ANew York Times, New York, New York, Thursday, June 03, 1971 - Page 36
Chess: Fischer Makes Exit Laughing In His Match With Taimanov by Al Horowitz
Baseball players call them “laughers.” A team will go out and score, say, eight runs in the first inning, and coast on in from there, looking like nine supermen playing sandlot kids. Also they will have incredible luck: Everything they hit will fall in, and everything the other guys hit will be right at somebody. But on another day, they will be on the receiving end of the same kind of game.
Such apparent mismatches happen in chess as well, where they are even less explicable than in the physical sports. Two players of roughly equal strength will meet and one will play like a genius, and the other like a dope. Perhaps the loser is just tired, or has a lapse of memory and stumbles into a losing line in the opening. Perhaps he is not in the mood for chess.
Whatever the explanation, he can solace himself with the thought that some other day it will be his opponent's turn to play like an idiot, scant consolation though that may be.
Surprising Score
Although such games happen fairly frequently, even among grandmasters, a long match in which nothing goes right for one of the competitors is rare indeed.
But the just-completed match in Vancouver, British Columbia, between Bobby Fischer [correction: of New York] and Mark Taimanov of the Soviet Union certainly looked like a “laugher,” and nobody, least of all Taimanov, can say why.
It is, of course, safe to say that Fischer is the better player and was heavily favored to win, but who would have predicted that after six games Fischer would be the winner by 6-0?
Taimanov is one of the world's leading theoreticians on the openings. He is the author of the definitive work on the Nimzo-Indian Defense. He is also a great authority on the 5. B-K2 variation of the King's Indian; his games with that line have contributed inestimably to clarify the problems confronted by both sides. One remembers his game against Najdorf in the 1953 tournament at Zurich, for example, or his games against Larry Evans in the 1954 United States-Soviet match.
In keeping with his reputation he brought a little surprise with him to Vancouver: 9. B-Q2 is a new move, and one that Taimanov must have subjected to a thorough analysis before he played it in the first game of his match with Fischer. It is astonishing, therefore, that the opening in the first game went so badly for him.
He may have overlooked that Black can play 16. … QxP, allowing White to capture the QNP in exchange, although this is mere conjecture. What is plain is that, by the 15th move, Black has the advantage.
In the third game Taimanov tried out his new move again, and this time followed it up differently to get the superior position out of the opening. When he varies with 11. Q-N3, it is to force Black to weaken his queenside, a weakness of which White takes clever advantage.
With 19. R-B6, however, (the idea is that if 19. … PxN, 20. B-B4, Black cannot play 20. … B-K3) he loses time, and throws away the whole of his advantage. It is the kind of thing that happens to a man for whom, for some inexplicable reason, nothing is destined to go right. (A story on the Fischer-Taimanov match appears on Page 35.)
