Word: chess
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pressure befits the enormity of the event. At stake is not only a record purse of $250,000 (previous record: $12,000) but also the reign and reputation of Soviet chess itself. Since 1946, when the play-offs for the championship were first organized, the U.S.S.R. has so dominated the title that it seemed to be permanently engraved in Cyrillic script. No Westerner, much less a brash young American, has ever advanced to the finals. Never, that is, until now, and the resulting excitement among the estimated 60 million chess players round the world?and millions of others...
Nyekulturny. Nowhere is the interest more widespread than in Russia. Following the lead of Lenin, a skilled tournament player in his own right, the Soviets have elevated chess into something more than the national pastime. Decorated and handsomely subsidized by the state, Russian chess masters are the "vanguard of Communist culture." There are 4,000,000 registered players in the U.S.S.R. (compared with only 35,000 in the U.S.), and 36 of the world's 82 grand masters are Soviets (compared with 13 in Yugoslavia, eleven in the U.S., six in Argentina and six in Hungary).* Russian youths, many...
...chess ranks somewhere between mumblety-peg and logrolling in fan interest. Or at least it did until Fischer, the celebrated recluse, became a media happening. The scenes blur: Bobby swinging away in a sports-celebrity tennis tournament, Bobby receiving a letter of support from President Nixon, Bobby jetting to Bermuda for lunch with David Frost and the beautiful people, Bobby making the rounds of the talk shows (Dick Cavett: Do you honestly think that you are probably the world's greatest player? Bobby: Yeah, right.) There is even a new record called The Ballad of Bobby Fischer, a twangy ditty...
Whether played at the summit by grand masters or at the Y.M.C.A. by nine-year-olds, the game of chess offers both intricacy and infinite variety. As did Shakespeare's Cleopatra, it leaves hungry where most it satisfies. It has been calculated that if every man, woman and child in the world were to spend every waking hour playing at the superhuman rate of a game a minute, it would take 217 billion years to exhaust all the variations on the first ten moves. Chess is an endless labyrinth that can both mesmerize and anesthetize. Alone, perhaps, among the games...
...painfully familiar on the grand-master circuit. For all its sedentary appearance, chess is a brutally punishing game. A recent physiological experiment at Temple University showed that chess drained as much energy out of a player as did a comparable session of boxing or football. In the crunch of play, in fact, it is not unusual for a grand master to faint dead away, or lose 15 Ibs. or more during a tournament. Under stress, the late Latvian grand master Aron Nimzovich used to stand on his head between moves to keep the vital juices flowing. The Yugoslav chess team...