A Background to the 1972 World Chess Championship

The match was played during the Cold War, although during a period of increasing détente. The Soviet Chess School had a 24-year monopoly on the world championship title, with Spassky the latest in an uninterrupted chain of Soviet world chess champions, stretching back to the 1948 championship.

Fischer, an eccentric 29-year-old American, claimed that Soviet players gained an unfair advantage by agreeing to short draws among themselves in tournaments. In 1962, the American magazine Sports Illustrated and 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.

Spassky faced enormous political pressure to win the match. While Fischer was often famously critical of his home country ("Americans want to plunk in front of a TV and don't want to open a book ..."), he too carried a burden of expectation because of the match's political significance. No American had achieved the world championship since the first champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, became a naturalized American citizen in 1888. The unusual public interest and excitement surrounding the match was so great that it was called the "Match of the Century", even though the same term had been applied to the USSR vs. Rest of the World match just two years before.

Spassky, the champion, had qualified for world championship matches in 1966 and 1969. He lost the world championship match to Tigran Petrosian in 1966. In the 1969 cycle, he won matches against Efim Geller, Bent Larsen, and Viktor Korchnoi to win the right to challenge a second time, then defeated Petrosian 12½–10½ to win the world title. He is often said to have had a "universal style", "involving an ability to play the most varied types of positions", but Garry Kasparov notes that "from childhood he clearly had a leaning toward sharp, attacking play, and possessed a splendid feel for the initiative."

In the Candidates matches en route to becoming the challenger in 1972, Fischer had demolished world-class grandmasters Mark Taimanov and Bent Larsen, each by a perfect score of 6–0, a feat no one else had ever accomplished in any Candidates match. After that, Fischer had split the first five games of his match against Petrosian, then closed out the match by winning the last four games. "No bare statement conveys the magnitude and impact of these results. ... Fischer sowed devastation." From the last seven rounds of the Interzonal until the first game against Petrosian, Fischer won 20 consecutive games, nearly all of which were against top grandmasters.

Fischer also had a much higher Elo rating than Spassky. On the July 1972 FIDE rating list, Fischer's 2785 was a record 125 points ahead of the number two player – Spassky, whose rating was 2660. Fischer's recent results and record Elo rating made him the pre-match favorite. Other observers, however, noted that Fischer had never won a game against Spassky. Before the match, Fischer had played five games against Spassky, drawing two and losing three.

Spassky's seconds for the match were Efim Geller, Nikolai Krogius and Iivo Nei. Fischer's was William Lombardy. His entourage also included lawyer Paul Marshall, who played a significant role in the events surrounding the match, and USCF representative Fred Cramer. The match referee was Lothar Schmid.

For some time, it appeared that the match might not be played at all. Shortly before the match, Fischer demanded that the players receive, in addition to the agreed-upon prize fund of $125,000 (5/8 to the winner, 3/8 to the loser) and 30% of the proceeds from television and film rights, 30% of the box-office receipts. He failed to arrive in Iceland for the opening ceremony on July 1. Fischer's erratic behavior was seemingly full of contradictions, as it had been throughout his career. He finally flew to Iceland and agreed to play after a two-day postponement of the match by FIDE President Max Euwe, a surprise doubling of the prize fund by British investment banker Jim Slater, and much persuasion, including a phone call from US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. Many commentators, particularly from the USSR, have suggested that all this (and his continuing exorbitant demands and unreasonable attitude) was part of Fischer's plan to "psych out" Spassky. Fischer's supporters say that winning the World Championship was the mission of his life, that he simply wanted the setting to be perfect for it when he took the stage, and that his behavior was the same as it had always been.

World-class match play (i.e., a series of games between the same two opponents) often involves one or both players preparing one or two openings very deeply, and playing them repeatedly during the match. Preparation for such a match also involves analysis of lines known to be played by the opponent. Fischer had been famous for his unusually narrow opening repertoire: for example, almost invariably playing 1.e4 as White, and almost always playing the Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense as Black against 1.e4. He surprised Spassky by repeatedly switching openings, and by playing openings that he had never, or only rarely, played before (such as 1.c4 as White, and Alekhine's Defense, the Pirc Defense, and the Paulsen Sicilian as Black). Even in openings that Fischer had played before in the match, he continually deviated from the variations he had previously played, almost never repeating the same line.