ADaily News New York, New York Friday, October 29, 1971 - Page 4
Knight in 64-Square World: Fischer's Magic Will Challenge King by Robert Byrne
Buenos Aires, Oct. 28—After Bobby Fischer won the ninth game of his 12-game match with Tigran Petrosian in Buenos Aires' Teatro General San Martin Tuesday night, finishing their series with a blazing 6½-2½ score, the chess world buzzed with the question: How did Fischer do it?
What magic did Fischer use to become the first non-Russian in 23 years to win the right to challenge the world chess champion?
To win five games outright, with only one loss and three draws against Petrosian, a Soviet superstar, a former world champion, and acclaimed by many as the greatest defensive player of our era, takes some doing.
Pre-match opening analysis doesn't come close to telling the story. Fischer had a small opening advantage in games five, six, seven and nine, while Petrosian started off with a considerable edge in the first three games.
His Second Took Off
The biggest single surprise was the Soviet star's 11th move in game one, a brilliant innovation discovered by the Russian analysis team, headed by Yuri Averbach and Alexei Suetin. Suetin complained to me he was required to turn out 10 pages of fresh analysis every day and the ordeal was killing him.
Fischer worked alone. Two-thirds of the way through the match, his second, three-time U.S. champion Larry Evans, who is also the author of the latest edition of modern chess openings, left for his home in Nevada. He wasn't being used.
But while Petrosian flubbed attacking chances in game one and failed to organize his superiority in game three, Bobby was absolutely superb in pressing minute advantages. After Averbach and Suetin had relaxed midway through the seventh game, confident that no one could defeat Petrosian in such a position, the 28-year-old American grandmaster proceeded to tear into him with some of the most merciless play ever seen.
That seventh game was really the end of Petrosian and the match.
Miguel Najdorf, Argentina's most famous grandmaster, tried to deprecate the one-sided result by insisting that Petrosian played badly. But I think if Petrosian were asked—as world champion Adolf Anderssen was asked, after his defeat by Paul Morphy, the great American chess genius of a century ago—why he did not play brilliantly, he would have to answer as the honest, ingenuous Anderssen did: “He wouldn't let me.”
In between games, the 42-year-old Petrosian preferred watching soccer matches, while Bobby kept up his favorite regimen of active sports, sometimes crowding in swimming, ice skating, bowling and running me ragged on the tennis court all in one day. However, on playing days, he would sometimes sleep right up to the 5 p.m. starting time, throwing on his clothes in the last minute to get to the game.
Then he would discover he was hungry and order a steak sandwich to go with his usual orange juice. But, as often as not, he would become so absorbed in the battle on the 64 squares in front of him that he would completely forget about the snack waiting just offstage.
He Wants 100G Purse
Fischer's insistence on perfect lighting for chess matches is well known. But in this match he pulled a complete about-face. When the lighting failed for 13 minutes of the first game, Petrosian at once left the table. Umpire Lothar Schmid of West Germany immediately rushed up in the semi-darkness to stop the time clock until Fischer's favorite fluorescent lights would be operable again. But Bobby would not break his concentration, and with Schmid's incredulous permission, continued almost 10 minutes before making his move.
So far the exact date and the place for Fischer's 24-game world championship match with the current titleholder, Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union, have not been fixed. Bobby is willing to play anywhere a $100,000 purse is offered, and I think Spassky will go along with that.
Under international rules, it cannot start later than June 1. I am not going to stick my neck out and predict the score this time, but I am betting on Bobby again—all the way. He will become the first American World Champion since Morphy.
