Some chess matches are contests. A few are front-page news. The 1972 World Championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, was both at once, and more.
It ran from mid-July into early September in the Laugardalshöll sports hall — 21 games, played at a moment when the Cold War was at its peak. Much of the world read it not as one American grandmaster against one Soviet grandmaster, but as the United States against the USSR, fought out over 64 squares. The press followed it like a summit. Viewers in America watched daily.
The long road for Bobby Fischer
By the late 1960s most experts agreed Fischer was the strongest player alive. He just refused to prove it on the official path. He declined the 1964 Interzonal tournament, and at the 1967 Interzonal in Sousse, Tunisia, he withdrew mid-event over a scheduling dispute — giving up a commanding lead and removing himself from the whole title cycle.
He finally committed, and the chess world was not ready. In the 1970–71 qualification cycle he won the Interzonal, then swept two Candidates matches 6–0, and beat Tigran Petrosian — the man who had lost the 1969 title match to Spassky — in the 1971 final, 6½–2½, to earn the right to challenge champion Boris Spassky. Spassky, gracious and worldly, had been waiting for him.
A disastrous start, then the turnaround
The format was a match of up to 24 games: a win was a point, a draw half a point, the first to bank a majority taking the crown. Fischer began badly. He lost the opening game, then refused to appear for Game 2, forfeiting it over a dispute. Down 0–2 before he had really played, he seemed to be handing Spassky the title.
Then something shifted. Fischer won five of the next eight games. The turning point is Game 6 — often called one of the most beautiful world-championship games ever played. Fischer, playing the Queen's Gambit for the first time in a serious game, built such a precise positional attack that Spassky himself rose and applauded as the win closed in. Grandmaster Miguel Najdorf likened it to a Mozart symphony. It gave Fischer the match lead for the first time, and he never let it slip.
Game 13 was the inverse: a marathon lasting into its eighth hour, when a blunder late in a long struggle cost Spassky a draw and pushed Fischer ahead 8–5.
Champion — and the strangest reign on record
On September 1, Spassky resigned the adjourned Game 21 by telephone rather than return to the board. Fischer won the match 12½–8½ — seven wins, three losses, eleven draws. He became the eleventh world champion, the first American-born player to hold the title, and his win briefly ended 24 years of Soviet dominance of the championship.
He never played another world-championship match. Over disputes about conditions, Fischer refused the terms for a 1975 defense, and FIDE declared Anatoly Karpov champion by forfeit in April 1975. Fischer walked away from championship chess as abruptly as he had once avoided it.
Fifty-four years later the story endures — a genius, a gentleman, and the match that made chess feel like world history. Want more on the players and their rivalries? Stack Signal keeps a running thread of the era. world championship chess history at Stack Signal