a good many of whom had not the least idea how to play the game, one shone out in particular for the impact his writing would have. Svetozar Gligoric, a Yugoslavian grandmaster who had played against both men and had beaten Fischer, was a journalist and broadcaster and who had signed a contract to produce the book of the contest. The book was at the printing press before the contest was over, the canny Gligoric learning of Spassky’s intended resignation in Game 21 thanks to a slip by referee Lothar Mendes. Fischer v Spassky went on sale within twenty-four hours of the result being declared. It went on to sell over 200,000 copies.

One of those who bought a copy, or had one bought for him, was me. It was a book worthy of the contest and the game of chess itself. Many detailed studies of the games, and histories of the contest, and biographies of the players (chiefly Fischer) would follow, but Gligoric captured the electricity of the moment like no one else. He stirred in the administrative battles, the personalities, the politics, his knowledge of the game and the players, and even the Icelandic weather, in a compelling alchemy. Here he describes things ahead of the famous Game 6:

The wheel of fortune made unbelievable turns in seven days. The Sunday before, it seemed that Fischer was doomed. Who would expect that the challenger would continue to match under those strange and, by then, very unfavourable circumstances (0:2 and one of the losses a forfeit, the first one in the history of the world championship)? Even on the eve of the third game Bobby looked very pale and near to a nervous breakdown.

But his appearance was deceptive. I remember the lost expression on his face before he began, after his eighteen-month absence from competition, to beat Petrosian in the Match of the Century in Belgrade in 1970. “When he starts playing chess, he is another man. He becomes steel!” This was known to Fischer’s chess teacher Jack Collins, but not to many others. True, Fischer hesitated to make his first move in the third game. But he made no mistake after that.

Indeed, Game 6 would turn out to be one of the masterpieces of the match, in which Fischer’s forensic, exhilarating play, turning what practice had established as being a sure defence for Black into a ruin, led to applause that has yet to die down. Even Spassky applauded his opponent and offered his hand in congratulation, a touching gesture that almost disarmed Fischer. But not quite.

“After all, it is how one plays chess that really matters.” So writes Gligoric, and most of Fischer v Spassky is annotated accounts of each of the twenty-one games, with commentary and diagrams of key moments, in the accepted style for all chess books documenting play. But Gligoric brings his journalism to play here as well. One senses throughout the tension, the crises and the triumphs. Gligoric tells us when a move by Fischer caught Spassky by surprise and had him thinking for ages over his next move. Even the outside events are sometimes woven into the commentary. One feels the playing out of history, over the board and through everything that radiated from it.

I played through each of the games the moment I got my hands on a copy of the book. The notation was traditional, so the opening moves of Game 6 are written as 1. P-QB4! [the exclamation mark is Gligoric’s, meaning a startling move], P-K3 2. N-KB3, P-Q4 3. P-Q4, N-KB3, rather than the ‘algebraic’ notation that is now universally adopted, which would be 1. c4!, e6 2. Nf3, d5 3. d4, Nf6. Playing through such games is both elevating and humbling. For a moment you are a genius, as you see (with the help of the book’s commentary) what the player has seen, and you are thrilled at the understanding you now have. You too could, indeed would play like this, for your eyes have been opened. But you will never play like this; you can never lead but only follow. Some are players; the majority of us are mere readers.

Fischer became world champion, and then threw it all away. He was due to defend his title against Anatoly Karpov in 1975, but having set out various demands, nearly all of which were met by the organisers, he withdrew because not all of them had been met. Karpov was declared world champion by default. Fischer descended into a miasma of paranoia, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic bile (despite his being of Jewish ancestry), before re-emerging to the absolute astonishment of us all in 1992, when he declared that he was still world champion – because Karpov had never defeated him – and all subsequent titles, won by Russians, had to have been fixed. In his mind the only correct person for him to play was Spassky, who had slid down the world’s ratings but wasn’t going to say no to another payday. And so there was a rematch. They played in Sarajevo, despite Fischer being told that there was a US ban on economic activity in Yugoslavia, following a United Nations Security Council Resolution relating to the ongoing Yugoslav wars. Fischer, inevitably, was contemptuous of such a ruling and ignored it. He won the match, but was yesterday’s man playing in yesterday’s style. Thereafter he drifted from country to country, playing chess with whoever might harbour him for a while. He immersed himself in conspiracy theories, obsessively anti-American as he had once been anti-Russian (his rants in favour of the 9/11 attacks did not warm him to his native country). Seeking to avoid deportation to the USA, he found sanctuary in Iceland, home of his 1972 triumph. He died there in 2008, aged sixty-four.

Fischer changed chess not so much by his demands for better playing conditions and rewards as by his romantic appeal. He played how people dreamed that they might play. Unlovely in real life, in our dreamworlds he was a rightful warrior – a white knight, if you like. It is this romantic appeal, alongside the geo-politics and the perverse personality, that has made dramatising his story so attractive. There have been some excellent books, a good documentary film (Bobby Fischer Against the World), a reasonable feature film (Pawn Sacrifice), and even a musical (Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice’s Chess owes something to the USA-USSR battle of 1972). Most recently the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit (2020), though ostensibly about a female chess champion, has much about it to suggest Fischer as the inspiration for Elizabeth Harmon. Both are the offspring of brilliant if troubled mothers; both pick up the game almost by intuition; both have a magnetic appeal, within the drama and beyond it (The Queen’s Gambit is said to have encouraged as many people to take up the game as did after Fischer v Spassky); both struggle with the world around them and can only find true meaning over a chess board. Harmon, however, has friends; Fischer may never have understood the word.

Chess has always been the most cinematic of games. The games that unfold in Casablanca, The Seventh Seal, From Russia with Love, The Thomas Crown Affair, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Chess Players or Blade Runner transfix the viewer, whether they know how to play the game or not. It’s because of the opportunity given for the display of thought. Most fictional film representations of sports fall down because they fail to depict convincing play. Chess on film is almost invariably convincing (except when they have set up the board wrongly…). It is about the mind isolated, caught in the act of making decisions that must reflect the world that surrounds the game we see. That’s what Gligoric captured, though he only wrote a book. That’s what The Queen’s Gambit captures, the mind that can only find clarity when confronted by sixty-four squares, thirty-two-pieces with all their moves and permutations. That’s what Fischer meant to all of us who followed the 1972 match and saw our dreams realised. It was the triumph of the mind, and we must always hope for that.

Links:

• The two books to read about Fischer v Spassky are, of course, Fischer v Spassky itself (easily found second-hand) and Dave Edmonds and John Eidinow’s Bobby Fischer Goes to War, which has a strong focus on the political background.
• You can play through every game from the 1972 match on Chess.com
• Very little footage exists of the 1972 contest, after Fischer’s protests against the presence of TV cameras led to their being withdrawn. There are some clips on the Associated Press Newsroom site