History of the World Championship

The preliminary contests for the world title in 1970-72 were noteworthy particularly because of the presence of numbers of non-Russian grandmasters, most of them younger than their Soviet counterparts, and seemingly more promising. Would the Soviet hegemony in chess finally be challenged, or perhaps broken? Above all there was the American Bobby Fischer, who at 14 had performed the unprecedented feat of winning the American championship. But there were others: the Dane Larsen, the Hungarian Portisch, most recently the Swede Andersson.

Fischer, obviously the most gifted of all the contenders, was also the most erratic. On a number of occasions he became so enraged about playing conditions that he simply left, without even bothering to collect his prize money. As recently as 1967, in Sousse, Tunisia, when he was far ahead of the field in the Challengers' tournament, he left because the committee had refused to rearrange the hours to conform to his religious observances.

But not long before the end of the Challengers' tournament, in Majorca in 1970, it became clear that it was Fischer who was to dominate the scene. First, he won every one of his last six games, apparently determined to crush every opponent regardless of the score.