Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match of All Time

16. SMASHED

The first phase of the match had ended with a fearful outcome for the champion. In Karpov’s judgment, Spassky’s confidence had been smashed.

Game four was played out in the main auditorium, now a camera-free zone. Thorarinsson hinted, tantalizingly, that the camera saga might soon be resolved since there was “one solution [Fischer] will accept”—however, he gave no details. The game itself was a desperately tense encounter. In a display of admirable, even bold, self-assurance, Spassky opted for the Sicilian Defense, a counterpunching opening seen routinely on the grandmaster circuit, but one he himself rarely played; Fischer knew it better than anyone on earth because he had relied on it countless times with the black pieces. Now Spassky was deploying Fischer’s trustiest tool against its master: a bravura psychological stroke.

The opening, a specialty of the seventeenth-century Sicilian named Gioacchino Greco, is mentioned in the 1925 Soviet movie Chess Fever, which actually featured the real-life world champion José Capablanca. A marriage is on the rocks because of the husband’s obsession with chess. Eventually the couple do find happiness, through the wife coming to recognize the charms of the game. Her last line, just before the closing kiss, is, “Darling… let’s try the Sicilian Defense.”

On move sixteen, Fischer unwisely accepted the sacrifice of a pawn—after which Spassky’s two bishops grandly commandeered the board, gaining between them a sweeping control of the long diagonals. Had the champion in the complex middle game found room for an apparently wasteful rook move, he could have forced white (Fischer) to advance a pawn. This pawn would subsequently have blocked the maneuver by which Fischer escaped. In the end, Fischer was lucky to crawl out with a draw. Later, the experts all concurred that Spassky had chosen the wrong order of moves and thrown victory away. Spassky and his coaches had plotted the development of the game right up to move nineteen. However, Fischer’s responses were so quick that as the game wore on, Spassky was increasingly tormented by the idea that there had been a leak and that his rehearsed line had somehow been conveyed to the American. Believing in any case that he had found a stronger continuation, at the nineteenth move he deviated from his team’s homework.

Off the board, even though several of Fischer’s grievances had been resolved, the American camp was still unsatisfied. But their next attack, launched before the following game, was a public relations disaster. Fred Cramer issued a list of fourteen fresh demands on Fischer’s behalf, a list that mysteriously found its way to the press. The outrageous nature of some of the items made Cramer look foolish and Fischer seem more than ever the prima donna. He, Fischer, wanted: a different car (something superior to the two-year-old Mercedes he had been allocated), exclusive use of the hotel swimming pool, smaller squares on the board, more pocket money ($10 a day did not suffice), another hotel room, and a wider choice of magazines in his hotel. Since several of the points mentioned concerned the Loftleidir, the manager issued a sharp statement: “Mr. Fischer is a treasured guest, but he does not own the hotel.” Cramer was furious that the debate went public—“I have been stabbed in the back,” he moaned.

Game five took place on Thursday, 20 July.

Pawn to queen four, knight to king’s bishop three, pawn to queen’s bishop four, pawn to king three, knight to queen’s bishop three, bishop to knight five—the Nimzo-Indian, an opening in which black develops his pieces quickly and often exchanges bishop for knight. It frequently results in highly unbalanced positions. Spassky proceeded slowly—taking an hour and three-quarters for the first twenty moves, leaving him barely two minutes a move for the rest of the session. On move eleven, Fischer found an ingenious and unorthodox knight maneuver that most players would have rejected without a second glance, for on its new square the knight can be captured, leading to the kind of unsightly, disjointed pawn configuration beginners are warned to avoid. Pawns tend to be at their most robust, most difficult to pick off, and most useful as a defensive shield, when they are adjacent and can reinforce one another. In the Napoleonic wars, the British infantry usually fought in line abreast, the French in deep columns; in pawn terms, the British strategy is far superior. But Fischer had seen deep into the position and suddenly went on the offensive, his “weak pawns” transmogrifying into a potent force.

Although the challenger now had the better of the position, the widespread expectation was that to convert it into victory, to capitalize on his small advantage, he had a long slog ahead, two dozen more moves, a few hours’ more concentration. And even if he played with great precision, the outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion.

In the event, no such chess toil was required. On move twenty-six, Fischer attacked Spassky’s queen with his knight. The Russian had several safe and honorable retreats. He chose none of them. Instead, disastrously, he withdrew his queen a single square. It was a catastrophic error. Fischer whipped off a pawn with his bishop—and the game was simultaneously over. Spassky recognized immediately that Fischer’s bishop was immune from capture, thanks to a simple trap.

