Word: chess
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...just a game, and it is a long way from Moscow. But for the Kremlin, the world chess championship beginning in the Philippine mountain resort of Baguio City this week is a grudge match involving national pride and politics. Philippines President Marcos had spent a fortune providing a new 1,000-seat amphitheater and other facilities for the event. As newsmen and chess aficionados from all over began to gather, much of the early betting was not on who would win but on just how many of the Soviets accompanying Anatoly Karpov, 27, the slim, intense defending champion from Leningrad...
Though they are a generation apart, Korchnoi and Karpov both grew up in Leningrad, and both are products of the vast Soviet chess bureaucracy. The U.S.S.R. promotes the game as "a weapon of intellectual culture." A network of chess clubs has produced, at latest count, 4 million players, among them 608 masters and 38 grand masters...
Today, Korchnoi is the Lear of chess: pacing and grimacing, given to lavish tirades and, on occasion, paranoia. During a qualifying match with Spassky earlier this year, he accused his opponent of inducing hallucinations via hypnosis, and even suspected microwaves had been employed to destroy his concentration. In Baguio City last week he demanded the right to bring to the match a fountain pen-sized device designed to detect "X rays, gamma rays and other radiation...
Karpov, the second-youngest world champion ever, is less conservative than he used to be, but still resorts to what one commentator calls "the boa constrictor style," lying in wait for his opponent to err. Spassky describes Karpov as one of a new generation of "realists" in chess: "We followed imagination, often pursuing phantasms, but Karpov will only deal with what is concretely in front...
...main goal is less political than personal: to avenge his earlier defeat and vindicate himself before the Soviet chess machine that spurned...