The Soviet Union was the center of world chess. As a young chess master, American Bobby Fischer went on a TV game show to win money for airfare to Moscow. Fifteen years later, he had to be coaxed to show up in Reykjavik for the Chess Olympiad to take on world champion Boris Spassky. So slip on your smoking jacket, fill your pipe, take your first sip of your adult beverage, and sit back in your most comfortable chair. Welcome to todays offering from The Philatelist.
Here we have a world map mounted on a chessboard and a rook chess piece to remind that the world checkers tournament was somewhere else. Serviceable design, but not a great one.
Todays stamp is issue A117, a 15 Krona stamp issued by Iceland on July 2nd, 1972. It was a single stamp issue. According to the Scott Catalog, the stamp is worth 45 cents used or in this case unused.
Bobby Fischer was not a typical chess master. For 24 years up to 1972, the Soviet Chess club supplied the world chess champion. Bobby Fischer is a Jewish American being raised by a single mother. His father was not the man his mother had been married to but a prominent Hungarian phycisist and mathimatician. As a latch key kid, his mother bought him a chess set to play with his sister while alone. As she soon lost interest, he played mostly against himself. At a used book shop on vacation, Bobby found a book of chess strategys that he devoured. After the family moved to New York, Bobby was able to make a big impression on the local chess scene, becoming junior champion. He had his mother write to Soviet President Kruschev for permission to come to Moscow to play the young Soviet players. Permission was granted but he then had to go on a tv game show to have the show pay for airfare. It did not go well in Moscow. 15 year old Fischer was rude and quickly beat young players. Then senior player Tigern Petrosian was summoned to the club to play Bobby and beat him. Fischer was outraged that the matches were informal and the Soviets were outraged at his rudeness.
Boris Spassky was also not a typical Soviet champian. He was from Leningrad and an Orthadox Christian with open far right monarchist political views. He learned to play at age five when he met a chess master on a train while being evacuated during the German siege of Leningrad in 1942.
When the tournament opened in Reykjavik, it did so without Bobby. The prize money was to be $125,000,($857,000 in 2022) going 5/8 to the winner and 3/8 to the loser of the multimatch tournament. Fischer also wanted 30% of the world television rights, all for the winner. American Jewish National Security Advisor Henry Kissenger pleaded with him to go to the tournament that had been delayed for two days. He did go when a British Jewish Banker agreed to double the prize money, still 5/8ths and 3 /8ths. The Soviets thought this drama was all a cheat to psyche out Boris Spassky. Bobby Fischer insinuated his own cheating theory that Soviet chess masters purposly play each other to draws to enhance their rankings.
Bobby eventually beat Boris 12.5 games to 8.5. Inspite their differing backgrounds, the two became friends. Twenty years after the tournament, Boris, who had in 1976 defected to Paris, decided to do a wierd “revenge” match. To do it in dramatic style, it was conducted in Belgrade Yugoslavia during the time of their civil war when the Serbian side was under UN Sanction. Bobby won again but felt himself cut off from America and defected to Budapest where his father was from. From Budapest he went on to Iceland where he was granted citizenship as a humanitarian gesture. He died in 2008 of kidney failure after refusing surgery to clear a urinary blockage. He believed massage was a better treatment.
Boris is still alive and happily back in Putin’s Russia. He is the oldest living former chess champion and has the distiction of winning chess matches against 6 other world champions including Bobby Fischer.
Well my drink is empty. Come again soon for more stories that can be learned from stamp collecting.