He had committed the sort of gross mistake all chess players, duffers and masters alike, have experienced at least once in their careers; realization dawns and the heart sinks at the very moment the fingers relinquish the moved piece. Chess is the most unforgiving of sports; there is no comeback, no second chance, from such a careless gaffe.

Icelanders are not an expressive people; equanimity is a national trait in which they take pride. But now the crowd erupted, breaking into a rhythmic chant: “Bobby! Bobby!” They stamped their feet and clapped their hands. In the canteen, the predominantly north European audience had a Greek moment, hurling plates and glasses into the air. With the match level at 2.5 points each, suddenly the talk was of the pressure on Spassky. Fischer left the auditorium looking smug. The American camp began to brief the media: The Russian was on the edge of a breakdown. He was clinging by his fingertips to sanity. By now, Viktor Ivonin had returned to Moscow and was present at a review of the match in the office of the sports minister, Sergei Pavlov. Present were three former world champions, Petrosian, Smyslov, and Tal, and at least four other first-rate grandmasters, Keres, Korchnoi, Semion Furman, and Leonid Stein. “Why on earth did Spassky permit the Nimzo-Indian in game five?” Petrosian wanted to know. The champion was hopeless in Nimzo-Indian-type positions, both as white and black. Their meeting, they understood, was futile. There was little they could do to assist Spassky several thousand miles away and at this late stage. Anyway, they could not tell him what to do. But the apparatchiks wanted to be kept abreast of the opinions of the experts—as a prime minister would want expert military opinion on the progress of a distant campaign.

Meanwhile in Reykjavik, daily discussions about the cameras continued among the ICF, Fred Cramer, and the television executives. The Icelanders’ budget had assumed major profits from television. Given the sums involved, the organizers and TV producers wanted and needed to believe that Fischer could still be brought round. But in an effort to circumvent Fischer’s antipathy to Fox, the American network ABC was brought in.

The network sent a thirty-six-year-old, Chet Forte, to salvage a deal, even though he was supposed to be overseeing their coverage of the Munich Olympics in September. He was a celebrated sportsman in his own right: only five feet seven, he had nonetheless been a basketball star for Columbia University.

In Fischer’s hotel room, the challenger told Forte, “I definitely want it filmed, but I cannot have it filmed when it bothers me.” Chet Forte was emollient. Later he told the press, “Bobby is immature about a lot of facts of life… but once you sit down with him, you can change your opinion of him.” On Saturday night, 22 July, they spent over two hours together in the auditorium with Forte patiently explaining how they would ensure the cameras were noiseless and invisible.

The stand-off lasted two weeks. At one point Fischer demanded Fox’s expulsion from Iceland (he remained). Fox himself responded furiously to rumors that he had been sidelined, pointing out (rightly) that he still owned the exclusive rights. “I am not out of it,” he said. Thorarinsson was sympathetic to Fox’s plight. “This is not a question of money. There are principles involved. We are fed up with Fischer making impossible demands. This farce cannot continue.” Another ABC executive, Lome Hassan, became involved. After more talks with Fischer’s lawyers, Hassan believed permission had been granted to place one camera discreetly on the main floor of the exhibition hall, right at the back, and two more at the side.

The very first move of game six on Sunday, 23 July, stunned the chess world: Fischer advanced his queen’s bishop’s pawn two squares. Known as the “English” (historically, its first recorded use was in 1843, when it was adopted by an Englishman, Howard Staunton), it ran counter to Fischer’s direct style and formed no part of his supposedly narrow opening repertoire: he had used it only twice before. That confident remark of Spassky’s about Fischer, “He plays one kind of opening, and he [will] not be able to find another,” had returned to haunt him. The scale of such a surprise is difficult to exaggerate. It was as if a normally right-handed boxer suddenly switched to southpaw, leading with his right hand and not his left, as his opponent expected.

Krogius insists he had labored on detailed contingency plans in case Fischer deviated from the opening habits of a lifetime. Fischer had played only a few professional games with the white pieces in which he had not opened with e4, the two-square push of the king’s pawn. “Spassky did not want to spend time studying the material that I had prepared. When, in particular, Spassky was asked what he would like to get ready in reply to 1. c4 or 1. d4, he told me: ‘Don’t spend time on this nonsense—Fischer would never play that.’”

