ANew York Times, New York, New York, Sunday, November 14, 1971 - Page 32
The Strange Malady Called 'Fischer-Fear' by Harold C. Schonberg
Robert J. Fischer, the scourge of international chess, the terror of four continents (only because he has not yet played in the global provinces), the man with the computer mind, the flawless intellect of chess, the machine, the crusher of egos who likes to watch them wriggle when impaled on the gang hooks of a profound combination, is a young giant of a man going on 29 who acts and talks like an adolescent and has the appetite of a growing boy (recent breakfast:extra-large orange juice, four eggs sunny-side, toasted bagels, melon, milk, fruit salad). He is a growing boy famous enough to be invited to appear on the Dick Cavett and Mike Douglas shows, to be the subject of numerous in-depth interviews, and who most likely will be the next chess champion of the world. Single-handed, he has made the ancient game of chess glamorous enough to have the man in the street talking about it, and to evoke editorials and front-page stories in The New York Times. Whoever heard of chess before Bobby Fischer came along?
Few will contest his rank as the greatest living chess player. Some authorities soberly rank him as the greatest who ever lived. United States champion at 14, grandmaster at 15—the youngest grandmaster in the history of the game—he has for the last 15 years been meeting them all and compiling an incredible record. (A grandmaster is as high as a chess player can get. There are about 75 in the world. Of that number, 33 are Russians and 10, not all of them active, are Americans.) Certainly he has been all but invincible the last year and a half. Starting in March, 1970, he licked ex-world champion Tigran Petrosian by a score of 3 to 1 in a four-game match. He had not played chess at that time for more than a year; his last previous appearance had been in the Interzonal Tournament in Tunisia, which he left halfway through even though he was in first place at the time. He had an argument with the judged claimed that his schedule was unfair, wand walked out feeling sorry for himself. “The organizers were against me,” he says. “I was fed up with the chess world and in a bad mood about the whole thing.” So for a year and a half he sulked in Los Angeles. It was the opportunity to play against Petrosian in particular and the Russians in general that lured Bobby back into action.
Larry Evans, a United States grandmaster, believes that it was Bobby's score against Petrosian that convinced him to re-enter international play on a large scale. But Bobby gives a different story. He says that he spent the 18 months brooding, studying chess and think-
* The reason for Fischer's withdraw over scheduling occurred whilst in First Place, not due to childish sulking, but due to the antisemitic discrimination by organizers. The schedule conflicted with the religious observance of the seventh day sabbath. Our church expressly forbid labor during the sabbath, even by punishment of ex-communication*
ing of revenge. “I was determined to come back and put those people who were putting me down in their place. The Russians and their sympathizers and all the rest.”
Anyway, after the Petrosian victory Bobby played in the Zagreb tournament, in May, 1970, and took first place. Last December he ran amok at the Interzonal at Palma de Mallorca, ending with a spurt of seven winning games against the best the world had to show. Winning the Interzonal started him on his series of individual matches toward the world's championship. He pulverized Mark Taimanov of Russia, 6-0. He then shut out Bent Larsen of Denmark, 6-0, and Larsen was thought to be the strongest player in the West aside from Bobby. He came into the semifinal match for the world's championship with the Soviet Union's Tigran Petrosian last month, therefore, with 19 consecutive victories in grandmaster play. No chess player in history could show anything like it.
Bobby won his first game against Petrosian. Then the Armenian snapped the string. Three draws followed. Bobby's admirers began to worry. Reports began to come out of Buenos Aires, where the match was being held. Bobby was not feeling well. Bobby had a cold. Bobby was off form. It later was learned that Bobby actually did have a cold and was taking drugs for it. He was very quiet for the first week. Then he started to complain. He complained about his hotel room, about the food, about playing conditions. At that point the Americans in his small entourage knew that the old Bobby was back in action. He was healthy again. He was his usual self. Watch out, Petrosian! Sure enough, Bobby won the next four games in a row (there was a brief hiatus when Petrosian took a couple of days off on the advice of his physician, pleading nervous exhaustion.) The final score was 6½ to 2½. Next spring Bobby will play Boris Spassky of the Sovet Union for the championship.
