In the post that will follow this one I feature a couple of quotes by Spassky that I came across online today. The problem with the quotes is that the online sources did not tell me the original source.
So I tried to remember which books Spassky had written, with some help from Amazon. I knew that Spassky hadn't written many books, mostly contributions to a few opening surveys. But I thought that he may have contributed to a book called How to Open a Chess Game, which had seven co-authors. I had to look this up on Amazon because I don't own a copy, to my regret. Spassky had not contributed to that book.
I also remembered two books which I own to which Spassky had contributed. One was an R.H.M. book on the Najdorf Variation. It wasn't going to be in there! But the other was the tournament book to the 2nd Piatigorsky Cup Tournament, which took place in Santa Monica in August 1966.
That particular tournament was interesting for many reasons. It was a ten player double round-robin, featuring Bobby Fischer, Samuel Reshevsky, Boris Spassky and World Champion Tigran Petrosian just a few months removed from their first World Championship match, and was rounded out by Larsen, Portisch, Najdorf, Unziker, Donner and Ivkov. Quite a field! There were several natural story lines, as Spassky and Petrosian were rivals, as were Fischer and Reshevsky, and Fischer of course had his eyes on "the Russians." Najdorf and Reshevsky provided a link to the pre-WWII chess scene, Larsen and Portisch were two of the very best players from the 1960s into the 1980s, Unzicker and Ivkov were near their peaks, and Jan Hein Donner was one of the great characters the game has produced.
Also interesting were the organizers, the famous cellist Gregor Piatigorsky and his wife Jacqueline. Jacqueline was really the force behind the tournament, and if you are wondering how a cellist, however famous, might afford to put on a pair of top notch tournaments, as well as the aborted 1961 match between Fischer and Reshevsky, wonder no more. Jacqueline was a member of the Rothschild banking family. BIG money. She had taken up chess with a passion, hiring IM Herman Steiner to be her coach, becoming the second highest rated woman in the USA at one point, and won an Individual Bronze Medal on Second Board at the first Women's Chess Olympiad in Emmen, Netherlands, 1957, on the USA team. I also seem to recall that she was good friends with Isaac Kashdan, who actually ran the two tournaments the Piatigorsky's put on. (The first had been in 1963.)
The competitive part of the tournament was interesting because Fischer started off horribly, and was tied for last after round eight, having lost three straight games. He then put on a furious comeback, but in the end fell a half-point short of tying Spassky for first. Spassky beat Fischer in their first game and drew the second, running his score to 2.5-0.5 against the American.
But my favorite bit of trivia about the tournament is that the organizers attempted to have each of the ten participants provide annotations for all of their games. Each game would be analyzed by each of the players, and those that bought the tournament books could see how the grandmasters views of the games were similar and different.
Seven of the participants complied fully. Donner annotated all but one of his games, a horrible loss to Ivkov, for which no one faulted him. Ivkov wrote a painful note at the start of that game:
A man may have lived in the chess world for 20 years, with his form varying from good to bad as the sun and rain alternate with the seasons, and not ever be aware of the real meaning of the word: last. When he begins to get indications and discerns signs that the word is for him, it is usually too late. To this writer, the new situation made him cynical: he thanked God that another participant was in even worse chess form.Ouch.
That left Reshevskey, who only supplied notes to six of his eighteen games, and Fischer, who provided notes to only one game, his Round 16 win as White against Najdorf. By comparison, Fischer annotates TWO of the games from this tournament for My 60 Memorable Games, as he also includes his win as Black against Portisch as well as the Najdorf game.
Why did Fischer and Reshevsky shortchange the Piatigorskys on this matter? I don't know. As mentioned before, the two had been involved in a bitter match sponsored by the Piatigorskys in 1961, which was abandoned after 11 of 16 games with the match tied at 5.5 points a piece. But Reshevsky had played in the first Piatigorsky Cup in 1963, and came back for the second, so you wouldn't think there had been hard feelings. But with Fischer, who knows? Was his noted perfectionism getting the better of him, or was he just being an ass? It's also unclear from Kashdan's preface to the tournament book whether or not the provision for annotating all the players games was part of the tournament contract, or a side contract.
I don't know. But it turns out Jacqueline wrote an autobiography back in 1988, and I've requested a copy from the Orange County Library. I'll let you know what I find in there, if anything. Incidentally, she only died back in 2012, at age 100.
Finally, we get to the Spassky quotes I was trying to source. It turns out they're from the very first game in the book, when Spassky had Black against Petrosian, with whom he had just conducted a tough World Championship match a few months earlier. Perhaps I'll post the game in the future, but probably not. The interested reader can look it up himself.
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