The game itself was majestic, by far the best to date. Harry Golombek described it as “a masterpiece through and through.” Fischer was able to create and then remorselessly exploit vulnerable spots in Spassky’s barricade, prizing his defenses apart before battering him with the rooks and queen, and without once leaving his own position at risk. Spassky was virtually in zugswang—a term referring to an unusual position where a player would prefer not to have to move, since all possible moves will only make his position worse. Black’s resignation position was quite pitiful, the king humiliatingly exposed to the world, like a naked man caught in the shower after the rest of his house has collapsed about him. The packed auditorium rose as one; a bemused, crushed Spassky joined in the applause, clapping for his opponent in recognition of the artistic creation to which he had fallen victim. Fischer had seized the lead. Outside, even the grandmasters were whispering in hushed tones about the possibility that Spassky was a broken man; his chess might never recover. In chess such a thing can happen.

Throughout this period, Spassky’s team dutifully reported back to the Sports Ministry that the champion’s problems arose from his departing from carefully worked-out plans. In Moscow, the grandmasters were also critical of Spassky’s theoretical unreadiness and of his improvisation. Nevertheless, they felt that all was not yet lost. Ivonin, it will be recalled, had thought Spassky was put at a disadvantage by having to sit in an upright chair while Fischer swooped and twisted in his fancy black leather executive model. Game seven saw that disparity corrected. The audience filing early into the hall caught sight of two apparently indistinguishable swivel chairs. At least the championship was proving to be profitable for Herman Miller, the Michigan furnishings manufacturer; the Soviets, through the ICF, had ordered another of his chairs. Cramer protested—though he had no real justification for doing so—and had to be physically restrained by the exhibition hall staff from removing the imported item.

This was not the only change. Fischer had been at work again, asserting control, dictating the playing conditions. Now the table and the board were altered. Fischer had objected to the dimensions of the table—too wide; this made reaching for the pieces awkward. As for the lovingly prepared marble board, there was insufficient contrast between the light and dark squares. So a simple wooden board was put in its place, as in the back room in game three.

Swiveling seemed to suit Spassky. The seventh game began promisingly, with the champion taking an early initiative. Fischer had steered the opening down a sharp line of the Najdorf variation of the Sicilian Defense. In this line, the black queen captures a white pawn (the “poisoned pawn”) deep in enemy territory—“poisoned” because of the risks associated with the foray. Black has to extricate his queen before it is surrounded and captured.

Fischer, however, successfully soaked up the pressure, retaining his extra pawn. Spassky, now rocking gently to and fro in his chair, ended up clinging to an embattled draw after rescuing the game with a saving move just before the adjournment. It had taken him forty-five minutes to work out his response. (According to the Western press, help with overnight analysis had even come from a mysterious hot line to two former champions, who were watching developments thousands of miles away: Mikhail Tal in Latvia and Tigran Petrosian in Armenia.) Lovers of chess curiosities noted that Fischer’s king’s rook had remained on its home square throughout.

For Spassky, the draw proved only a temporary respite. Before the next encounter, game eight, Fischer had declared that he was still unhappy with the shading of the squares—worse than the marble board, he thought. But when, with only an hour to go before the game, Spassky was told about this, he refused to have it changed back. The rule was that any alteration in the equipment had to be sanctioned by both sides.

The Soviet’s newfound resolution did not sharpen his concentration. In game eight, he made another blunder. It occurred early, on move fifteen, when Spassky overlooked Fischer’s none-too-subtle bishop move targeting the champion’s rook, which had nowhere to run. The champion thus lost a rook and got only a bishop in return. The repercussions were not as serious as the colossal howler of game five, but as an illustration of so-called chess blindness, this lapse was even starker—for he had missed not a combination of moves, but one simple move.

Normally priding himself on his inscrutability, the champion began to display signs of psychological wear; he clenched his hands between his knees, flickers of worry crossed his face. On move nineteen, he made another terrible mistake, a retreat of the knight, allowing white a neat little combination (Larry Evans called it “witty”) that simultaneously gained a pawn and forced the exchange of queens. The ending was never in doubt. After his resignation, Spassky remained sitting for a few minutes, staring at the board, punch-drunk. Grandmaster Gligoric described this as the worst game of his career.

Fischer had been unaware that during this game his movements were being captured on film. Believing ABC had finally been granted permission, Lorne Hassan had shot the match from cameras surreptitiously placed far back on the balcony. When Fischer subsequently found this out—from a radio news report—he fell into a rage. He had been deceived. How dare they? He wanted apologies, lots of apologies, apologies all around. He wanted a daily veto power on the use of cameras.