But the match will not be held in Russia. Neutral territory will have to be found, and the International Federation of Chess agrees. Bobby has a thing about the Russians. In 1962 he accused them of collusion, claiming that they were prearranging drawn games, thus giving Russian tournament leaders easy half points (A win is a full point, a draw a half point.) He also darkly hinted that some Russians in tournaments would conveniently lose to others; that they controlled the Federation Intationale des Echecs (commonly called FIDE); that the Russians wanted to get rid of all threats to their domination of international chess. Bobby said all this once, he said it twice, he said it thrice, and he is still saying it. What's more, he says, if he played in Russia “they” would annoy and harass him and prevent him from (Continued on Page 124)
[Caption:AWESOME—Right, Bobby Fischer, who lives for chess and chess only, waits at the board for the start of his recent match in Buenos Aires with Tigran Petorsian. Left, an impression by the Argentine cartoonist Hermenigildo Sabat of the two locked in combat. Fischer's victory won him the right to play Russia's Boris Spassky for the world championship next spring.]
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doing his best. “I won't play in Russia, period.”
The Russians were appalled. Who, us? They called Bobby a sore loser, a spoilsport, a loudmouth, a conceited braggart, and nowhere near as good a player as he claimed he was. There were counter charges, and soul-searching in FIDE, and the noble game of kings and queens was being rolled in the mud. *Cheating at chess! Who would have thought it? The Russians have neither forgotten nor forgiven. Russian chess publications keep sniping at Bobby. Only a few months ago an article in a Russian magazine said that it would be a setback for chess if Bobby won that world's championship, because of his rudeness and lack of interest in anything but chess. And last September there was a dispatch from Tass that laughed to scorn Bobby's allegation that Soviet grandmasters had “plotted” against him. “Soviet grandmasters, of course,” said Tass, grandly, with hand on heart, “never plotted against him. They only protected their interests.”
As Bobby would say, yeah. Western grandmasters are more loath than Bobby to come out with charges that the Russian fix games. Or perhaps the Western grandmasters are too well-mannered and polite to suggest such a monstrous thing. “Put it this way,”said one recently, “and don't quote me. The Russians don't try as hard against each other as they should.” Says another: “You can't prove charges of collusion. But it's harder to refuse a draw from a friend than from a stranger. Let's leave it at that.”
In the future, however, charges of collusion in world's championship play will be a thing of the past. FIDE has just ruled that draws will no longer count in candidates' matches after 1972. Bobby, it would seem, has won his point.
ONE thing in the Russian dispatch was accurate—Bobby's lack of interest in anything but chess. Almost from the beginning Bobby's life had only one meaning, and that was to push pawns, knights, bishops and rooks around the 64 squares with more precision than anybody else. To further this ambition he dropped everything—everything—to concentrate on chess. He left Erasmus Hall High School in his junior year because “the stuff they teach you in school I can't use one way or the other.” As a boy of 12 he would walk into a chess club with an American chess magazine stuck in one pocket, a Russian one in another, an English one in his hand. Chess magazines and books constituted his only reading. Today he continues to read every chess publication except those printed in Oriental languages. He has picked up exactly the amount of Russian, French, Serbo-Croatian and Spanish needed to make sense out of chess publications in those languages. “All I want to do, ever, is play chess,” he has said.
He is intensely closemouthed about his personal life. His religion, his family, the way he amuses himself—all that, he says, is nobody's business. It is known that his father left the family when Bobby was 2. Nobody seems to know anything about the father. His mother is now remarried and living in England. His married sister lives in Los Angeles. His religion is fundamentalist. Bobby belongs to the Church of God, a group that observes the Jewish Sabbath and Jewish holidays, or between sundowns on Friday and Saturday. There was a time when he would not even answer the phone on the Sabbath.
