August 20, 1962

The Russians Have Fixed World Chess

Soviet athletes are being good sports on a number of fronts lately, as shown by Igor Ter-Ovanesyan's story in this magazine two weeks ago. The same admirable attitude does not apply, however, to one treasured game. Here our national champion tells how the Soviets have arranged title competition so that they can't lose in chess

Bobby Fischer

The international Candidates' Chess Tournament that ended June 28 in Curacao left me with one conviction: Russian control of chess has reached a point where there can be no honest competition for the world championship. The system set up by the Fdration International des Echecs, the governing body of world chess, insures that there will always be a Russian world champion because only a Russian can win the preliminary tournament that determines his challenger. The Russians arranged it that way. As far as I am concerned, they can keep it that way. I will never again play in one of these tournaments.

I've been told that is a hard decision to make, because it means giving up any hope of ever winning the title. The truth is that as long as the present system exists neither I nor anyone else from any Western country can win the title. So the decision isn't a hard one to make, but it is hard to explain. The reason why it is hard is that anything I say about Russian dominance of this part of chess—or anything that any Western player says—is bound to look like an alibi for not having beaten the Russians in the Curaao tournament. Any loser explaining why we can't win the world championship, or arguing that the setup makes it impossible for us to compete with the Russians on equal terms, seems to be suffering from sour grapes; it's said there is nothing in the Russian control of international chess that a few victories by others wouldn't fix.

Well, I now know better. And if these reasons sound like sour grapes, I hope a statement of the facts will change that impression. I began playing chess 11 years ago, when I was 8 years old. In 1959 I qualified for the Candidates' Tournament, held that year in Yugoslavia. The winner would meet Botvinnik for the world championship. There were eight players in the tournament, four of whom were Russians. I finished in a tie for fifth place, right behind the four Russians. In the three years before the next Candidates' Tournament rolled around, I played against the Russians at every opportunity I was offered. In these interim tournaments I defeated all the Russians I had faced in Yugoslavia (and would face again at Curacao) or I came out ahead of them in tournaments in which we were entered—in Stockholm, for example, where I won the tournament by 2 points, or in Bled, Yugoslavia, where I beat the four Russian entries, 3 to . That is, I won three and drew one of my four games with the Russians in that tournament.

But between 1959 and 1962 the Russian dominance of the Candidates' Tournament became much more open than it had been before. At Curacao it was flagrant. There was open collusion between the Russian players. They agreed ahead of time to draw the games they played against each other. Each time they drew they gave each other half a point. The tournament winner, Petrosian, got 5 points of his 17 total this way. They consulted during the games. If I was playing a Russian opponent, the other Russians watched my games, and commented on my moves in my hearing. Then they ridiculed my protests to officials. They worked as a team.

The present trouble in international chess goes back to the end of the war. In March 1946 Alexander Alekhine, who had been the world champion, was found dead in Lisbon, and there was no clear-cut procedure for choosing his successor. In the old days, champions themselves decided whom they would play for the title and there was some unfairness about it, because a champion could refuse for years to play a strong challenger. Generally the trouble had something to do with money: if you couldn't put up enough money, you couldn't get a match. It may have been unjust at times, but at least it was logical. Now you can't get a match if you put up money or anything else.

The Russians have substituted propaganda for money as the incentive for holding on to the title, and the system they have worked out makes no sense whatever. I personally would be willing to play a match with Botvinnik at any time, letting him decide the minimum and maximum stakes we would play for, and the time and place. I would go so far as to spot him the advantage of two points in a match of 24 points. It isn't conceit that leads me to say I could come out the victor with ease in such a competition; it is simply that Botvinnik has been world champion too long, his reign perpetuated by the system that selects his opponents, and he is no longer a chess master of championship caliber.

The tournament to pick Alekhine's successor was held in Moscow in 1948. There were five players, three of them Russian. Botvinnik won the tournament and became the new champion, but he did not win by a very big margin—certainly not enough to suggest that he and the other Russians outstripped all other competition thereafter, for all time. Botvinnik's margin would have been even less (possibly even nonexistent), except that another Russian, Paul Keres, lost all his games to him. So right at the start there was a question of whether the Russian numerical superiority in these Candidates' tournaments might not be decisive. But there wasn't so much criticism at first.

