Boris Spassky Boris Spassky Boris Vasilievich Spassky (; born January 30, 1937) is a Russian chess grandmaster. He was the tenth World Chess Champion, holding the title from 1969 to 1972. Spassky played three world championship matches: he lost to Tigran Petrosian in 1966; defeated Petrosian in 1969 to become world champion; then lost to Bobby Fischer in a famous match in 1972. Spassky won the Soviet Chess Championship twice outright (1961, 1973), and twice lost in playoffs (1956, 1963), after tying for first place during the event proper. He was a World Chess Championship candidate on seven occasions (1956, 1965, 1968,
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