World Chess Championship 1969 World Chess Championship 1969 The 1969 World Chess Championship was played between Tigran Petrosian and Boris Spassky in Moscow from April 14 to June 17, 1969. Spassky won. The 1967 Interzonal Tournament was played in Sousse, Tunisia in October and November. The first six placegetters qualified for the Candidates, along with Boris Spassky and Mikhail Tal who were seeded into the Candidates matches as finalists of the previous tournament. A major controversy occurred when Bobby Fischer, who was leading the tournament with seven wins and three draws in ten rounds, abandoned the event over a dispute with the organisers. Because
Bobby Fischer score would be nothing short of a lottery – the winner in that case could not claim to have won a convincing victory. Soviet grandmaster Lev Alburt felt that the decision to not concede to Fischer's demands rested on Karpov's "sober view of what he was capable of". Years later, in his 1992 match against Spassky, Fischer said that Karpov refused to play against him under Fischer's conditions. After the 1972 World Chess Championship, Fischer did not play a competitive game in public for nearly 20 years. In 1977 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he played three games against the MIT Greenblatt