Bobby has no home and no permanent address. He lives out of hotel rooms, and the rooms he picks do not have a view. A view, he says, detracts from his concentration. In his hotel room, Bobby will read some magazines outside of chess—the news magazines, mystery-story magazines,
*The loonnng winding November 1971 NY Times article by Harold Schonberg, stitches together a lot of myth with some fact. The fact is, the accusations against Soviet collusion… cheating among Soviet players, was not “News” among the chess world of 1971. Some of the earliest allegations were made by none other than Edward Lasker, president of the American Association of Chess Masters. The topic of cheating via “Grandmaster Draws” was quite common throughout the 1950s, before Bobby Fischer ever thought to publicize the issue in 1962. Harold Schonberg pretends Bobby was the first to raise this issue, as if it were a product of his own imagination. On the contrary it was well known fact by the 1970s and in recent decades other chess pros, including none other than the former Soviet players, have confessed the SOVIETS were ORDERED to CHEAT… none of it was “imagined”.
Soviet Grandmaster Draws, U.S. Chess and Bobby Fischer
Spokane Chronicle Spokane, Washington Tuesday, November 21, 1950
Chess “Cheating” Charged To Reds
zines—but mostly he works at chess, studying openings and end games, working out new wrinkles, playing over games of opponents he will face, probing for weaknesses both technical and psychological. Max Euwe, the former world's champion and now head of FIDE, has gazed upon Bobby and marveled. “He studies chess day and night. In fact, I've never seen him do anything but chess.”
Bobby does not apologize for his monomania. “Chess,” he says, “demands total concentration. Yeah, and love for the game. The Russians have produced great players but not natural talents because they never had to struggle.”. In Russia chess players are heroes and are subsidized by the state, with the usual prerequisites—a good apartment, a car, a dacha. “You can get good only if you love the game. I'm not sure if the Russians do. They are more interested in what they get out of it, and they don't develop character. It takes a certain amount of adversity to develop character. Everything has come too easy for the Russian players. They get the red-carpet treatment.
Larry Evans, the former United States champion (Bobby has not entered the tournament in recent years, though he has held the championship eight times, winning each time he competed). says the Bobby studies chess the way a concert pianist works on technique. “All others are lazy. Not Bobby. It's the only thing he does, and he has been willing to give up his personal life for it.” Bobby, explains Evans, always had a compulsion to win. Every game is life and death. Seldom will Bobby offer a draw, even if he needs only a half point to win a tournament. Bobby agrees with Evans. “The game, not the tournament result, is the main thing,” he says earnestly. “A lot of guys aren't even interested in playing winning chess.” This Bobby can't understand.
To Bobby the game itself is more important than the money he makes from it, although like all artists he is interested in money. He would like to be rich, with the things that wealth brings. But first comes The Game.
“I've never needed much money,” he says. “I've made a living at chess, but not a good living.” Bobby is one of the few professional chess players in the United States. There are about a half dozen in all, and Bobby does better financially than any of the others. In the beginning he was helped by wealthy chess enthusiasts. He could not have made out on prize money alone. Prize money in chess tournaments is considerably below, shall we say, the prize money on the professional gold circuit. It always has been low, though recent years have seen an improvement. In the nineteen-thirties, Al Horowitz won the United States Open. The purse was supposed to be $800, but the sponsors ran out of money, and Horowitz gladly settled for half. THis year the purse for the Open was more than $2,000.
Last year, however, Bobby hit the big time for a chess player, and a good guess at his income would be $20,000. He collected some international first prizes, and he gave a series of simultaneous exhibitions, playing 20 players at a time for a fee of $400. When his series of candidates' matches started, cities around the world began bidding for them. In the match with Petrosian, Buenos Aires put up $10,000 of which Bobby, as winner, collected $7,500. That is enormous for chess. Bobby figures that the purse for his match with Spassky will be at least $25,000, and he started making noises about $100,000 after going through Petrosian. Several countries will be bidding for the match. There could be big money coming Bobby's way if he becomes the world's champion. Maurice Kasper, the philanthropist of chess, told Bobby that he would invest in stocks and bonds for him.
“What's the difference between a stock and a bond?” Bobby wanted to know.
