Boris Spassky, endlessly witty and a free soul, was more than just Fischer’s victim or a Soviet Union foot soldier

It’s a game that starts with Larsen playing the off-beat 1.b3 (which has since been named after him as the Larsen Opening). The provocative opening is the 6th most common opening move with white pieces and offers players a different way to come out swinging from the first move rather than the time tested 1.e4 and 1.d4.

For a few moves, things go well for Larsen. But then, his position starts to deteriorate. Like a boa constrictor squeezing its prey to dramatically reduce blood flow, Spassky cuts off safe squares for his rival’s king to seek refuge on after mounting a dazzling kingside attack. What’s so jaw-dropping about this attack is how cavalier he seems to be about his own pieces getting snatched. A bishop takes an outpost on f5. A knight hops on g4. In the span of a few moves, Spassky allows his knight to be captured, and then leaves his bishop hanging without protection or commensurate protection.

Then he offers up a rook to be captured like he started the game with about eight of them on the board. By the 15th move, Larsen has an additional rook and a knight on the board. And yet, he probably has a chill running down his spine because he can see by now that despite all his material advantage, he’s perilously close to losing. It takes just two more moves, before Larsen resigns, a 17-move defeat.

In an interview in 2014 with Kingpin magazine, Larsen called that defeat the worst of his career.

In 1960, 10 years before that game against Larsen, Spassky had delivered an equally beautiful victory over David Bronstein. In that game, Bronstein has a pawn that is threatening to capture Spassky’s rook on the final rank while also promoting to a queen. The rational move would be to move the rook in line with the pawn and pick it off on the next move. Spassky instead goes for the kill, making things uncomfortable one move at a time for Bronstein’s king on the back ranks. He keeps raising the pressure until his opponent cracks and resigns.

For a man who is largely remembered — unfairly — for losing the world champion’s crown to the legendary Bobby Fischer, Spassky had games of breath-taking beauty, punctuated by piece sacrifices.

READ MORE: Boris Spassky, the man who dared George Bush to put him and Bobby Fischer in same cell, ‘and give us a chess set’

The rest of the world came to remember him as Fischer’s victim or a pawn marching on the battlefield of the 64 squares for Soviet Union ideology in the middle of the Cold War. But both those characterisations fall woefully short of the mark.

Spassky’s legendary wit

Spassky was an independent thinker, a man who did not buckle under pressure and changed nationalities a few years after the defeat to Fischer. The 1972 World Championship would never have happened if Spassky had paid heed to the Soviet bosses and refused to play over Fischer’s eccentric behaviour in the build up to the game. No Soviet Union champion would have agreed to play the third game of that clash in a secluded backroom. And no USSR player would have publicly applauded an opponent after a loss.

Spassky was not the anti-hero to Fischer that Hollywood made him out to be in Pawn Sacrifice either. The 2015 movie does a good job at fleshing out the complexities of Fischer while choosing to paint Spassky’s character with shallow strokes. In that sense, the movie does not deviate from the cliche of having a stoic, egotistical Soviet Union villain who exists in the movie only so that the protagonist can beat him eventually for a happy ending.

Away from cliches, the most fitting tributes to Spassky came on X from grandmasters who had spent considerable time with the world champion and knew a thing or two about his legendary wit and his sense of humour.

READ MORE: Remembering Boris Spassky, and the Cold War-era ‘Match of the Century’ that defined him

“After the Candidates tournament in Moscow (in 2016), I spent a few hours with him and got to hear numerous funny stories about the golden era of chess that he was a big part of. Before I left his place he told me something I still remember. ‘Don’t try to become a world champion, the majority of us became champions by accident!’” recounted Levon Aronian.

Many more tales of his wicked sense of humour tumbled on social media, with the Polgar sisters, Viswanathan Anand and Garry Kasparov all contributing to our understanding of the man.

But the best anecdotes came from Vladimir Kramnik, who was so close to Spassky that the latter was one of the witnesses at Kramnik’s wedding.

“Spassky immigrated to France in 1976 after marrying a French woman. But he never really learnt French. At some point, visitors to his apartment in Paris noticed a motivator hanging on the wall of his cabinet, handwritten by him in Russian: ‘Learn French, idiot!’ Needless to say, his French never improved much. Spassky himself always acknowledged that he was somewhat lazy in general,” wrote Kramnik before launching into one more tale about his predecessor: “He once lost to Viktor Korchnoi in some veteran event (after the use of) the French Defence. Korchnoi was always ready for jokes of that sort, and while signing Spassky’s scoresheet, he wrote there, ‘Learn French, idiot!’”

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