The 10th World Chess Champion, Boris Vasilievich Spassky, passed away today - Thursday, February 27, 2025 - in Moscow, Russia at the age of 88.
Born in Leningrad (previously and once again St. Petersburg) on January 30, 1937, Spassky was a prodigy who set records at every level before struggling to achieve the game’s ultimate prize. He set Soviet records for being the youngest first category player (roughly 1900-2000 FIDE, from what I’ve been told, achieved at age 10), youngest candidate master (2100-2200; age 11), and Soviet master (2400?; age 15). He achieved the International Master title at 16, which was probably the record, and became a Grandmaster at 18, which obliterated the previous record of 23 years old, held by Tigran Petrosian. He achieved the GM title by qualifying for the 1956 Candidates Tournament; needless to say, that too was a record. (This came a year after he won the World Junior Championship; I don’t know if he was the youngest-ever winner of that event at the time, but it was still of course yet another great achievement.)
After that, however, his career stalled. He didn’t win that Candidates event, and he was knocked out of the next two World Championship cycles before even reaching the Interzonal stage (then the stage that preceded the Candidates) - in both cases in heartbreaking fashion.
The key step to his breakthrough to the highest level was a switch in trainers, to GM Igor Bondarevsky. Bondarevsky was good for his chess, but even more than that he helped him develop the psychological toughness he needed. In the 1964-1966 cycle he repeatedly came through in the clutch, first in the Interzonal, then with concluding wins against Paul Keres and Mikhail Tal in their respective Candidates matches. Only Petrosian, the defending champion, was able to vanquish him, but Spassky was still clearly on his way up.
Indeed, Spassky was even more powerful in the next Candidates cycle, and while Petrosian made a real fight of it in their 1969 rematch it was Spassky who triumphed, winning 12.5-10.5 to become the 10th World Chess Champion.
Unfortunately for chess, the instant Spassky won the title was just about the moment he lost his drive. Having achieved the highest aim, Spassky could no longer maintain the motivation to train hard or to fight in every game, and he was no match for Bobby Fischer in 1972. Maybe no one could have stopped Fischer that year but Fischer himself, but Spassky was finally able to play him on just about level terms…once it was too late.
From then on Spassky continued to have good results and remained in the world’s top group for more than a decade, but he played without much ambition, making lots of short draws but also proving a difficult opponent for anyone when provoked. (There’s a famous story of him offering Garry Kasparov a draw in their game from the 1988 World Cup in Reykjavik. His comment accompanying the draw offer was something like “I’m giving you a last chance; if you refuse the draw, I will wipe you off the board.” Kasparov was the World Champion at that point, but he was also 0-2 against Spassky with three draws. Kasparov wisely accepted the draw. To his credit, he won their last two games, played in 1989 and 1990, to equalize their career head-to-head score.)
Spassky is unfortunately best known as a sort of foil, friend, and victim of Fischer’s. With some justification, too, but the degree to which his relationship with Fischer overshadows the rest of his career is unfortunate. He was a genuinely great player every bit as impressive as all the other Soviet players between Mikhail Botvinnik and Anatoly Karpov (e.g. Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, and Petrosian), but because of the brightness of Fischer’s star, and perhaps because of the universality of Spassky’s style, there’s a sort of “generality” to him. Tal is the paragon of complications, Petrosian of positional chess. But who is Spassky? He could do everything well, but that also meant that there’s no recognizable Spassky game or style. That he was too lazy (the “laziness” charge was a constant self-ascription; it’s not my accusation) to write a memoir - something he “threatened” to do for a very long time - maybe even 40 years. Every World Chess Champion but Wilhelm Steinitz and Max Euwe until Magnus Carlsen wrote autobiographical chess books (and Steinitz and Euwe wrote more than enough other works to make up for it), but not Spassky. If I’m not mistaken, he never wrote a chess book of any sort - which doesn’t help his legacy either.
Nevertheless, he is a great of our game, and he deserves to be remembered by all of us in the chess community and his best games deserve to be better known. And as he was an Orthodox Christian, I will offer the standard prayer on his behalf: Eternal be his memory*.
There are, appropriately, many tributes already on the web. Please add more in the comments; here’s some more reading for now:
From Mark Crowther, on TWIC.
Dylan Loeb McClain in The New York Times.
ChessBase: this piece by Frederic Friedel.
*(This is a prayer to God for his soul, not an expression of desire for us to remember him forever in this life, though I do hope that he will long be celebrated as the great chess player he was.)
He was a great and understood Bobby the man better than most propagandists nowadays. Good article.