What makes Bobby Fischer so powerful a player? Dedication is part of the answer, but there is much more to it than that. Chess clubs around the world are full of dedicated players almost on Bobby's level of dedication. At best, those players have achieved a good technique. But chess demands something more than memory and technique—memory for the myriad openings that abound in master play; technique for the ability to handle a routine situation in a clear-cut manner: how to win an end game with a pawn plus, say. That is technique, and it is not enough. There is a mysterious ingredient that all great chess players have, along with great composers, mathematicians and scientists. It is a creative element of the mind, the ability to arrive at the inevitable in quantum jumps of the imagination; the ability to express oneself uniquely, ignoring the platitudes of others; the ability to create a structure that no other mind has been capable of creating.
Great chess players work this way. They see possibilities inherent in a given situation that less gifted or fertile players can never find. Out of the infinite number of possibilities in a complicated position, they manage to find the one precise continuation that not only has purity and economy, but also a beauty of its own. Anybody can push chess pieces around. It needs the mind of a Capablanca, an Alekhine, a Fischer to find a line of play that stands apart, unique, perfect, an affirmation of the creative process.
“Ideas,” says Fischer. “I never did memorize lines.” Which is to be regarded as something of an understatement, for Bobby never forgets an opening, an analysis, or a game he has played. Not long ago, while being interviewed, he took on an amateur. The game ended about 30 moves and 15 minutes later, the amateur taking all of the time. Bobby moved automatically, seemingly without thinking. “You know,” he said to the amateur when the game was over, “that was, move for move, a game I played against Mecking in Brazil a couple of years ago. Here's where you and Mecking went wrong.” And he set up the pieces for an analysis.
When Bobby analyzes, it takes a professional to keep up with him. Pieces fly all over the board, and Bobby takes it for granted that his audience can keep up with him. He was discussing the first game he won from Larsen in Vancouver, and he set up the board.
“I had white,” he said, and made his customary first move, pawn to king 4. “Larsen set up a French defense.” He made the appropriate moves. “I tickled his knight, so he took the bishop. No bishop to rook 4. It used to be played, but Alekhine found the answer. Here.” Bobby shows why B-R4 is no good. “Now I play bishop to rook 3, to prevent his castling. Here I sack [sacrifice] a pawn, and he takes it. Now I have all kinds of play. Larsen didn't know this analysis well, but he thought he knew it better than me and wanted to catch me by surprise. He thought I'd be afraid to sack the pawn.”. Bobby shows what happens when the poisoned pawn is accepted. “Here Larsen thought he was getting me.” Larsen had brought a rook to the seventh,
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with mating threats. “So I chopped his rook.”
Like all grandmasters, Bobby has a comprehensive knowledge of “book” chess. As far back as 1490, there were manuscripts on chess openings, and in 1495 there already was a book on openings written by a Spaniard. Even since then, there have been thousands of books about chess openings, not to mention books on the middle game, the end game, combinations, traps, analyses. There are few with which Bobby is unfamiliar. Chess players have to know “book.” Opening lines have been so comprehensively analyzed that grandmasters play the first dozen or so moves almost by rote.
“There are no longer any surprises, any departures from book, any 19th-century gambits,” says Bobby. “The old gambits can't come back because players today know too much. Whatever position you've got, it's been played before, There are only so many types of positions. There are concrete things happening, whether positional or tactical. Chess is not that hard a game. Everything's been worked out.”
But, Bobby concedes, there are certain things that can't be explained — things like imagination, and the ability to conjure magic out of a position. And chess is a function of the players personality. Some players can be described as classic, some romantic, some avant-garde. Most today are eclectic. Bobby describes his own style as eclectic, with a bit of the old and a bit of the new.
One of the peculiarities about Bobby's style is that when he was white, he almost always opens with P-K4. In all the years he has been playing tournament chess, in all the hundreds upon hundreds of games, the number of non-king's-pawn openings he has used can be counted on the fingers of a mutilated right hand. Bobby knows the king's pawn openings better than anybody alive. But more, it is, one suspects, a point of honor with him to open with P-K5, just to Ted Williams had to hit to right field, no matter what kind of defense was set up against him. That, too, was a point of honor. Opponents, knowing Bobby's quirk, come to him prepared with all kinds of fancy variations against P-K4. It makes no difference. Bobby has fancy variations of his own. Goodness knows what he is reserving for Spassky.
