Exactly, and the point is that they weren’t fair. Having removed the objectionable criterion whereby the champion retained the title in the event of a drawn match, Fischer created another “drawn match” criterion that meant he won. I’m puzzled by your analysis of the 9-0 situation, Liberal - if Fischer reaches any score of 9-x then he wins at once, since Karpov cannot reach ten wins without the score reaching 9-9 at some stage. There’s no need for the director to step in and no need for any games to be thrown.
I’m also puzzled by the fact that you should think that Karpov would ever offer Fischer a draw in a position that Fischer would be clearly losing. Do you really think Karpov would routinely throw away wins, or be unable to perceive what he was doing?
Then, too, why would you think that a “meek defensive player” (I suppose if you described Fischer as “dogged” and “obdurate” those would be positive adjectives) would be at a disadvantage in a match in which draws were not counted? A draw is still a game that is not lost, and tough defensive chess can be a way to win - as I would have thought a player of your stature would be the first to appreciate.
Indeed, being willing to grind out matches in a tough defensive style has long been a feature of the successful match-player, predating Soviet dominance by decades. Capablanca was a fantastic match-player not merely because of his ability to win games but because he was really good at not losing - and a generation before Capa, British chess writers were remarking on how Blackburne’s style was better suited to tournament play than match, because in matches the man who was willing to endure exhausting draw after draw was the man who would not lose, whereas in a tournament it was not good enough merely to draw - a series of draws and one win would settle a match, but see the contestant place only in mid table in a tournament.
Whatever advantage the Russian drawing machine might have conferred[sup]*[/sup] when it was a question of one Russian out of many finishing ahead of Fischer would have been irrelevant in a match in which Fischer was playing only one Russian. He tried to impose an absurdly unfair demand on Karpov and he was rightly told to shove it.
[sup]* Did the sporting Americans refrain from such reprehensible stratagems because of their sense of fair play, or did American chess suffer from a lack of players of the quality of the top Soviets?[/sup]
In a match where ‘the first to 10 wins’, 10-9 is perfectly possible.
Only if the champion insists that a 9-9 tie is somehow a ‘win’ for him does 10-9 become impossible.
If Fischer were to win 9 games, under his rules the challenger could win the next 10 and still lose.
‘if the champion can win only 8 games, then there is no way for the challenger to lose’.
Well if the challenger can only win 9 games, he can’t win.
So what?
If Fischer can win 9 straight, then he can win 10 straight. There’s simply no need for a 9-9 clause.
I don’t understand.
When games were adjourned, the rules allowed players to get as much help as they wanted.
The only forbidden assistance is during play.
I don’t understand how a strong player and tournament organiser doesn’t know this.
Reference your Golombek adjudication anecdote above, glee, I’m quietly proud of having found a mistake in Modern Chess Miniatures, Barden and Heidenfeld 1960. There’s a game between Balogh and Sandor in which the annotation ignores a mate that I spotted. I’m at work at the minute, but I’ll see if I can dig out the book when I’m at home now that I’ve seen this thread is still alive.
My sister worked at the hotel where the Soviet team stayed at Bath 1973, and she’ll endorse this. She said Mikhail Tal was especially sweet.
Glee, I’m only a few steps from a chess simpleton, but I was interested when younger and when Fisher was in the news a lot. Now that he’s gone, I’d welcome your views / opinion on the simple question - just how good was he?
Usual caveats. I know there’s no definitive answer, and I know this is just aimless fun like those who sit around in the pub debating who was the greatest boxer / soccer star / rock guitarist of all time. All that said, I’d still welcome your insightful opinion. He was world champion, of course, but was he the all-time greatest, as he clearly believed?
Question 2. Fisherandom… do you agree that it makes sense, in that it means players cannot rely on memorised openings and have to actually apply their intellect to the complexities of the game? Has it been tried in formal tournaments? Does it receive much support or enthusiasm among aficionados such as yourself?
Liberal, if you come back to this thread, I’m still puzzled by this:
Aside from saying “tournament” for “match” (what with a tournament being a multi-player event as opposed to a head-to-head contest, which is what a match is - but a man with your background knew this all along), I don’t understand why you believe why Fischer’s conditions would remove the incentive to play for draws. A draw is still the better result if the position is such that the player cannot win, and a “meek” (or “obdurate”) defensive style can be as valid a way to win games as an aggressive, attacking one. It served Steinitz well, and Petrosian too, and also Capablanca.
