ADaily Press Newport News, Virginia Thursday, September 30, 1971 - Page 4
Cold War Chess
The world championship of chess has been a Soviet monopoly since 1948 but Bobby Fischer, of Brooklyn, at the age of 28 and after 14 years in competition has advanced to the semi-final round of the current tournament in a way that indicates he has a better than fair chance to capture the title.
Fischer has brought his aggressive style to full fruition this year, doing something that in chess had been viewed as an impossibility — shutting out in succession during the tournament two of the 10 best players in the world in 12 straight games, with no draws.
This has been compared with pitching 12 no-hit games in a row, or hitting 19 home runs in 19 at-bats. More high-level chess games result in deadlocks than are won or lost; grandmaster faced with defeat can usually bring about a draw.
Today he meets former world champion Tigran Petrosian of the Soviet Union in Buenos Aires in the opener of a 12 match series which will determine who will take on reigning titlist Boris Spassky in a showdown next spring, perhaps in Yugoslavia. If he passes both tests he will be the first American in 100 years to gain the international championship of chess, and this would be a real blow to the Soviet Union, where chess has more devoted adherents than anywhere else. While the Petrosian-Fischer matches, before they begin, are already the talk of Moscow, the progress of an American into the next-to-last round is causing little stir in this country, where impending World Series and the early stages of a football season tax no one's mental capacities.
