World Chess Championship 1972 World Chess Championship 1972 The World Chess Championship 1972 was a match for the World Chess Championship between challenger Bobby Fischer of the United States and defending champion Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union. The match took place in the Laugardalshöll arena in Reykjavík, Iceland, and has been dubbed the Match of the Century. Fischer became the first American born in the United States to win the world title, and the second American overall (Wilhelm Steinitz, the first world champion, became a naturalized American citizen in 1888). Fischer's win also ended, for a short time, 24 years of Soviet domination
World Chess Championship 1972 an eccentric 29-year-old American, was a vocal critic of the Soviet domination of chess, because he believed that Soviet players gained an unfair advantage by agreeing to short draws among themselves in tournaments. In August 1962 "Sports Illustrated", and then in October the German magazine "Der Spiegel", published Fischer's article "The Russians Have Fixed World Chess", in which he expounded this view. Fischer himself rarely agreed to early draws in unclear positions. The pressure on Spassky was enormous because for the Soviets, chess was part of the political system. While Fischer was often famously critical of his home country ("Americans