It’s all very well to claim that Fischer would never have accepted a draw offer unless he was losing, but I believe you’ll find numerous instances from his career - My 60 Memorable Games is probably a reasonable place to start - in which he did exactly that. Too, of course, Fischer doesn’t necessarily have to accept an offer in order for a game to be drawn; threefold repetition, stalemate, perpetual check and a number of statutory endings are already drawn, offer or no.
You could consider the Alekhine-Capablanca championship as a model for the Fischer-Karpov one. Capablanca was perfectly capable of playing winning chess, but part of the secret of his success was a playing style that allowed him to go for years without losing a game (not a match; a single game); Alekhine was the aggressive, imaginative player. As cited, that match ran for 34 games before the aggressive Alekhine scored his sixth win; mathematically, you would expect Fischer-Karpov to have run fifty games at least - possibly a few more since Fischer was ring-rusty and might have dropped a game or two while getting back into the swing of things. Not a good brief for an exciting contest.
Hey, I used to think I was a strong player. Then I played Kasparov!
Your questions are like chess - simple to state; hard to resolve.
Here’s my opinion (full of waffle as usual!)…
Fischer was certainly the strongest player of his day.
He beat Spassky, who had the full resources of the Soviet chess organisation behind him. No doubt every Fischer game was scrutinised by top Soviet players, looking for weaknesses. They still couldn’t stop him!
Fischer was determined to win as much as possible.
Suppose you are playing a top chess tournament, with a decent money 1st prize. You win a few early games, whilst all your rivals draw most of their games. In the last couple of rounds, you only need three draws to win the event outright. Your last three opponents are not chasing the lead, so will undoubtedly agree a draw*. Fischer would try to win all 3 games! This is of course very entertaining for the spectators and (if successful, as it almost always was) will push Fischer’s chess rating up.
As you say it’s hard to compare generations.
When Morphy was playing wonderful attacking chess over 100 years ago, there was no formal payment system. His most famous game** was played against two noblemen in a theatre box!
When Euwe became World Champion, he still taught maths at school. A true amateur!
Fischer used books and magazines for his research - modern World Champions have these massive databases.
Fischer quotes:
Morphy was probably the greatest genius of them all
All I want to do, ever, is just play Chess
I don’t believe in psychology. I believe in good moves
Your body has to be in top condition. Your Chess deteriorates as your body does. You can’t separate body from mind
It’s just you and your opponent at the board and you’re trying to prove something
You have to have the fighting spirit. You have to force moves and take chances
I like the moment when I break a man’s ego
There are tough players and nice guys, and I’m a tough player
If I win a tournament, I win it by myself. I do the playing. Nobody helps me
Don’t even mention losing to me. I can’t stand to think of it
Different people feel differently about resigning
My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I don’t take these things into consideration
I’m going to say that Kasparov was possibly stronger than Fischer.
I cannot prove it; I don’t have a cite and there are stronger players than me who would disagree.
As a professional chess teacher, I would add one thing. Fischer was clearly driven to win the World Chess Championship. However his education was cut short; he had problems socialising and was undoubtedly unhappy a lot of the time, especially after he achieved his ambition.
There are many successful World Champions (Capablanca, Spassky + Kasparov particularly) and I think that chess is a great game but you need to spend time on making a success of the rest of your life too!
Fischerrandom does indeed wipe out hundreds of years of analysis. (It shows the complexity of chess that even modern computers still cannot say which opening moves are the best.)
Stronger players use more analysis. A beginner will remember little; a club player will have a couple of favourite openings; an international will study several openings for each colour and a world-class player will have a massive computer database with millions of games. Yes, Fischerrandom levels the playing field in this respect.
However there are some problems:
some opening positions may not be fair
we’ve all spent some time learning to understand openings; now that’s all been wasted?!
computers become even stronger
There is not much support for Fischerrandom, presumably because of these reasons. There are occasional international events, but I don’t see it catching on.
For one thing, it’s fun for me to think “I’m following one of Fischer’s games!”
