Every world championship match is a kind of siege. The one played in 1978 came with a psychologist attached.
The world title was contested that year in Baguio City, a mountain resort in the Philippines, from 18 July to 18 October. The defending champion's delegation included a Soviet hypnotherapist named Vladimir Zukhar. He sat in the front row at every game, staring at the challenger, who answered by wearing mirrored sunglasses and lodging complaint after complaint. The chairs were X-rayed. The little flags on the table were protested. When a cup of yogurt was passed to the champion mid-game — one he had not ordered, his opponents insisted — it was treated as a possible coded signal. The challenger, for his part, had recruited two American yoga specialists who were out on bail after attempted-murder convictions.
It was, by any measure, the strangest championship match ever played. The chess behind it was serious, and the stakes were personal.
The champion was Anatoly Karpov, 27, the quiet Soviet prodigy who had taken the title by default in 1975, when Bobby Fischer refused to defend it. Karpov had earned the challenge the hard way, beating Viktor Korchnoi in the 1974 Candidates final. But he never played Fischer — FIDE proclaimed him champion on 3 April 1975 after Fischer missed the deadline — so the crown felt unproven, and Korchnoi believed it should have been his.
Korchnoi, 47, was the other half of that 1974 final. In July 1976, after sharing first place at the IBM tournament in Amsterdam with Tony Miles, he asked Miles how to spell "political asylum," walked into a police station, and defected — the first strong Soviet grandmaster to do so. He left his wife Bella and his son Igor in Leningrad. Their exit visas were refused; Igor, drafted into the army, went into hiding and would later be imprisoned for draft evasion.
The Soviet federation tried to have Korchnoi thrown out of the championship cycle. FIDE's president, Max Euwe, insisted on his right to play. Korchnoi repaid him by beating Petrosian, Polugaevsky, and Spassky to earn the rematch.
The match was first to six wins, draws not counting, unlimited games — the very format Fischer had demanded and been denied. It nearly ended early: after 17 games Karpov led 4–1, and game 27 put him on the brink at 5–2. Then Korchnoi, at 47, won three of the next four games. Suddenly it was 5–5. The longest title match since Alekhine and Capablanca went 34 games in 1927 came down to game 32. Karpov won it on 18 October: 6–5, with 21 draws. The crown stayed in Moscow.
Off the board, paranoia had done what neither player's nerves could. Years later, the Mitrokhin Archive suggested the KGB had assigned eighteen officers to make sure Korchnoi lost. Korchnoi's camp later admitted the yogurt protest had been a parody of the earlier ones. At the time, everyone took it seriously.
The rivals met once more, in Merano, Italy, in 1981. That one was no contest — "the Massacre in Merano," six wins to two — and it was their last match for the crown. Korchnoi's wife and son were finally allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1982.
Chess writers at the time grumbled that the quality of play in Baguio never matched the drama. Perhaps not. But the match has survived on merit: two superb players, one state's full machinery, and 64 squares where the real duel began with a gaze from the front row. Karpov kept the title. The story belongs to both men.