“All the ‘guilty ones’ were punished” after the match

Fischer plus forty
By ANDY SOLTIS
Last Updated: 11:13 PM, July 28, 2012
Posted: 9:59 PM, July 28, 2012

Forty years ago this month, Bobby Fischer ended Soviet supremacy in chess by taking a huge lead in his world championship match with Boris Spassky.

Yuri Averbakh, who then headed the Soviet chess federation, recalls how the top Soviet GMs were summoned by the national sports committee after the match, to explain what went wrong. “All the speakers talked of Spassky’s poor preparation,” he told Chesspro.com this month.

Viktor Korchnoi, for example, blasted Spassky’s opening analysis as “terrible.” Averbakh recalls that when he visited Spassky’s training camp, he saw Spassky bring out a whiskey bottle at lunch.

“All the ‘guilty ones’ were punished” after the match, Averbakh says. Spassky’s state stipend was cut and members of his entourage couldn’t play abroad.

A new book, “Bobby Fischer Comes Home,” by Helgi Olafsson, offers some revelations about the American’s post-title years.

World Champ Vishy Anand writes in a foreword that he quietly met Fischer in Iceland in 2006 “but we ended up doing some very mundane stuff” like analyzing games on a pocket set. For Anand, who does everything on a computer, this showed how out-of-date Bobby was.

Source: http://www.nypost.com