*International chess is tough, with a single game lasting up to 7 hours. If you play a tough game, you will be thinking about missed opportunities for hours afterwards. You may not enjoy the rest of the day, including your main meal :eek: , because you are frustrated with yourself. Having the tournament leader offer you a quick draw is extremely tempting.
I consider you to be one of those people. We don’t know each other in real life, but we went through that prayer thing here on the board many years ago. You might not even remember it at all, but I won’t ever forget how fair, gracious, and accomodating you were. Though the experiment failed on one level, it succeeded on another. You gained a lifelong admirer.
Apologies for the slip. As a former TD, I actually have to watch myself with respect to that terminology. I think I caught most of them, but that one slipped.
Karpov was a Soviet drone. His physical conditioning was horrible. He was pale and gaunt because he never went outside or exercised. Instead, he spent all his time studying chess under the heavy weight of Soviet coaches who did not necessarily share Fischer’s opinions on physical fitness, body and mind, that sort of thing. But chess at that level is almost as physically demanding as it is mentally demanding. Plus, we all know that the body tires when the mind does. The eyes hurt. The head aches. And the body longs to remove itself from the table.
I wouldn’t insult Petrosian by comparing him to Karpov. Petrosian was a defender, yes, but an aggressive defender who used his defensive strategies as a means to launch counter-attacks against mistakes and careless play. Karpov was a machine, playing for the draw rather than the win unless the win simply presented itself. We can both speculate any way we like about how he might have fared against Fischer, but I don’t think Alekhine-Capablanca is an apt comparison. Frankly, had there been a time-warp and Fischer had ended up defending against Kasparov after the fall of the Soviet Union, I doubt that he would have bothered with trying to set up new rules. Like I said, they were designed for the sole purpose of nullifying the Soviet apparatchik.
Yes, Fischer certainly accepted draws throughout the course of his career. And of course I know that there are other methods to draw. But to fail to see his intentions for the Karpov match is to remove everything from its context. He expressly said that his rules were designed not to reward draws. He knew what the Soviet strategy would be for the match. And he knew that the frail, ashen Soviet darling of chess would crumble under the pressure of having to win games to win the match. You may say he was wrong, but he knew more than either of us about the Soviet cabal. He faced it time and time again.
Fischer suspected two things: (1) that they had transmission and/or receiving devices under them, and (2) that they adjusted them as part of the rest of their eye, hand, and facial expression signals. I realize that in this day and age of Internet conspiracy jokesters, this sound like just more of the same, but Soviet cheating was common knowledge, especially in the form of collusion, which two economists have fairly well and conclusively documented in a peer-review journal article, “Did the Soviets Collude? A Statistical Analysis of Championship Chess 1940-64”. Their work covers only up to the mid 60s, but it shows the pattern and there’s no reason to believe the Soviets suddenly reformed when Fischer burst onto the scene and began knocking down their grandmasters like bowling pins.
Another Fischer quote to add to those listed by glee. Speaking to Dick Cavett, Fischer said, “When I have white, I win because I’m white. When I have black, I win because I’m Fischer.”
Here Balogh (White) played 23. Bb5! and Barden commented “…now if 23. … cxb5; 24. Rdg1, Ne8; 25. Rg8+, Rxg8; 26. hxg8(Q)++, Kxg8; 27. Rg1+” which is indeed winning for White, but overlooks that 24. …Ne8 allows 25. Qxf8#. It’s not often I get to correct a former British champion’s exercises for him.
The Wikipedia article on Karpov appears to be revisionist, too, even where it doesn’t mention Fischer. It gives the bare facts of his Candidates’ wins against Polugaevsky (+3=5) and Spassky (+4-1=6), and also credits his “tenacious and aggressive play” in winning the latter match, in the face of earlier predictions that Spassky would wipe the floor with him and despite losing the opening game to Spassky. His stamina was tested in the final Candidates match with Korchoi, where it was the meek and unaggressive Karpov who went three games up before finally winning +3-2=19. Kasparov points out that Fischer had been sulking in his tent for three years while Karpov had been playing very serious competitive chess, although Spassky is quoted as saying that Fischer would have won in 1975 but Karpov would have qualified again and won in 1978.
Karpov won Las Palmas 1977 with a score of 13.5/15 - that’s twelve wins minimum. He scored four early wins against Kasparov in their 1984 title match and was 5-0 ahead before Kasparov won any; in none of their four subsequent matches did Kasparov win by more than a single game.
