Summer 1972. In an ice-cold auditorium called Laugardalshöll, in Reykjavík, Iceland, two men sat down across sixty-four squares and played the most-watched game of chess in history. Bobby Fischer of the United States versus Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. They called it the Match of the Century, and for once the billing was not an exaggeration.
Two worlds on a board
This was never really about chess, and everyone knew it. The Soviet Union had held the world championship title without a break since 1948, an unbroken chain built on state sponsorship and a factory of grandmasters. Spassky kept the chain intact. Fischer was the lone American prodigy from Brooklyn who had spent his whole life challenging the machine alone.
His route to Reykjavík had been devastating. Through the Candidates cycle he crushed grandmaster Mark Taimanov 6–0, crushed Bent Larsen 6–0 — the first perfect scores in Candidates history — then beat former world champion Tigran Petrosian 6½–2½. By the time he faced Spassky, Fischer's Elo rating of 2785 sat 125 points above Spassky's 2660, the largest gap between a challenger and champion the rating system had ever recorded.
The match was best of 24. Fischer's start was a disaster. He lost Game 1 on July 11, grabbing a poisoned pawn with the sharp-eyed 29...Bxh2, a move that has been analyzed ever since. Then he forfeited Game 2 entirely in a dispute over playing conditions. Down 0–2 before he had won a single game, he looked finished.
The comeback
He was not finished. In Game 3 he defeated Spassky for the first time in his career. In Game 6 he played the Queen's Gambit for the first time in his life and produced a masterpiece so quiet and precise that the Argentine great Miguel Najdorf said it was "like a symphony" — and Spassky himself joined the applause. Nine of the first thirteen games were decisive, a level of fighting chess rarely seen even today.
Fischer won seven games, lost three (including the forfeit), and drew eleven. By the end the match had grown so enormous that it was broadcast on ABC's Wide World of Sports and, on public television, followed by millions of American viewers who had never touched a chess board — the birth of what people called the "Fischer boom."
It ended undramatically and somehow perfectly. In the adjourned 21st game, Spassky saw that Fischer had sealed a winning move and resigned by telephone on September 1. Fischer was the eleventh world champion, the first American-born player ever to hold the title, and the Soviet chain was broken — for a little while, at least.
What it left behind
Fischer never defended his crown. Two years later FIDE could not meet his demands, and he forfeited the title without playing a game. He vanished from chess for twenty years. Spassky, in a gesture of rare sportsmanship after the politics of the match, became one of the few men Fischer respected again.
The result was a match no one can quite forget: a lonely genius, a state machine, and 21 games that turned a board game into world news.
Sources: World Chess Hall of Fame & Galleries; Chess.com archives; OlimpBase (Reykjavík 1972); The New York Times (Sept 2, 1972); FIDE Open Chess Museum.