Will The Real Fischer-Spassky 1972 Design Please Stand Up?

thank you Rob :) 

were also making up the board used in the Fischer Spassky 72 match, to offer as a full combination ....and i think a signature would compliment the board..

Wayyyyy cool and looking forward to seeing it all come together. 

Hi Guys..we have available if any are interested the current Fischer Spassky set offered by JOL....ours are shown here below and at a very comfortable price of £199.00/set..these are ebony! with stamping too....

http://www.officialstaunton.com/products/reykjavik-series-ebony-chessmen

Thanks Carl... That set looks very much like the "current" Fischer Spassky set offered by JOL. For reference here's a photo below of the actual original set compared to our HOS Fischer Spassky.

Thats a nice looking set.!

Hi Guys...finaly we have received our consignments of Fischer 72 series chessmen...we will soon list them at our website..here some shots of the set, hope you like it! 

A nice looking set, and a good likeness, Carl.

You should offer some Soviet reproductions Carl.

Hi Rob 

thank you! 

the sets are 3.3/4 inch and available in ebonised/boxwood and ebony/boxwood and I will run specials at usual for chess.com members. 

:)

thanks Chuck! :) 

there alive !

ebony version:

http://www.officialstaunton.com/collections/chess-pieces/products/fischer-spassky-72-series-ebony-chessmen

ebonised version: 

http://www.officialstaunton.com/collections/chess-pieces/products/fischer-72-series-boxwood-chessmen

as usual we can offer discounts for chess.com members, so if interested please message me on here :) 

also to follow is a chessboard to match the set, with solid mahogany frame...will update as soon as they arrive

That looks like a very accurate reproduction, well done.

I have say before that I am not really a fan of the fisher/spassky set but this one looks so nice I am a converted.

I found a news article about the first game of the match here,

https://bobby-fischer-1972.blogspot.com/1972/07/chess-champions-poised-for-match.html

which notes that the board used at least for the first game, in addition to being of green and white marble treated so as not to be shiny, had 2 1/4" squares. (One with 2 5/8" squares was made, and the squares were found to be too large for the chessmen, it was also noted.)

While I can't answer the precise question posed by the original poster, as I'm not an expert on the quality of the various "Fischer-Spassky" sets offered by different makers, I have learned precisely what the original set was - thanks to Alan Fersht and his web site.

We know that the Fischer-Spassky pieces had a 3.5 inch King height, and they were made by Jacques & Co. I haven't been able to find a copy of Jacques' 1972 catalogue online. Alan Fearsht's web site concerns the development of Jacques' sets from 1849 up to 1939 - when, of course, the Second World War interrupted the manufacture of chess sets.

But that turns out to have been recent enough. The most recent Jacques set he depicts, for the period 1938-1940, has the distinctive characteristics of the Fischer-Spassky set; the crenellations on the Rook and the cross on the King.

So that is the original of which a true "Fischer-Spassky" set should be a copy.

I was recently trying to find that particular set and noticed a lot of variation in design of sets on the market. I found this image which appears to be the set used and is signed by the players at the end of the event.

The most striking difference is that the knight is closed mouth with no teeth showing unlike the most recent designs available today that claim to be the same. 

I was able to acquire a set that matches the one above as seen in the lower of the two images shown below:

The set I used as my template to match to was sold at auction as one used in the 1972 world championship match, and provenance was provided by Gudmundur G. Thorarinsson, chairman of the Match Organizing Committee, who certified it was genuine and by the players signatures. (Apologies to anyone who notices but in my haste to set up the board shown above I placed the white king and queen on the wrong squares)

I purchased my set second hand and don't know its origin but it is the best match I've seen and none of the currently available reproductions seem to get the knights quite right.

There were a lot of games played so I'm assuming that different sets may have been used during the match, but I can't find any images of the pieces confirming on that.

Thanks for those photos. You're right about the mouth. I wouldn't say it is completely closed though. I would guess the teeth are there. We just can't see them from the photos. 

It is my opinion that the most accurate version is a cross between the Fischer Spassky Commemorative set (top) and the new and improved Fischer Spassky set (bottom) from House of Staunton.

I found this photo in a thread here at CB&E where @D2_To_D8 was comparing his 40th anniversary set from HoS (bottom) to the original set (top).

The original image is high resolution so if you have some graphics software you can zoom into the knight to inspect his mouth more closely. If you do you see that the genuine Fischer Spassky Knight definitely has a closed mouth with no teeth and you can see it is in fact just a slot terminating in a hole. This can be clearly seen from the image below:

This image also shows the the knight I matched it with, which isn't an exact match, but does have the following key similarities:

• The eyes are just a hole with a solid centre, obviously produced with a hollow centre drill. 
• The nose on both are just circular holes on the side with a dimple on top.
• The mouth on both is just a toothless slot terminating with a hole drilled where the bit would go.
• The ears are just a simple single groove on each side.

When you look at the image with the Fischer signature it is very clear that all the reproduction sets with open mouths and teeth do not match and must have been modeled on another set entirely that may have also been used during the match that I haven't seen an image of.

Hope that helps