The Battle of the Brains

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handed it to the referee. Afterward, he said, "I sealed a cruncher," and then went bowling. Spassky and his team of analysts, meanwhile, studied the position long and hard that night looking for a flaw in Fischer's assault. Next day, when Fischer was late in arriving, the referee opened his envelope and made the move: a bishop check on the king. It was indeed a cruncher, and Spassky, without bothering to reply, tipped over his king to signify his defeat.

In a reversal of roles, the champion stalked the challenger in the fourth game. Sacrificing a pawn early on, Spassky set up a double-barreled bishop attack on Fischer's cornered king. Staving off one mating threat after another, Fischer somehow managed to salvage a draw. In the fifth game it was Spassky's turn to make a beginner's booboo. Pressured by a knight foray, and more than an hour behind on the time clock, the champion dropped his queen back in hasty retreat. Fischer picked off a pawn with his bishop and challenged the queen, daring Spassky to take the unprotected attacking piece. If he had, Fischer would have had a two-move checkmate. Even if he moved elsewhere, Spassky's position was hopeless. After studying the board for a full minute, he stood up and shook Fischer's hand. The audience applauded and cried, "Bravo Bobby! Bravo Bobby!"

Late last week Fischer claimed that Spassky was close to a breakdown and had gone into seclusion.

The pressure befits the enormity of the event. At stake is not only a record purse of $250,000 (previous record: $12,000) but also the reign and reputation of Soviet chess itself. Since 1946, when the play-offs for the championship were first organized, the U.S.S.R. has so dominated the title that it seemed to be permanently engraved in Cyrillic script. No Westerner, much less a brash young American, has ever advanced to the finals. Never, that is, until now, and the resulting excitement among the estimated 60 million chess players round the world—and millions of others who do not know a double fianchetto from a double play—is of the kind usually reserved for an epic heavyweight championship fight.

Nyekulturny. Nowhere is the interest more widespread than in Russia. Following the lead of Lenin, a skilled tournament player in his own right, the Soviets have elevated chess into something more than the national pastime. Decorated and handsomely subsidized by the state, Russian chess masters are the "vanguard of Communist culture." There are 4,000,000 registered players in the U.S.S.R. (compared with only 35,000 in the U.S.), and 36 of the world's 82 grand masters are Soviets (compared with 13 in Yugoslavia, eleven in the U.S., six in Argentina and six in Hungary).* Russian youths, many of whom study the game as a standard course at grade school level, discuss the Nimzo-Indian defense the way U.S. kids talk about the Dallas Cowboys' front four. So many Soviet citizens play the game, in fact, that one chess writer contends the reason that service in Russian restaurants is so bad is because "the cooks are forever having at [chess] with the waiters instead of heating up the lyulya kebab."

The Russians have no trouble getting heated up about Fischer. The Soviet press calls him nyekulturny (uncultured), a "temperamental child" whose "endless whims" and "absurd