Word: korchnoi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...when Fischer failed to defend it,* and is now a major Soviet hero, complete with membership on the Young Communist League's central committee. But facing him. in a duel that could take two grueling months to play out, is, of all things, a Soviet defector: Victor Korchnoi, 47, a tempestuous, irritable man who narrowly lost to Karpov in a 1974 Moscow match. He blamed his defeat on harassment by Soviet officialdom, and later sought asylum in The Netherlands, leaving behind a wife and child. (He eventually moved to West Germany, then Switzerland...
Tass has blasted him for being "obsessed with vanity." Korchnoi, for his part, has said that he sees Baguio as a "political challenge." and is eager to take on an opponent "who licks the boots of the authorities...
During the 1974 match, a 24-game marathon that Karpov won by the slimmest of margins, Korchnoi complained bitterly about Karpov's habit of staring intently at him across the board. By the end of their exhausting nine-week battle, recalled one spectator, "they were like two boxers after 15 rounds, leaning against each other, hardly able to move...
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...
...chess tournament in Amsterdam was over, and Russian Grandmaster Victor Korchnoi, 45, ranked second only to World Champion Anatoli Karpov, had finished in a tie for first place. But Korchnoi had a private end game to complete: he defected and sought asylum. Tass, the Soviet news agency, quickly counterattacked, accusing Korchnoi of being "obsessed with vanity." In fact, Korchnoi has been in dutch with Soviet chess officials more or less constantly since 1974, when he lost in a semifinal world championship match to Karpov and then complained publicly that his fellow grandmaster had a "poor chess arsenal." But Korchnoi...