is Boris Spassky too underrated?

And Spassky was also a "player" when it came to women, as well.  All of his wives were very attractive.  I remember him talking about the breakup of his first marriage, when he said, "We were like bishops of opposite colors."  Great line.  I used to joke to my wife, that if I ever wanted a divorce, I would try using that line in court and hope the judge was a chess player!

eheh, not many people understand that joke, but it is very cool! the only pieces that never touch each other...

they say hes so senile he cant even remember how the pieces move. sad.

Interesting history thanks!

I'd say most rank him last of the World Champions, and it isn't easy to find some of the traditional World Champions that deserve to be ranked behind him, even if he obviously was a great player. One can have all kinds of critical opinions on for example Chessmetrics, but the 5-year-peak ranking of players still does say something, even if it wasn't updated the last 15 years:

The problem for Max Euwe was that his results often tailed off if he played too much. He would often start off with good results and then as he continued to play his play would deteriorate. As an amateur this was a bit difficult for him to control. He simply had to play when his job allowed him to. Over the course of his career he played several matches against some of the world's best players at their peak - Capablanca, Alekhine (3 times), Bogolyubow, and Keres. With the exception of the return match against Alekhine (where Euwe held his own quite well in the first half and then collapsed), they were all very close-run affairs, and I think ChessMetrics does him an injustice.

Spassky was undoubtedly a great natural talent, but he was lacking one important aspect, discipline, or in Gary Kasparov's words: 'the ability to work hard must also be considered a talent'. This needs to be taken into account when we say that had Spassky only worked harder, Fischer would probably not have defeated him. First of all, Fischer, at the time was already 100 points higher rated than Spassky. Secondly, Spassky's predecessor, Tigran Petrosian, once told Bent Larsen that he didn't like being the World Champion, because it forced him to live like a monk. Despite his reputation as something of a curmudgeon, Petrosian was in fact a gregarious man. Spassky was the same, and to this we should add the fact that he wasn't at all enamoured of the Soviet system, and often preferred to go his own way. Had Spassky worked harder it's quite conceivable that it would have had a detrimental effect, and making his play stale (his results as World Champion were nothing much to write home about, presumably because the duties of the World Champion hang heavy on him). One of his greatest successes, the Soviet Championship in 1973 came after a six month period of having been ostracized for losing to Fischer.

Coming back to the point of the OP, most of us can learn a lot from Spassky's games. He was a very fine, well-rounded player.

How are those ratings calculated?