Word: chess
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...soon was. A floppy young gangleshanks in corduroys, T shirt and sneakers, he hunched over the board cracking his knuckles, biting his fingernails and hushing kibitzers with cries of "Pleeze! This is a chess game!" Occasionally, when he lost a crucial game, he burst into tears. There were, however, more triumphs than tears. At 13, he became the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Open Championship (open to those under 20); at 14, the youngest ever to win the U.S. championship; and at 15, the youngest ever to win the title of international grand master. The Mozart...
...What he has done is good for chess, but that was not his intention...
...intention, then and now, is to win the world title. He thought a lot about that in 1968, when he went into seclusion in California with his chess books. Once hopeful of challenging the Russians directly, he soon realized "that it was unrealistic of me to think they would give me a match for the title. I thought that they had a lot of self-respect; you know, I thought that they were like me. I shouldn't have had to play all the qualifying rounds out, but world opinion didn't do it for me. I figured that...
...Vancouver last year. Fischer defeated him in six straight games. Then, last July in Denver, Fischer took on Denmark's Bent Larsen, ranked second only to Bobby in the West, and stunned him by again winning six straight games. The 19 straight victories were without parallel in grand-master chess history. Declared Sovietski Sport: "A miracle has occurred!" Then nine months ago, Fischer tangled with Petrosian again in Buenos Aires and dropped him 61-21 to win the right to meet Spassky. After the Petrosian match, Fischer was reluctant to fly off in a private plane for a brief vacation...
...Moscow's Central Chess Club, however, the reaction was summed up by one player who observed: "Well, we've still got Spassky." Spassky himself is happy that chess has a Bobby. "It would be an awfully dull world without him," he says. Like Fischer, Spassky comes from a broken home and also had a games-playing sister. (Iraida went on to become the Soviet checkers champion.) During World War II, Spassky's parents were separated; he was evacuated from Leningrad and lived for a period in an orphanage in the Kirov Region. He learned the game when he was five...