By 1953, when I was beginning to play chess seriously, everybody was talking about the unfair way of selecting Botvinnik's opponents. And there were charges that the Russians were rigging international tournaments to keep the world championship in Russian hands. For example, the Chess Review wrote about the Candidates' Tournament of 1953: "There has been undeniable collusion by the Russians to freeze out Western competition." The main argument was this: nothing could prevent one of the Russian players' winning the Candidates' Tournament if, at a critical stage, "it became expedient to throw collective support to the Soviet candidate whose prospects had crystallized above those of his fellow Russians." Nothing could prevent it because the Russian team could draw all their games with each other if they were in the lead, or throw their games to the strongest Russian contender it they were threatened by a player from another country. In an editorial The New York Times said that the system for picking the challenger for the world championship led "to possible collusion between Soviet players to help one win a tourney, as against a non-Soviet opponent."

That was nine years ago, when I was 10 years old, so I don't think I can be guilty of sour grapes in quoting it. In the intervening years Russian mastery of this system of keeping in the lead has grown more skillful. At Curacao there were five Russians out of the eight contenders. Mikhail Tal, however, the former world champion, had recently recovered from a kidney operation, became ill during the tournament and withdrew to enter a hospital, having no part in the general Soviet team effort thereafter. The other four Russians swam in the afternoons, dressed, came to the start of the games in the chess room at the Hotel Intercontinental, dawdled at the chessboards for half an hour or so, made a few quick moves, traded off as many pieces as possible and then offered a draw. "Niche!" one would ask. "Niche," his opponent would reply. They would sign their scorecards, go through the formality of turning them in to the officials and then have dinner or change their clothes and go back to the pool. We played four games a week. Two other days were given over to finishing adjourned games. I played on every day set aside for tournaments. In effect, I was playing a regular schedule of six days a week. But when the Russians drew with each other, they drew early, before the time of adjournment. They thus played only four days a week. In the weeks when all four Russians happened to be playing each other, and drew all their games, they really played only two days that week.

Geller and Petrosian drew their first game in 21 moves. They met again in the 10th round. That game lasted 18 moves. Their next game went only 16 moves. In their last meeting they drew in 18 moves.

Keres and Petrosian drew in 17 moves the first time they played each other, 21 moves the second, 22 moves the third and 14 moves the last time they met. In this last game they overdid it, and while they drew, Petrosian clearly would have won if they had gone on.

As shown on page 19, white's king is permanently trapped in the center of the board. White's queen wing is hopelessly weakened. As a matter of fact, black wins in a few moves. But when black had certainly won, and another move or so would make it obvious, they drew.

Or take Geller and Keres. They drew their first game in 27 moves, their next in 17, the third in 22 and the last game in 15 moves.

The record of Victor Korchnoi, the fourth member of the Soviet team, is more complex. In the first half of the tournament he, too, drew every game he played with the other Russians. At the midpoint of the tournament there was a five-day rest period; we all went to the island of St. Martin. The four Russians were almost tied in points for first place, and the talk was that when they came back to start the second half, one of the four was certain to begin losing to the others. Whatever happened in the Russians' consultations at St. Martin, Korchnoi's game certainly collapsed abruptly afterwards. He lost three games in quick succession, first to Geller, then to Petrosian and then to Keres. Then, in the last time around, he drew quickly with Geller, drew with Keres and lost again to Petrosian. Anyone could draw his own conclusions from this sequence of events but, in any event, it revealed the advantage the Russian team had over Western individual players.

The noisy kibitzers

Sometimes, after their quick draws with each other, the Russians wouldn't go back to the swimming pool. They would openly analyze my game while I was still playing it. It is strictly against the rules for a player to discuss a game in progress, or even to speak with another player during a game—or, for that matter, with anyone. I studied Russian enough to be able to read their chess books, and I could easily understand what they were saying. They would say this move is good, or that move is good—in Russian, of course. My Russian isn't the greatest but, believe me, they weren't talking about the weather. If I was playing against a Russian, and one of these debates was going on right in front of us, my opponent might get up and join the discussion after he had made his move. Even if the advice they gave each other was bad—and too many chess cooks can spoil a game—it was annoying. It made me mad that they thought they could get away with it. I protested to the officials. I learned that they could get away with it. I complained a few more times, but their lead had increased to the point where they were unworried, and they then gradually stopped doing it.

Somebody asked me, "What did you learn at the tournament?" I said, "I learned not to play in any more of them." It is a waste of time for any Western player. The present arrangement for selecting a challenger for the championship is bad for chess, bad for the players taking part in it and bad for any real standard of the world championship. The general public long ago lost interest in any title gained in this fashion. Maybe chess players are losing interest in it also. I have, permanently.