Despite Bobby's characterization of his game as eclectic, most experts consider him primarily a classicist. It is with good reason, considering Bobby's own clear style, that he so admires Capablanca. The great Cuban had the purest of classic styles. In Capablanca's games there were never wild combinations, or tight and cramped positions, or illogical moves. Everything was direct and uncomplicated, aiming toward simplicity. “I could understand what Capablanca was doing,” says Bobby. “Everything was logical. Then I became interested in Alekhine. Botvinnik also. I respect Botvinnik. He was a real thinker.”
Most grandmasters are agreed about Bobby's classicism. “His game is sharp, cool, classical,” says Evans. “It is never unsound. It follows the truth. It also borders just this side of riskiness. Bobby hates defensive positions and is very strong at keeping the initiative. And there is no more accurate player alive. Against Bobby you can't make the slightest mistake. You're dead.”
William Lombardy, the American grandmaster, describes Bobby's games as machinelike, with “terrifically accurate positional play but never boring. Bobby has a great will to win. I've never seen anything like it. He'll play till all the pieces are gone, waiting for his opponent to make a mistake. And the opponent eventually will. Bobby's well prepared.
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[Caption: Prodigy—Fourteen-year-old Bobby Fischer ponders strategy in a game at the Manhattan Chess Club in 1957. A few months later he was to become the youngest U.S. chess champion in history.]
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His opening repertory is encompassing. Certainly he's the greatest of all exponents on the black side of a Sicilian or King's Indian. His end game is generally flawless. Bobby is the most complete player I've ever seen, and I'm convinced he's the best today.”
Another grandmaster, Robert Byrne, talks about Bobby with rueful respect, for Byrne was on the wrong end of two of Bobby's great games. Byrne believes that there is a lot of “idiot nonsense” written about Bobby. “He's a classicist with a purely classic approach. Sure, he can win brilliantly, with sacrifices and everything, but every game is based on position. The frequent smashing attacks he gets are merely a result of his opponents' desperate attempts to avoid positional disadvantage. Bobby,” says Byrne, who was trained in philosophy, “pursues the Idea of the game, in the Platonic sense. All of us players have that ideal. But Bobby knows how to embody it. He has the ability to overcome the chaotic mess and the complexity of modern chess, the baroque scramble, and isolate a single theme, a single line of development, and carry it through. How he does it is his secret. Nobody else can.
“Bobby's approach always is entirely rational. Larsen, for instance, is a romantic who looks for an unusual move. Bobby will never do that. He may make the unexpected move but never the unusual or unharmonious one. He wins a classic theme over and over again—the superior bishop versus the inferior knight. Bobby scares them. I call it ‘Fischer-fear.” I think that's what happened to Taimanov. He was terrified.”
Byrne was referring to the candidates' match last May in Vancouver. Bobby went there alone. Taimanov was accompanied by two seconds, both grandmasters. This is permitted by FIDE rules. Seconds are allowed to help a player analyze adjourned positions. (Russian chess players also travel, very often, with masseurs and physicians.) Taimanov had several worries. Russian bureaucrats do not like their players to lose, especially to Americans, especially to Bobby Fischer. Taimanov was carrying Russia's reputation on his back. That did not help his game. And Fischer was playing at top strength. That strikes terror into a grandmaster's heart. Taimanov definitely had Fischer-fear.
Bobby thought that the sight of Taimanov and his seconds was the funniest thing he had ever seen. The three would sit in a circle, each with a pocket set, six hands flying, pocket sets waving in the air, and a confused look on Taimanov's face. Just before resuming play in one adjourned position, the seconds were giving Taimanov last-minute advice. When poor Taimanov entered the playing room and sat down to confront Bobby, he was so rattled, his head was so full of variations, that on the sixth move he left a rook en prise, even as you and I, and immediately resigned.
Others besides Byrne have commented on the fear that Fischer strikes into his opponents. After the Petrosian match there was a comment from Yuriy Averbakh, the Soviet grandmaster. Fischer, said Averbakh, is no doubt a great player, even if Petrosian's play was disappointing. After the sixth game, Averbakh said, Petrosian's spirit was completely broken. “There is some strange magnetic influence in Bobby,” continued Averbakh.
