David Edmonds - Bobby Fischer Goes to War

Following a night’s analysis of the position, and assisted by grandmaster Isaac Boleslavskii, a new arrival on a brief visit, Spassky opened the sealed move—B-Q6 check—thought for five minutes, and resigned. Schmid apologized to the audience for the brevity of the show. They had paid the equivalent of a dollar a minute and seen one move. Ten minutes after Spassky had left, Fischer rushed in to claim his victory. He had beaten Spassky for the first time.

This second session of game three—that single move—was held on the stage in the main hall. Overnight, Spassky had written a letter to Schmid, a not quite official protest, delivering it just before midnight. He said that the back room was unsatisfactory: there was too much noise, from the air-conditioning, the traffic, children. (Curiously, the children had not disturbed Fischer.) The rest of the games must take place in the auditorium, in accordance with the match rules. Fischer, no doubt buoyed by victory, agreed to return to the auditorium provided there was no filming. Thorarinsson went along with this, leaving Fox stranded and muttering about legal action. It was not a difficult decision for Thorarinsson. “The filming is not the first priority. The chess match is the first priority. If this is the only way the match can go on, then we must take it.”

Because of Spassky’s letter, the organizing committee and representatives of the delegations met the next morning—a little late, under the circumstances—to discuss the legality of moving the game into the closed room. Golombek, an elder statesman of the chess world, told the committee that he could recall only two occasions when games were transferred to an alternative site because of a problem in the original venue: in the matches between Botvinnik and Smyslov and between Botvinnik and Tal. In both cases, the substitute venue had held spectators.

Schmid then spoke. He said Spassky had shown admirable sportsmanship in agreeing at such short notice to move to the back room. For future reference, the chief arbiter added: “I saved the match, but I’m not going to take this sort of decision again.”

Schmid’s praise for Spassky’s sportsmanship provoked bitter comments in the Soviet camp. Ivonin noted in his diary that Fischer’s behavior had taken a heavy toll on the champion. Spassky told him that his previous image of Fischer was shattered: “I idealized Fischer. The third game broke my idealism.” He had also seen something deeply disturbing in Fischer that he described as “an animal.”

That evening, the Soviet delegation held a meeting with the ambassador Sergei Astavin. They agreed there should be no more “charity” toward Fischer; the Americans did not go in for charity. The group believed that the Americans had acted deliberately to drag Spassky down and distract him—and that they had succeeded.

Later, Anatoli Karpov remarked that Fischer’s game two forfeit was “a stroke of genius, a stroke tailor-made for Spassky. It proved that Fischer knew Spassky inside out. Had it been Petrosian instead of Spassky, he would simply have licked his chops and swallowed the extra point.”

It was not the Soviets alone who recognized how destructive these events were for Spassky. Brady wrote that Fischer’s win brought the challenger’s gestalt into place—he had drawn blood, and it would become, says Brady, “a torrent of energy streaming out of Spassky’s psyche.”

In all this, what motivated Fischer? Many Fischer observers, including a few in the Soviet chess establishment, believed he was frightened of the chessboard. For Fischer, leaving Iceland proved as difficult as arriving. Marshall believed that when it came to a decision, “he was less afraid of playing than he was of the unknown. But make no mistake, he was terrified of playing.”

The Icelandic grandmaster Fridrik Olafsson, who was a friend and admirer of the challenger, also located the source of his behavior in that fear. “Why did Bobby not turn up? I tell you one thing. He had something really sick inside him. He had a terrible fear of losing.” Losing was for other players; “Bobby Fischer” could not afford to lose.

How does one negotiate with a Fischer, a man who is apparently prepared to risk everything rather than accept a compromise? Most people would not consider that to be rational. Yet there were few occasions when the challenger did not get his way with FIDE, the Icelandic Chess Federation, and other tournament organizers. The board and pieces, the lighting, the chair and table, the noise level, the proximity of the audience, the visibility of the cameras—all had to be just so. The prize money or appearance fee had to be increased. The games had to be played at specific times. Fischer’s exasperated opponents would capitulate in the face of these demands, sometimes after putting up a perfunctory, halfhearted fight. But with other competitors, the tournament regulations were always strictly interpreted. So why with Fischer did the rules take on this remarkable plasticity?

Game theory, a branch of mathematics that analyzes complex human behavior through simple models, offers some insight into Fischer’s success to those perplexed by the apparent weakness of officials. Game theory has been used to revolutionize the study of intellectual disciplines from economics to international relations and from evolutionary theory to philosophy. Its proponents have won Nobel Prizes, and one of its key exponents, John Nash, has been the subject of a best-selling book and Oscar-winning Hollywood blockbuster, A Beautiful Mind.

“Games” come in various kinds. There are, for example, games of perfect information, such as chess, where at each stage of the game one knows all the opponent’s steps to date, and games of imperfect information, such as a sealed auction, where one can only speculate about the sum of money a rival has bid. Then there are games of cooperation (where, as the name implies, players cooperate to achieve the best possible outcome) and games of noncooperation (where individuals act only in their own self-interest, irrespective of what other players are doing).

One reason Person A may not cooperate with Person B is that Person A’s gain is Person B’s loss: this is a zero-sum game. In nonzero-sum games, both sides can benefit. Compare chess to the usual form of charades, in which there are no teams and individuals take it in turns to act out the title of a book, movie, play, or song in front of the rest of the group, who try to guess it. In chess, your defeat is my victory. In charades, we all win or lose together.

So how would a game theorist explain the conundrum of Fischer’s apparent bargaining imprudence and his negotiating success?

In bargaining, theorists have long recognized that there are rational advantages to irrationality, or at least to the appearance of irrationality. One purely academic illustration of this has a woman returning home to discover a dangerous-looking burglar in her house. She recognizes that the burglar has a motive to kill her because she can describe him to the police. If she could swallow a tablet, making her, for a short period, wholly and transparently mad, the burglar might believe she will not be able to identify him later and so might leave her unharmed.