Hollywood film producer Jerry Weintraub and the U.S. promoter of the Beatles, Sid Bernstein, had arrived in Iceland to try, among other things, to buy the TV rights, but Fischer refused to see them. Chester Fox was also reported to be holding out for $250,000. Exasperated, now even ABC threw in the towel. ABC president Roone Arledge sent a telegram announcing the company’s withdrawal: “Obviously the cameras must have been unobtrusive since there had not been an objection either during or immediately after the game, and we are sorry that you were unaware of their placement.” From this moment, not a single move would be filmed until the final day, when the Yugoslav journalist Dimitri Bjelica would sneak a camera into his bag and secretly shoot some footage.

The sign that greeted spectators on 30 July read SPASSKY VEIKUR (SPASSKY IS ILL). Run down by his opponent’s chess and antics, thought the experts. Taimanov, Larsen, Petrosian—and now Spassky. Two thousand spectators were left disappointed; this was a Sunday, when a full house was always guaranteed. Spassky had produced a note from the physician. Cramer gloated: “We ex pected Spassky to adjourn a week ago. That’s what the Russians normally do when their man is below par and is losing rapidly.” In fact, in Moscow after game six, a meeting of grandmasters, strongly critical of the champion’s performance, had recommended that Spassky should play one more game and then take a three-day break.

When the champion returned in full health two days later, he played out an uneventful draw in which the heavy artillery was quickly exchanged, leaving an inert rook ending. Like apathetic guards at a tranquil border crossing, four pawns apiece faced one another in a tedious standoff. The players called it a day, shaking hands shortly after eight P.M.

In game ten, on 3 August, for the first time in the match, Spassky allowed Fischer (white) to open with his beloved Ruy Lopez. No individual in the world knew it better than Fischer or had deployed it to such lethal effect. The key move was the twenty-sixth, bishop to g3, in which the challenger nonchalantly gave up a pawn. Suddenly Fischer’s inactive troops sprang to attention. Each major piece was brought into the action with exquisite timing, arriving neither too early nor too late. Bent Larsen, the second-highest-rated player in the West, was electrified by the game’s unfolding, with its pure, relentless logic: “I bow to Bobby’s brilliant combination.” The ending, with white ahead on material, was a display of technical mastery as Fischer coldly and clinically finished off his opponent.

Among Spassky’s seconds in Reykjavik and the despondent official onlookers in Moscow there was concern over the champion’s psychological state and talk of possible “outside influences” affecting his play.

On 31 July, the deputy chairman of the Russian Federation Sports Committee, Stanislav Melen’tiev, was sent to Reykjavik for ten days. Melen’tiev was on friendly terms with the champion. His instructions were to watch Spassky and his relations with the team. But the committee’s vacillation and sense of impotence is clear in the contradictory advice Melen’tiev received just before he left. On the one hand, he was to inform Spassky (yet again) that from this moment on there was to be no “charity”—no more concessions—to Fischer’s whims, and he was to remind the Russian to take a firm stand. The match “was not just a personal matter; he [Spassky] bore a duty to society.” On the other hand, Melen’tiev was not to force Spassky to act against his will or intimidate him by quoting “a higher authority as saying he should do this or that.”

The score was Fischer 6.5, Spassky 3.5. Spassky was being steamrollered. In that context, game eleven represented the most challenging in the champion’s professional life: a challenge to which he rose with great courage. Once again, Fischer played the poisoned pawn variation of the Najdorf, gobbling up white’s sacrificial offering. He had brazenly captured the pawn in the same position against many other players and had always escaped unscathed. The great eighteenth-century player (and composer) François Philidor described pawns, the foot soldiers of the chessboard, as “the souls of the game,” and Fischer certainly never underestimated their worth.

However, Spassky’s team had had over a week to search for ways to enrich the venom. The toxicity of the swallowed pawn was exposed on move fourteen, when Spassky made a highly counter intuitive retreat of his knight to its original position. He insists he conjured up this move at the table. Byrne and Nei describe it as “a diabolical withdrawal” and “the most interesting move in Reykjavik.” Fischer soon found his queen short of squares as the hunt closed in; eleven moves later, she was finally trapped. There were whisperings and murmurings through the audience, prompting Schmid to spring nervously from his chair and to press down furiously on the “silence” button. The game was now effectively over, though Fischer limped on for a few more moves. When he eventually conceded, cheers and shouts of “Boris!” resounded through the hall. The champion visibly relaxed. “The rest of the match will be more interesting for me,” he said.

