Fischer - Spassky 1972 WCH Summary

Click on the Game # to go to the game directly. Games not posted yet will have an "x" after the  game #  I collated notes from all of my sources*  to come up with some decent analytical coverage of each game  (*except for the NYT book, which rarely had anything in it another source didn't)

Notes on the Notes:     

oo = unclear position (dynamic equality as opposed to "=" indicating static equality)

+= / =+ White/Black has a minor advantage;

+/- (-/+) White (Black) has a major advantage;

+-/-+ White/Black has a winning advantage.

!? interesting move, probably sound

?! interesting move, probably unsound or unnecessary

BCE Basic Chess Endings by GM Fine 

Notes on the Sources: All of my copies are PBs in EN. You can  find them at amazon, but frankly I don't think any of them are worth the prices I saw (as of Feb 2013) even for used copies, with the possible exception of the Evans/Smith book - as long as you aren't expecting heavywt annotations. I'm sure there were more books written on this WCH (World Chess Championship) than any other WCH so if you're interested in a book on it check out 2 books I've never seen - one by GMs Euwe and Timman and another by GM Gligoric. I own Timman's The Art of ChessAnalysis  and it "only" has 24 games - covered in 192 pp of very dense annotations, so I'm guessing his book on the 1972 WCH is also well annotated, esp with GM Euwe co-contributing.  Gligoric used to write Chess Life's "Game of the Month" which was also extensively annotated, until USCF went bankrupt in the late 1970s; so I'm guessing his book is probably excellent as well.  I welcome any comments or reviews of books not described by me here on the 1972 WCH

Chess World Championship 1972 (Simon & Schuster, NY)  by GM Evans and Ken Smith 1972, 261 pp, 8.875" (Ht) x 6.125" (Wide) x 0.625"(thick) PB.  This book has a unique format with a diagram for every move! All the other books here average only 1 or 2 diagrams per game. It is not a good source for extremely detailed coverage of the match itself or bios of the players. The annotations are mostly light and aimed more towards beginners than experts, but with more descriptive and useful prose than The Chess World Championship esp for Class-A and lower-rated players. This is a good book if you want the scores of every WCH from 1948-1972.

Fischer-Spassky From the Soviet Point of View, 1973. 158 pp, 8.5" x 5.375" x 0.5". Each game has a unique annotator or annotators inc GMs Flohr, Korchnoi, Krogius, Smyslov and Tal among many others. The annotations are geared towards intermediate/advanced players and are good, but not extremely detailed. Not a good source for historical or biographical info. 

Fischer-Spassky: The NYT Report on The Chess Match of the Century by Richard Roberts, Harold C Schonberg, IM Al Horowitz and GM Reshevsky, 1972. 218 pp, 7" x 4" x 0.44". Basically a beginners book with sparse annotations but good coverage of the match itself and the events surrounding it.

The Chess World Championship (RHM Press, NY) by GM Gligoric and IM Wade, 1972. xi + 221 pp, 7.875" x 5.375" x 0.8". It includes several useful indices of games, openings, players etc and a 50 pp  intro on the history of theWCH from 1948-1972. Its main feature is  complete game scores from all games in the Hague WCH Tnmt of 1948 and from every WCH match from 1951 to 1972. Only the 1972 WCH is extensively annotated. It's a pain to read 99% of the games in the book because the annotations are only set apart from the game score by brackets - the game moves are not in bold face or underlined (most of the 1972 WCH game moves are in bold face, why not all of them?) Feh! BTW I credited all notes from this book to Gligoric but this is inaccurate - apparently Wade collated notes from several sources (see the "acknowledgements") but they aren't individually credited in each game, so I just arbitrarily credited everything from this book to Gligoric although it would have been more correct to credit the book itself as the source of its' annotations.

BTW this wasn't the worst rout in a modern WCH (ie 1948 - present), in 1961 ex-champ Botvinnik reclaimed his crown from Tal with a score of 13-8 and in 1993 WCH Kasparov tied this record (ie a 5 pt lead) by beating challenger Nigel Short with a score of +6 -1 =13.

Pictured above is GM Spassky in front of Fischer's grave in Iceland in 2008. He jokingly asked reporters accompanying him if there was another space available next to Fischer's grave. See the uncropped photo at http://rvkgrapevine.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/page/2/