“The same thing happened with his two previous opponents [Taimanov and Larsen] in his march to the world title. They were so spiritually wrecked after the first couple of games.”
Another thing that provokes Fischer-fear in his opponents is Bobby's avoidance of time trouble. In tournament chess a player has to make 40 moves in two and a half hours. If the flag on his clock falls before the required 40 moves, he loses by forfeit. The last half hour of any tournament session is a nerve-racking scramble, with players all over the room trying to beat the clock. Amidst the pandemonium there is certain to be one calm player—Bobby Fischer, who still has plenty of time left on his clock.
Time pressure is the major contributor to ulcers among chess players. That, and lack of sleep during a month-long tournament. It takes a sturdy physique to stand up to the rigors. Chess is a young man's game. Many players actually go into training a month before. Before his match with Petrosian, Bobby was at Grossinger's, playing tennis, swimming and getting plenty of fresh air. The older one gets, the less punishment the body can take, the slower the reflexes for chess, the greater the inability to absorb new theory, memorize lines, adjust to new situations. Averbakh gave as one reason for Petrosian's defeat his age: “You can't play chess when you are over 40. Spassky, a younger man with solid spirit, will perform better against Fischer,” Spassky will. But he is 34 years old, against Fischer's 28.
These days Bobby is a legend. At American chess clubs even the pot players (a group of three; one player has to win successively from both others; anything from 10 cents to half a dollar a pot) will stop playing and talk about Bobby. Normally, it takes something just short of an atomic holocaust to make pot players cease their action. When Bobby enters the Manhattan Chess Club there is an awed hush, like that greeting the unexpected entry of Jascha Heifetz into a violin class at the Julliard. Bobby is always very quiet, very polite. He no longer will storm into a chess club, as he did as a youth, playing off-hand or blitz games, keeping up a constant chatter. He is cognizant of his position and is careful not to do anything that will demean him. The best players will get up enough nerve to ask him to play through one of his games, and Bobby usually agrees. Off in a corner they go, Bobby setting up the pieces and putting them through complicated maneuvers. A crowd gathers — a hushed, respectful crowd, a group of lieutenants listening to the great general explain tactics and strategy.
By now Bobby has achieved some of the surface amenities. There was a time when he was eternally suspicious. He was reluctant to analyze his games because he thought players were trying to pick his brains. He was suspicious of many things. He warned people not to look at television because of its dangerous radiation. He fought shy of friendships; people “wanted” things from him. He was suspicious and would seldom grant an interview (“They make a freak out of me”) He was suspicious of FIDE, which he thought was controlled by the Russians. Now he has mellowed a bit. He even thinks of the future. When asked what he wants from life, he
thinks a while and has an answer: “The world's championship. Recognition. Marriage maybe. I don't meet too many girls.” With his saturnine good looks and heroic 6-foot-2 lean build—Bobby's shoulder spread is that of a Muhammad Ali — he would have no trouble finding girls if he started the hunt. As for recognition, it is suddenly coming to him in big doses. “How he craved it!” says a friend. Now that he is becoming famous, he no longer is the “unearthly” type he was once described as bring. He has loosened up a good deal.
“He's smoother, softer, not as harsh with people,” his old friend and antagonist Lombardy says. “He even passes out compliments. One of the last times I saw him he said to me, ‘That was a fine game against Benko.’ I was flabbergasted.” Not that Bobby can be called, as yet, a well-adjusted person. “If he were,” points out Col. E. Edmondson, head of the American Chess Federation, “he wouldn't be a chess genius.”
One of his chess colleagues thinks that Bobby is beginning to feel strongly self-conscious about his lack of education. But, he said, Bobby is fixed in his ways and will not change. “He would like to be interested in other things, but he's too immersed in chess and always will be. So he avoids people.” Bobby goes his own way. “I have more influence over him than anybody,” says Larry Evans, “and that's exactly nil.” But one thing all Bobby-watchers are agreed upon: that Bobby has been the greatest thing that ever happened to American chess.
