By David Edmonds and John Eidinow

This excellent history book recounts the world chess champion match betwen Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky in 1972, with Nixon as President and the United States and Russia submerged in the Cold War. Fischer the individualist American and Spassky the communist came to represent much more than merely two savants doing battle with wooden pieces on a checkerboard - this was yet another competitive confrontation between east and west.

The book’s most interesting character is the tragi-comic Bobby Fischer - a petulant, petty, and near Howard Hughes-like eccentric. Gifted at chess as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, he lived and breathed the game, even carrying around a little pocket set on which to study moves constantly. He was extremely competitive and possibly had a paranoid fear of losing - he reportedly cried after tough matches. But his oddness went beyond mere personality quirks - ethnically Jewish, he was notoriously anti-semitic and denied his own ancestry. In the years leading up to the championship match, Fischer became convinced the “commies” were out to get him, to the point where he had fillings removed from his teeth as they may have contained KGB monitoring devices and he was reluctant to fly to Iceland (where the championship match was being held) for fear of sabotage. I’d love to see a biopic of Fischer - Nicholas Cage comes to mind (the movie Searching For Bobby Fischer was about a different child chess prodigy).

As a child, Boris Spassky experienced the hellish Nazi invasion of Russia. Spassky was groomed as a chess star with institutional backing: the Russians considered chess exellence to be proof of Soviet intellectual superiority. He was supposed to win against Fischer as a matter of Russian pride - the entire country was counting on him, and literally, there was the dire warning that he could be in grave danger if he didn’t succeed.

The match as depicted in the book is alternately nail-biting and hilarious, as Fischer’s nutty personality leads to totally unreasonable demands on the Icelandic organization running the tournament: Fischer says the board doesn’t have enough contrast between light and dark. Fischer says the lights are too bright. Fischer can’t concentrate with all the television cameras. Fischer wants the first few rows of the audience removed as the noise is too distracting. These annoying demands may have been a psychological strategy to wear Spassky down, but early on Fischer loses two games, one a forfeit because of lateness.

As the match continues, things get really nutty as Spassky feels fatigued, leading to suspicion that he’s being drugged or there’s an American death ray causing him to make stupid chess mistakes. The KGB descends, X-rays are taken of the chairs, and the lighting examined to search for nefarious CIA spy technologies.

Beneath all the drama is the foundation of chess (of which I’m pretty inept). But just as in traditional drama, a chess game has an opening (most of these have been well-documented), a middle, and endgame (usually after both queens have been eliminated). I chuckled at some of the standard game terms like the “Nimzo-Indian defense,” the “Ruy Lopez Opening,” and the “Sicilian Defense” that either player employs not unlike the “crane kick” from The Karate Kid. Chess becomes a psychological battle of wills - due to the ever-present threat of making a stupid move, a player must get into their opponent’s mind to figure out if they see something you don’t. The fear and trying to read your enemy’s mind - it’s suggested that this can lead to paranoia. Fischer is quoted as saying “chess is war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent’s mind.”

Following the marathon match, it seems Fischer’s eccentric ways got the better of him, as he drifted away from competitive chess and forfieted his hard-won title to the Russian Karpov due to a list of over a hundred demands for the next championship tournament. Gary Kasparov would later become the ultimate Russian chess champion who would do battle with IBM’s Deep Blue computer. Meanwhile, Fischer was in hiding, far away from the United States, diving deeper in his eccentricities and becoming a near recluse. He now lives in Iceland, and has invented a style of “random chess” that could breathe new life into the game. The chess world is peppered with Fischer “what ifs” - who would win a Fischer - Kasparov match? Could Fischer have defended his title against Karpov in 1975?

The mere fact that even I’m interested in this subject shows that this book did a wonderful job of recapturing the chess-mania in 1972. I highly recommend it.

Check out this documentary on YouTube.

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