It might be worthwhile to add this:
Note that 11 out of 13 and finishing 2.5 points ahead of Kasparov and Shirov. Quite an achievement for a timid drawing master, no? :dubious:
In summary (speaking as a disinterested party), I find your assessment of Karpov unfair with a strong flavour of jingoism. But if all that you say is true, and Karpov in 1975 was a fraction of the player he would later become, and a physically weedy specimen unsuited to the rigours of a long match, why in Kaissa’s name did Fischer insist that a 9-9 result meant he retained the title when it was there for the taking simply by dropping this condition?
I don’t doubt at all that the Soviets cheated at chess, just as they did in every other international competition in which they were involved. I just don’t buy the “no hats” rule as a realistic counter-measure.
Karpov did indeed improve considerably over the 20 year period, and I do not mean to take away from him in that regard. I haven’t even talked about him as a modern player at all. Many other players got better as they got older too, like Lasker for instance. But you keep discounting the fact that the player in question at the time was not one man — it was a dozen Soviet grandmasters, the KGB, and the full weight and influence of the Soviet Politburo, and even the Kremlin itself. This wasn’t Russia; it was the Soviet Union — a failed totalitarian state that spent a large portion of its spare rubles on first-class accomodations for its chess prodigies. And it did this because they represented success in the midst of all the failures of socialism and the soviet system.
Fischer could not drop the condition because it would have begun a cascade of Soviet counter-demands. The USSR was not a nation in which there was debate over whether waterboarding is torture. Its massive chess machinery would have lept upon the slightest sign of weakness, which is exactly what it did when the USCF balked at backing Fischer. Their betrayal of him was tantamount to a show of weakness, and so they put their foot down at this arbitrary line knowing that there was nothing Fischer could do.
Incidentally, these Wikipedia cites are interesting and all, but lest you think I’m a lone wolf in my opinions (and you do not believe what I said were the opinions of Yasser and Lev), Susan Polgar, a contemporary chess legend who plays competitively on a grandmaster level with men, writes:
I personally asked Karpov, Spassky and Kasparov about the 1975 Fischer - Karpov matchup. All three said that they felt Fischer may have had an edge in 1975. However, all three also agreed that Karpov would have defeated Fischer in a rematch.And thus, Karpov himself gave Fischer the edge. But they all knew that he would improve over time with further Soviet training, which seems to have come to fruition in the 1990s. They knew that Fischer would languish in isolation, having been abandoned by his own backers.
Fair enough. But you just might have looked at it differently if you had been playing in conditions where every third body in the room was a Soviet agent of some sort or another, whether a state-sponsored grandmaster or an “assistant”.
What did the KGB do, specifically and with cite please, to influence the results of chess matches?
Your description of this Soviet machine going up against the poor widdle Americans is not accurate. Yes, the Soviets were serious about chess, but that doesn’t conflate an unfair advantage. Fischer could have had access to US grandmasters if he wanted, but his growing insanity and personality prevented that.
This is a gross misrepresentation of what the international and U.S. chess community did for Fischer.
(1) Fischer shouldn’t have even been eligible to compete for the 1972 World title. He refused to compete in the U.S. championship, which was a qualifier, because of yet another one of his format disputes. Only because of the work of the USCF and the graciousness of another American player did Fischer get to compete.
(2) FIDE changed the qualification tournaments in response to Fischers (justified) complaint of Soviet collusion.
(3) When Fischer refused to play for the world championship because he felt the prize fund was too small, it was doubled quickly.
(4) Spassky agreed to change the playing conditions of their match in the middle of it, simply to accommodate Fischer’s paranoia. This likely caused financial hardship for the backers of the match.
(5) FIDE tried to modify Fischer’s 9-9 demand to a 6-6 match, but caved when Fischer held firm to his demand.
(6) The only demand that FIDE refused to meet out of the 64 Fischer set forth was one that provided him with an unfair advantage.
No, FIDE was not simply a tool of the Soviet machine. They, as you noted, agreed to change the championship match to a format that was more favorable to Fischer’s style of play. They changed the qualifier to satisfy his demands. They did everything Fischer wanted to in regards to playing conditions. The only thing they weren’t willing to do for Fischer was confer an unfair advantage.
