The honorariums, Edmondson pointed out, were in addition to the prize money. Then there would be expenses. “I will also guarantee that your ‘pocket money’ will be twice that given to other contestants in each event.” In addition, he promised that Fischer would be put up in the most luxurious hotels and that the conditions at every stage in the world championship cycle would meet Fischer’s high standards. The plea worked, and Fischer was off to the walled city of Palma de Majorca in the Balearic Islands—and the Interzonal.
So Fischer began a miraculous year in the history of chess. As the scale of the miracle became apparent, a burgeoning wave of press and public interest emerged that would swell all the way to Reykjavik.
The November/December 1970 Interzonal took place in the concert center in Palma, the Sala Mozart, overlooking the bay, the cathedral, and the old fort. There were twenty-four competitors; many were already famous names in the world of chess, including Efim Geller, Vasili Smyslov, Mark Taimanov, Lev Polugaievskii (USSR), Lajos Portisch (Hungary), Bent Larsen (Denmark), Wolfgang Uhlmann (East Germany), Svetozar Gligoric (Yugoslavia), Vlastimil Hort (Czechoslovakia), Henrique Mecking (Brazil), and Robert Hubner (West Germany). But it was Fischer who drew the spectators. Crowded onto the dark yellow carpet, they strained to glimpse his board.
The top six would advance to the knockout stage, where they would be joined by former world champion Tigran Petrosian and Viktor Korchnoi, the latter having qualified as the losing finalist in the Candidates match against Spassky in 1968. Fischer began well but hit a bad patch, losing to Bent Larsen. In the second half, he abruptly stepped up a couple of gears and, in a stupendous run, eventually won the last seven games, taking first place by the huge margin of 3.5 points. Grandmaster Uhlmann, who also qualified for the Candidates, said, “It’s simply unbelievable with what superiority he played in the Interzonal. There is a vitality in his games, and the other grandmasters seem to develop an inferiority complex.”
While the Soviets relaxed and played bridge between rounds, Fischer barely emerged from his room at the plush Hotel Demar. The list of conditions he had placed on his attendance at the tournament was as long as ever and included glare-free fluorescent lighting and a schedule that took account of his religious practices, meaning the strict observance of his Sabbath. To fit in with that, Larsen had to rise early for his rendezvous with the American. “Many of us have decided that this will be the last time that Fischer gets such special treatment. What he wants, he gets. But no more!”
Eight players were now left to compete in the Candidates round for the right to face Spassky: Taimanov, Korchnoi, Geller, Petrosian, Larsen, Uhlmann, the brilliant, highly strung Hubner—and Fischer. He was drawn in the quarter-finals with Taimanov, the match to be played at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Until this match, Mark Taimanov had lived an enviable double life, conducting his chess in tandem with a career as a highly respected classical pianist. He performed duets with his wife, Liubov Bruk; their work together has earned them a place in the record collection
Then forty-four years old, and so a relative veteran, Taimanov had come across Fischer several times in tournaments over the years. Like many others, he was astonished by Fischer’s single-minded devotion: “I swear that I never saw him without a chess set.” Despite Fischer’s evident promise from a young age, Taimanov had been one of the few to be skeptical that he would achieve the breakthrough to the superleague. For all the American’s maturity at the chessboard, Taimanov thought the adolescent Fischer suffered from a weakness. He was “too deeply convinced that he is a genius. Self-confidence that borders on a loss of impartiality in assessing one’s potentialities is a poor ally in a difficult contest.”
If overconfidence was a failing, it was not one Fischer ever attempted to rectify. He saw himself as the firm favorite in the Taimanov match. He was not alone; the noncommunist press was of the same mind. Only Taimanov insisted he could win, dismissing Fischer as a mere computer. Even the Soviet Communist Party daily
Taimanov prepared hard, helped by former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, who handed over his enormous Fischer file in its entirety. This had been compiled a year earlier, in 1970, as negotiations dragged on for a Botvinnik vs. Fischer match supposed to take place in the Dutch town of Leiden. The plans had been aborted after Fischer insisted the victor would have to win six games, draws not to count. For the organizers, this had major financial implications since it meant that, in theory, the match could go on forever. It was not a risk they were willing to take.
Botvinnik’s analysis of Fischer’s play was full of fascinating, detailed insights. Through a painstaking deconstruction of all of Fischer’s published games, he claimed to discern certain themes and patterns that Fischer consciously or unconsciously adopted. The Russian drew a number of conclusions—for example, that Fischer had a penchant for long moves with his queen, and that in the endgame he preferred a knight to a bishop. Also in the endgame, observed Botvinnik, his king was often dispatched on deep forays across the board. Taimanov was grateful but felt that ultimately “it didn’t help me—in the Russian saying, this straw was not for the right horse.”
In addition to the file, Taimanov was backed by the thorough organization of the Soviet chess machine. He was supplied with three grandmasters: Aleksandr Kotov led the team, supported by the highly thought of, but young and relatively inexperienced, Yuri Balashov, and by Yevgeni Vasiukov, an old sparring partner. It was not Taimanov’s ideal squad. “I wanted Tal. He was a friend of mine, and in case of defeat I would rather have had Misha with me.” But Botvinnik thought he was too bohemian and that his fondness for drink might render him incapable of the long hours of sober analysis required of a second. Puritan sports apparatchiks in the Central Committee also disapproved of Tal’s three divorces.
By contrast, in terms of the actual chess, Fischer was without assistance. He had hoped to bring grandmaster Larry Evans along as his second, but Evans refused because of Fischer’s twin demands that he abstain from journalism and leave his wife at home. Colonel Ed Edmondson, however, was there to help with the arrangements and with resolving any disputes.
The game started several days late, this time because of an objection by Fischer’s opponent. To Taimanov’s annoyance, the organizers had attempted to preempt a Fischer tantrum about the spectators by setting the board in a cramped room at the back of the campus library. Taimanov, used to playing the piano in front of a large and appreciative concert audience, said it was too stuffy. After some haggling, they compromised on the student cinema, which seated 200. Victory would go to the player who racked up five-and-a-half points; there would be a maximum of ten games.
Fischer won an epic first game in eighty-nine moves. He won the second and the third games. Taimanov blundered badly in the second. After a postponement, taken on Taimanov’s request on health grounds (he was diagnosed with high blood pressure), Fischer won the fourth game, then the fifth, again after a shocking Taimanov howler. And then Fischer won the sixth. It is difficult to portray to non—chess players the magnitude of such a shutout. A typical result between well-matched players might be, say, six wins to four, with nine draws. Fischer had just beaten a world-class grandmaster six games to none, with no draws. The British chess player P. H. Clarke wrote that “this performance by Fischer may be the best, in statistical terms anyway, ever recorded in a single competition.”
Taimanov’s defeat turned his hitherto settled life inside out. This pillar of the Soviet chess establishment suffered the wrath of a system that felt betrayed and disgraced—even scared—by the scale of his rout. In his account of this episode,
His “civic execution” began on 5 June 1970, on his return from Vancouver when he was passing through Soviet customs at Moscow’s Sheremet’evo Airport. He had done this dozens of times before, always without incident. Now he found himself thoroughly searched, on the orders of the senior customs official on shift, named in the report of the incident as Comrade Dmitriev. Taimanov’s suitcase had been delayed, but in his hand baggage the officials discovered a copy of
