Word: game
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...world who are ranked as international grandmasters, the equivalent of karate's black belt. Every town from Khabaroush to Kiev has a chess club. Taxi drivers vent their pent-up hostilities across the boards during lunch breaks. City parks teem with chess hustlers. Soviet children, who learn the game in Young Pioneer youth groups, argue Sicilian defenses and queen's gambits with the same passion that American kids show when they talk about double plays and quarterback sneaks. Professionals of the caliber of Petrosian and Spassky, both of whom are paid handsomely as the coaches of trade-union...
...bolster his diet and cheered him so boisterously at one point that authorities had to draw the curtains on the stage to allow the competitors to concentrate. Petrosian, who likes to stroll about or read the newspaper between moves in less important matches, slipped off to watch a hockey game between championship rounds, a practice unheard of for competing chess champions, who supposedly must keep their minds riveted to the board...
...title match, was tautly primed for a comeback. While working his way through three years of preliminary matches, he swam daily laps and boned up on Psychological Analysis of a Chess Player's Thought by Nikolai Krogius, his mentor. Nonetheless, in the opening match of the 24-game title series, he inadvertently touched the wrong piece and, obliged by the rules to move it, lost the game...
Crushing the Crocodile. Capitalizing on his strong, versatile middle game, Spassky rallied to win the fourth, fifth and eighth games and go ahead by the score of 5 to 3 (players receive one point for each game they win, ½ point for a draw). The Armenians in the audience moaned. Said one official: "It was like the funeral of a father." Then Petrosian rallied. Baffling Spassky with his impenetrable defenses, he tied the score at 6 to 6. For the next six games, the contest was a standoff; one expert described it as a battle between "the young tiger...
Mosley often trivializes history by reducing it, for example, to a matter of Chamberlain's gout or Hitler's bad breath. He also overplays that luxury sport of historians, the what-if game: "If a certain Virgil Tilea hadn't had a large and stimulating lunch on March 16, 1939, Britain and France might not have been at war with Germany on September...