Fischer rarely lost, and the historical evidence was that when he did lose, he was psychologically knocked off balance. What impact would defeat have on him this time? Around the world there was excited talk of “turning points,” of the match being “at a crossroads.” In Izvestia, grandmaster David Bronstein wrote, “The world champion has at long last retrieved the key to offensive play and will now probably be able fully to display his many gifts.”

In the event, game twelve was a quiet game—plain-speaking grandmasters called it “tedious”: manifestly drawn a good twenty moves or so before the result was sealed with a handshake, it was prolonged apparently through pure obstinacy. The only amusement to be had was watching the beads of sweat break out on the brows of the two contestants. For once it was a warm day, but Fischer had insisted the air-conditioning system be switched off because of its gentle hum. Throughout the game, he made constant complaints to the arbiter about disturbances in the audience. This time, he had unmistakably good grounds. Some local lads had managed to sneak into a basement room and were screaming into the ventilator pipes that led directly to the hall.

Later, Schmid received a Fischer missive, insisting that the first seven rows in the hall be cleared: “The spectators are so close, and so noisy, and the acoustics are so poor, that I can hear bits of conversation, as well as coughing, laughing, and so on. This is not suitable for a world championship match, and I demand that you and the organizers take immediate action to ensure full and complete correction of these disgraceful conditions, and furnish me a full report of what is to be done.” “It was just a normal letter by Bobby’s standards,” Schmid said, trying to ignore it. However, for Fischer and thus for the organizers, noise was an irritant that would not go away.

Complaining seems to have been cathartic for Fischer. Game thirteen certainly suggests so. Just to replay the seventy-four moves of this nine-hour marathon is to sense the tension. For much of the time, the position was mind-bogglingly complex, and it was unclear who was ahead. C. H. O’D. Alexander described it as “a struggle of heroic proportions.” Fischer gave up a piece but retained and then activated a phalanx of pawns on the wing; they marched, slowly, inexorably, and menacingly, up the board. Several times, under intense pressure, Spassky found just the right saving maneuver. But then on move sixty-nine, exhausted, he slipped up, making the wrong check with his rook; the Soviet press called it “the fatal check.” After that, he could not stop one of Fischer’s pawns from queening. “Bobby poured more into the endgame than he ever did in his life,” said Lombardy. When the victorious Fischer left the stage, Schmid—disregarding U.S. allegations of bias—sat with a demoralized Spassky and rehearsed the latter stages of the game. His mistake and his fatigue apart, Spassky could have taken comfort from his part in such a tour de force. David Bronstein went through the moves countless times and wrote of the game’s delightful intricacy, “It’s like an enigma titillating my imagination.”

Larisa Spasskaia, together with the wives of the other Soviet team members, had now arrived in Iceland. “I hope I can make him relax and think,” she said. Following his titanic and ultimately futile exertion, Spassky needed time to recuperate. On the morning of the fourteenth game, a second postponement was announced. Ulvar Thordarson, a keen chess player and eye specialist who had been asked to be the official doctor shortly before the Fischer-Spassky match began, issued a statement confirming that he had “today at this time [10:20 A.M.] examined Boris Spassky, who does not feel well. I have on medical reasons advised him not to play the scheduled game today.” The exact nature of the illness was not disclosed at the time. Thordarson now says that it was not serious—a cold, no doubt brought on by stress. When the doctor went to see Spassky in the hotel Saga, the champion was well enough to joke with him. “He challenged me to a game of chess. I said, ‘You stick to chess, I’ll stick to medicine.’”

Cramer was less than sympathetic. “Poor Spassky. The Russian bug has struck again because I’m sure there is nothing wrong with the Icelandic climate. Perhaps he wants a couple of days to talk with his wife and get his mind off chess.” Then Cramer approached Thordarson, demanding to see the medical report and receiving instead a stern rebuke. “Before I threw him out, I explained the ethical code between a doctor and a patient.” Thordarson handed the report over to Schmid, forbidding the arbiter from making it public. Cramer next tried it on with Schmid, too, earning him a second scolding. “Spassky does not feel well. That is enough,” the German grandmaster said. The widespread perception in the Western media was that Spassky, behind in points and mentally drained, would now capitulate without much of a fight.