Frank Brady - Endgame

January 1962

Spending two months in Sweden in the middle of winter, Bobby found the weather less cold than he’d thought it would be: Temperatures remained close to fifty degrees Fahrenheit. He wasn’t in Stockholm, though, to stalk the cobblestoned streets of Old Town, or walk through the underground tunnels, or ready himself for a cruise on the Baltic Sea. Rather, he was there to, once again, try to become the player the whole chess world should pay homage to. Aside from the accolades that would flow to the winner of the Stockholm tournament, the real prize for Bobby was to qualify for the Candidates tournament, which, in turn, could give him a chance at the World Championship.

Chess Life , on its front page, wrapped up the eventual Stockholm results this way:

Stockholm, 1962, may come to be recognized as the event which marked the beginning of a decisive shift of power in world chess. For the first time since the Interzonal and Candidates’ tournaments began as eliminating contests for the World’s Championship in 1948, the Soviet grandmasters failed to capture first prize. Bobby Fischer’s margin of 2 ½ points reflects his complete domination of the event. It owed nothing to luck: he never had a clearly lost position.

What Bobby achieved in going undefeated in both Bled and Stockholm was the chess equivalent of pitching two successive no-hitters in baseball’s World Series. Most would have thought the feat impossible. Less than a week shy of his nineteenth birthday, Bobby Fischer had just established himself as one of the most extraordinary chess players in the world. But this wasn’t the time to gloat or preen, or even to relax. Bobby’s goal was the World Championship, and the next step toward that objective was almost upon him.

The economics of chess enforced a certain humility anyway. Before Bobby left Sweden, he was given a small white envelope containing his earnings from the tour-de-force playing he’d just demonstrated. The envelope contained the cash equivalent of $750 in Swedish krona. Bobby could only shake his head ruefully.

He now had barely six weeks to prepare for the Candidates tournament to be held on the island of Curaçao, thirty-eight miles off the coast of Venezuela. The winner of the Curaçao tournament would earn the right to play the current World Champion, Mikhail Botvinnik, in the next world title match.

Home in his apartment in Brooklyn, Bobby went through what was becoming his routine: elimination of social engagements, long periods of solitary study, analysis of games, and a search for innovations in openings. He classified the lines he studied into stratifications of importance, always eliminating the not-quite-perfect continuation and seeking what he called the “true move,” that which could not be refuted. A Socratic dialogue raged within him: How unusual was the resulting position if he followed that particular line? Would his opponent feel at sea? Would he (Bobby) feel comfortable playing it? How would he ground himself if he had to continue to play that variation until the endgame?

Grandmaster Pal Benko, a former Hungarian freedom fighter who became a U.S. citizen and, like many other chess players, an investment broker, entered Bobby’s room at the Hotel Intercontinental in Curaçao shortly after Arthur Bisguier, Bobby’s second, had arrived.

“We’re going to work now,” Bobby said dismissively to Benko, as he was eating a large late-night room service dinner. He and Bisguier had planned to go over some games. “You can’t come in.”

“Yes I can. Bisguier also my second,” said Benko.

“Bisguier also my second,” parroted Bobby, trying to duplicate Benko’s Magyar accent.

“Why you make fun at me?” Benko asked.

“Why you make fun at me?” Bobby parroted again.

“Stop it!”

“Stop it!”

All the while Bisguier stood by and, with body language and a few words of attempted peacemaking, tried to calm things down.

“Get out of my room!” Bobby commanded.

“No, you get out!” Benko replied, somewhat illogically.

It isn’t clear who hit first, but since Bobby was sitting, he was at a disadvantage. Blows and slaps were exchanged as both grandmasters screamed at each other. Bisguier jumped in and separated the two men. Benko had achieved the “better” of it and years later would confess: “I am sorry that I beat up Bobby. He was a sick man, even then.” In the annals of chess, this was the first fistfight ever recorded by two grandmasters, both prospective World Champions.

The day after the fight, Bobby penned a letter to the Tournament Committee, asking them to expel Benko. The committee chose to do nothing about the protest.

Before May and June of 1962 Bobby seemed to be gaining strength with every contest. “Fischer grows from one tournament to the next,” Mikhail Tal had said. He’d surpassed his great achievement at Bled in 1961 with an even more dazzling triumph at Stockholm. He’d defeated at least once all of the five Soviet grandmasters he was to meet at Curaçao, and he seemed to be reaching the peak of his powers sooner than anyone (but himself) had expected.

Pundits’ predictions were proven totally wrong when the first news issued from Curaçao that May. Fischer and Tal had both lost in the first and second rounds, and Bobby was soon lagging in fourth place. All in all, Eliot Hearst observed in Chess Life , the Candidates tournament had furnished “a series of early-round surprises that are probably without parallel in chess history.”

Some have speculated that Bobby might have been spending too much of his off time gambling, but Bisguier said that all Bobby would do was, on occasion, wander into the casino in the evenings and play the slot machines—the “one-armed bandits” as they were called—until he got bored. He didn’t watch television or go to the local movie house, because he said such activity was bad for his eyes and he didn’t want to hurt his play. He did attend a prizefight one night and went to a local nightclub a few times, but his heart and interest weren’t in it.

Henry Stockhold, a chess player who was covering the match for the Associated Press, brought Bobby to a brothel one night and waited for him. When Bobby exited an hour later, Stockhold asked him how he enjoyed it, and Bobby’s comment, which he repeated at other times, has often been quoted: “Chess is better.”

Tigran Petrosian won the 1962 Candidates tournament with a score of eight wins, nineteen draws, and no losses, for 17½ points. Soviets Efim Geller and Paul Keres tied for second, a half point behind, and Bobby’s fourth-place score was three full points below the three leaders and a half point ahead of Korchnoi.

Bobby wanted the world to know what really happened at Curaçao. He wrote: “There was open collusion between the Russian [Soviet] players. They agreed ahead of time to draw the games that they played against each other.… They consulted during the games. If I was playing a Russian [Soviet] opponent, the other Russians watched my games, and commented on my moves in my hearing.”

Korchnoi, in his memoir Chess Is My Life , backed Bobby’s accusations: “Everything was arranged by Petrosian. He agreed with his friend Geller to play draws in all their games together. They also persuaded Keres to join their coalition … this gave them a great advantage over the remaining competitors.”

When asked why Fischer hadn’t won, Pal Benko, still smarting over his fight with Bobby, replied: “He simply wasn’t the best player.”

Bobby’s self-image was shattered as a result of Curaçao. His dream—his obsession—of becoming the youngest World Champion in history had eluded him. It had seemed inevitable to him that he’d win the title, but that was not enough. His ascendancy to international chess prominence at such a young age had made him certain that he’d become champion, but the Russians—through what he considered their chicanery—had proven that they could hold him back, and this both enraged and saddened him.