Word: petrosyan
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...Science? Sport? "When you're playing for the world championship, " says Tigran Petrosyan, 33, "chess may start out as an art or a science. But in the end, physical endurance is so important that it becomes an athletic event." And so it was last week-at least in the Soviet Union, where there are 3,000,000 registered chess players (v. 6,000 in the U.S.) and everyone else is a kibitzer. In a match that lasted two months and went 22 games, Tigran Petrosyan became the new World Champion of Chess, defeating Mikhail Botvinnik, 51, the perennial titleholder...
Into Training. The son of a janitor in Tiflis, Armenia, Petrosyan played his first game at twelve. He was a master at 19, an international grand master at 23. But in the Soviet Union, grand masters are so ho-hum that it took him eleven years and uncountable victories to earn the right to challenge Botvinnik, who won the world championship in 1948 and, except for a lapse of two years, has defended it successfully ever since. Like a football quarterback, Petrosyan scouted his opponent-poring over charts of Botvinnik's games. Like a boxer, he went into training...