Then, on move twenty-nine, Fischer did the unthinkable. Picking up the remaining black bishop in the long fingers of his right hand, balancing it with his thumb, index, and middle fingers, he stretched out his arm and in one movement plucked off the rook pawn with his two smaller fingers while installing the bishop in its place.
This was inexplicable. In playing Bxh2—bishop takes the king rook pawn—Fischer had fallen into a standard trap. At first glance, the undefended white rook pawn looks as though it can be safely pinched by the black bishop. At second glance, one sees that if the pawn is taken, white’s knight’s pawn will be advanced one square, leaving the black bishop helplessly stranded. White can capture it with nonchalant ease. Even for the average club player, the recognition of such a danger is instinctive.
Fischer was the chess machine who did not commit errors. That was part of his aura, part of the “Bobby Fischer” legend, a key to his success. Newspapers reported a gasp of surprise spreading through the auditorium. Spassky, who had trained himself not to betray emotion, looked momentarily startled. Those who later analyzed the match were equally dumbfounded. “When I saw Bobby play this move,” wrote Golombek, “I could hardly believe my eyes. He had played so sensibly and competently up to now that I first of all thought there was something deep I had overlooked; but no matter how I stared at the board I could find no way out.” Nor could Robert Byrne and Ivo Nei, who analyze the game in their book on the match: “This move must be stamped as an outright blunder.” The British chess player and writer C. H. O’D. Alexander’s verdict is similar: “Unbelievable. By accurate play Fischer had established an obviously drawn position… now he makes a beginner’s blunder.” A television pundit on the U.S. Channel 13 reckoned it would go down as one of the great gaffes of all time. The Los Angeles Times thought it could be explained only as a “rare miscalculation by the American genius.” In Moscow, the correspondent for the Soviet state newspaper Izvestia, Yuri Ponomarenko, located the move’s source in sheer greed. Bondarevskii commented that the move was “a vivid example to smash the myth of [Fischer] as a computer.” Anatoli Karpov, the twenty-one-year-old Soviet star in the making, had a psychological theory involving both players: Spassky was afraid of the American and had sought to prove to himself that he could always draw with the white pieces. Fischer, annoyed, at tempted to disprove this. “So he sacrificed a piece without rhyme or reason.”
Years later, in twenty pages of exhaustive analysis, British grandmaster Jonathan Speelman concluded that even after Fischer captured the h pawn, totally accurate play could have earned him a draw. And to be charitable to Fischer, perhaps he recognized this intuitively. But that is hardly an explanation. For such a gambit had only a downside, offering no chance of victory. At best, with extreme care, it gave him the same result—a draw—that he could have achieved without any effort at all—indeed, probably by simply asking for one.
The game was adjourned after five hours, with Fischer’s position in a hopeless mess. Only The New York Times could conjure up a spirit of generosity: “Even if Fischer does lose the first game, he has achieved the respect of every player here by rising to Spassky’s dare and throwing away a sure draw for a speculative attack.” In 1992, when Fischer and Spassky played a rematch, a journalist, still intrigued by the move two decades earlier, asked Fischer whether he had been trying to create winning chances by complicating a drawn position. “Basically that’s right. Yes,” he replied.
At the time, however, he offered a different explanation, claiming to Lombardy that he had reacted too fast because the cameras distracted him. Soon after his first move, he protested ferociously to Schmid about the noise coming from the camera towers and repeated his complaint several times as the game wore on. No one particularly approved of the towers Chester Fox had constructed, ugly contraptions designed to conceal the film cameras and cameramen. They had been wrapped in black hessian, under which the cameramen sweated in saunalike conditions. But overnight the problem appeared to have been resolved when the two camera towers were removed from the hall. A third camera remained, looking down on the game from the back of the set.
Viktor Ivonin had arrived during the first day of the game and had gone straight to the hall, attempting with relish to predict the moves. (In his notebook, he jotted down that at the thirty-fifth move, when Spassky captured Fischer’s bishop, the American left the stage with “his trousers hung under his stomach.”) Despite the intellectual stimulation, he had a number of anxieties. There were some irregularities, some abnormalities, he noticed. There was Fischer’s luxury black leather American chair. The Soviet embassy had told him they were uneasy about it, without explaining why. Ivonin thought that the way the challenger constantly swiveled and threw himself around in it must surely distract the world champion. Spassky’s chair, by contrast, was a regular office model, firmly upright, with arms. Another worry was that when Spassky wrote his sealed adjournment move, his action was picked up by the closed-circuit camera and displayed on the big screen at the back of the stage. (At the end of a session, if a game was ongoing, one player was required secretly to seal the next move.) Ivonin later told Spassky that he had seen him write “pxp,” pawn takes pawn, and warned him in the future to make sure he concealed his move from the camera before committing anything to paper.
However, at dinner the mood was positive. Victory the following day looked assured. Ivonin quoted the Soviets’ first astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, to Spassky: “Poekhali!”—“Let’s go!” meaning “We have lift off!” At some point, Spassky took a call from Lothar Schmid. Was he happy with everything? “Yes,” replied Spassky, “everything is fine.” Schmid said that there was something Fischer did not like, but he was not at liberty to say what.
As the experts had foretold, the next afternoon Fischer quickly capitulated; he struggled on for only sixteen more moves. A player other than Fischer might not have bothered to see it through that far. Geller remarked that if Fischer was doing so petty a thing as continuing with the game—not resigning when he was definitely going to lose—he was not that strong. It showed how the Soviet team had failed to understand the American’s character: that he would never give up, so long as there remained even a glimmer of a chance.
Spassky was not fooled by his victory, describing Fischer’s blunder as “a present to the Sports Committee.” When he and Fischer parted at the adjournment, Fischer had spoken to him in Russian, saying, “Do zavtra” (“Till tomorrow”). The Russian interpreted this as a mark of Fischer’s resilience, understanding immediately that he had a fight on his hands and that this was merely an opening skirmish for the battle ahead.
On stage for the adjourned first game, Fischer had appeared satisfied. But after thirty-five minutes and three moves, he leaned far back in his swivel chair and caught sight of the camera. Incandescent, he hurled himself off the platform, pursued by the chief arbiter. Schmid, he spat out to the arbiter’s face, was a liar for telling him the cameras had been removed. Unless the backstage camera was ejected at once, he would leave the match. Crushed by the force of the challenger’s vehemence, Schmid complied, ordering the camera to go. The cameras, the cameramen, and their producer, Chester Fox—all had become the object of Fischer’s rage.