As the most publicized player of our time, Bobby has drawn a great deal of attention to the game. People are beginning to regard it for what it is—a rigorously intellectual application of pure logic backed by a creative impulse—rather than a game played by a lot of lovable, elderly eccentrics. Bobby has been good for chess in other ways. For years he has fought for better playing conditions and higher purses, and thanks primarily to him standards have been raised. “Chess players,” says Lombardy, “are apt to be subservient. Chess is the thing they do best, and the thing they love to do. They will accept anything to play chess. But it's degrading to fish for pennies, and Bobby will not do it.”
Now will Bobby play at all unless other conditions are met. There must be glarefree fluorescent lighting and good ventilation, or he will walk
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out. Spectators must be at least 25 feet from the players. No photographers are allowed to take shots during the game; flash bulbs and clicking cameras disturb one's concentration. Players finishing a game must retire from the room rather than sit down and noisily start analyzing.
“They call me temperamental,” says Bobby, “but I'm not. I don't go out of my way to look for trouble. I just don't see why we shouldn't have comfortable playing conditions. And, like, they call me conceited. I'm not. Call it confidence. If I don't go around singing other people's praises, that's not my bag. Take Spassky. I respect him. I mean, he's a good player, even if he never has developed much in the last few years. He started out playing interesting chess. Now it's hard to tell his games from Petrosian's. Anyway, he never was in my class.”
Bobby much prefers head-to-head match play over tournaments. “I want to knock off all the top players. When I win the championship I won't wait three years to put it on the line. I'll play once, maybe twice, a year.”
Bobby is, rather unrealistically — but who can say, with Bobby? — talking about $50,000 matches when he is champion. In any case, he will not be like Alekhine, who won the title from Capablanca in 1927 and then successfully dodged a return match. Bobby, who lives out his emotional life on the board, where he indeed is the greatest, looks forward to meeting and dominating the best intellects of the game. He needs to win for the health of his ego. When he was 14 he said that he liked to see his opponents squirm. He still has tremendous emotional satisfaction from his victories. On the Cavett show, the one revealing remark he made was that the great moment in a game occurred when the opponent drifted into a lost position “and I feel I can crush his ego.” In this ego-crushing process, Bobby was asked a few weeks later, did that mean his own ego was correspondingly lifted? Bobby though about it for a few moments, “I guess that's it, yeah, yeah.”
But whatever Bobby's inner exaltation, whatever the won position does for his ego, he never shows it in public. His manner during play is impeccable — strictly business, poker-faced, never an obvious sign of gloating. Only very experienced Bobby-watchers know from a certain air of suppressed excitement, the faintest possible trace of a smile, when he sees a win.
Bobby can't lie. He is incapable of telling a lie. That's why he is called conceited, when he is only telling the truth as he sees it.”
Bobby was once asked who in the entire history of chess was on his level. He selected Morphy, Steinitz and Capablanca. “But,” Bobby said, “they couldn't beat me today. Too much theory has been published since then.” Word got around, and this judgment was cited as an example of Bobby's conceit. “But its not conceit,” says the psychiatrist. “It's a matter-of-fact statement, and it also happens to be true. If a genius like Paul Morphy had the advantage of today's theory, he might consistently beat Bobby. Maybe. But if Morphy were to step into this room right now, resurrected from 19th century, he wouldn't have a chance against Bobby.”
When Bobby plays Spassky, there is going to be some familiar prematch analysis, in which Bobby's chances will be downgraded. “Spassky,” they will say, “will not be easy. His style of play will give Bobby plenty of trouble.” But they said that about Taimanov, whose rock-solid style of play was supposed to disturb Bobby and tempt him into rash moves. Taimanov, as it turned out, never had a chance. Then they said that Larsen, with his romantic style and all-out gambler's tactics, would really give Bobby a workout. Larsen never had a chance. Then they said that Petrosian's ultra-cautious style would drive Bobby crazy, and that Petrosian's greater experience would make Bobby sweat. Petrosian never had a chance. Now the professors are beginning to say Spassky, with his precision play and flawless technique, may stop Bobby. There also is the constant talk, especially in Russian circles, about Bobby's “luck”—about the amazing tendency his opponents have of blundering in won positions.
Capablanca once had an answer to that matter of luck.
“The good player,” he said, out of his genius and vast experience, “is always lucky.”
