GM Boris Spassky, the 10th world champion of chess who defeated “Iron” GM Tigran Petrosian in 1969 to reach the chess Olympus and who lost his title to GM Bobby Fischer in the Match of the Century in 1972 in Reykjavik, died on Thursday aged 88. His death was confirmed by the Chess Federation of Russia.
Spassky, who was the oldest living world chess champion—a title now passing to GM Anatoly Karpov—was eloquent and funny, a freethinker, and an anti-Communist. In the late 1960s, he was the best player among the Soviet contingent that was put to a halt by Fischer.
“You can’t imagine how relieved I was when Fischer took the title off me,” Spassky would later say. “Honestly, I don’t recall that day as unhappy. On the contrary, I’ve thrown off a very strong burden and breathed freely.”
You can’t imagine how relieved I was when Fischer took the title off me.
—Boris Spassky
This was not only a deliberation many years after the match; Spassky expressed the same feelings when he was interviewed in Reykjavik shortly after the final game.
“You know, I am not disappointed to lose this match. I don’t know exactly why, but I think life for me will be better after this match. Of course, I would like to explain why I think so.
“I had a very hard time when I won the chess title of the champion in 1969. Perhaps the main difficulty is that I had very big obligations for chess life, not only in my country but all over the world. I had to do many things for chess but not for myself as a champion of the world.”
Boris Vasilievich Spassky was born January 30, 1937, in Leningrad—a city he himself preferred to call Petrograd, the name that was used from the time of Russia’s involvement in World War I until Lenin’s death in 1924.
In the summer of 1941, Boris and his older brother, George, were evacuated from the besieged Leningrad to an orphanage in the village of Korshik in the Kirov Oblast. It is said that during the long train ride (the distance is over a thousand kilometers), Spassky learned the rules of chess.
His parents suffered and barely survived. In an interview published in 2017, Spassky tells the story that his father was on the verge of dying of starvation and survived as his wife sold her belongings and brought him a bottle of vodka.
Eventually, their parents took Boris and George to Moscow, where they stayed until the summer of 1946. After their return to Leningrad, when he was nine years old, his brother took him to Krestovsky Island, and there he saw a chess pavilion. It was there where he fell in love with the game.
Much later he would say: “Looking back, I had a sort of predestination in my life. I understood that through chess I could express myself, and chess became my natural language.”
I understood that through chess I could express myself, and chess became my natural language.
—Boris Spassky
When he was 10 years old, he managed to win in a simultaneous exhibition game against Soviet Champion GM Mikhail Botvinnik, who became the world champion a year later.
Spassky always said that he “became a professional at 10” when he started working with his first coach, Vladimir Grigorievich Zak, at the Leningrad Palace of Pioneers in 1947. Zak trained him but also fed him in times of severe poverty, shortly after the Second World War. It was also Zak who helped him to get a stipend, enough to support his whole family.
In several interviews Spassky told the story that in the early days at the Pioneers Palace, he almost stole a white chess queen, just to carry it with him. “If I had indeed taken it with me, I might not have become world champion.”
Already at 15, he scored his first major result: second place at the Leningrad Championship, behind GM Mark Taimanov but ahead of GMs Grigory Levenfish and Viktor Korchnoi. The result was highly praised by Botvinnik.
His good score a year later in Bucharest (shared fourth place), where he beat the future world champion GM Vasily Smyslov for the first time, brought Spassky the title of international master.
By then he had started working with another trainer: GM Alexander Tolush, who won the tournament.
When he was 18 years old, Spassky showed his huge talent once again. At the 22nd Soviet Championship in 1955, he finished half a point behind the winners, GM Efim Geller and Smyslov, and shared third with Botvinnik, future world champion Petrosian, and Georgy Ilivitsky.
From the Gothenburg Interzonal, also in 1955, he qualified for the first time for the Candidates Tournament and at the same time, he became a grandmaster—the youngest in the world at the time.
The 1956 Candidates Tournament was held in Amsterdam and Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. Spassky came in third behind Smyslov and GM Paul Keres. In that tournament, he was the only one to beat Smyslov, who would end the cycle as the world champion. This time Spassky had the black pieces.
1956 was a great year for Spassky, in which he also became World Junior Champion and tied for first place at the Soviet Championship with GM Yuri Averbakh and Taimanov, but got bronze in the end.
In those years his education steered him toward journalism. He stated in an interview:
“I did not even decide for myself, but it happened in my life. I first enrolled in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics of Leningrad University. I studied there for about a year, but then I was forced to switch to philological studies because chess required great absences and mathematics does not tolerate this. At the Faculty of Philology, I got permission from the rector to leave for tournaments and training camps.”
Spassky did graduate from the university but later said he “didn’t get a real education.” He was first and foremost a chess player, and that became his true career.
After his early successes, he suffered a huge setback at the 1958 Soviet Championship in Riga, which also served as a Zonal tournament. He had started with a magnificent 9/12 and was the sole leader, but then he collapsed completely and didn’t even clinch one of the four qualifying spots for the Interzonal.
He suffered a crucial loss versus GM Mikhail Tal after spoiling a completely winning position. The latter ended up winning this particular world championship cycle by beating Botvinnik in a match in 1960.
Then something remarkable happened. Spassky, in an interview in Kingpin:
“After my loss to Tal, I went out into the street. I was absolutely depressed, tears were running down my cheeks… Suddenly, while walking I met David Ginsburg, the journalist who had worked in the chess newspaper 64 before the war and was later sent to the Gulag. ‘Is it worth being so upset?’ he asked me. ‘Well, Tal will play his match with Botvinnik, and he will win the title. But later he will lose the return match to Botvinnik. Some time later Petrosian will become world champion, and then your turn will come…’”
The rest was history—as predicted by Ginsburg. But first, Spassky failed to qualify yet again for an Interzonal tournament, one more time after losing a crucial last-round game, this time to the Ukrainian grandmaster Leonid Stein.
In his My Great Predecessors, 13th World Champion Garry Kasparov wrote:
“Two world championship cycles without Spassky looked rather strange, since his chess strength was unquestioned. But, as is well known, the components of chess success are not only strength and understanding of the game, but also psychological stability, and the ability to compose oneself at critical moments. Later on, in his best years, Spassky was able to draw lessons from these catastrophes and would play very well in decisive games. But then, in the late fifties and early sixties, his nervous system was not yet ready for such severe tests.”
As Spassky revealed much later, his slump was also related to his turbulent life in those years:
“The explanation is absolutely simple. My life did not pan out properly. I went through two divorces—there is a joke that two divorces are tantamount to participation in one war! My health also left much to be desired—I was suffering from kidney trouble, which returned in the second match with Fischer. Besides, at that time the Soviet Championships were usually held in January and this was quite unfortunate for me since these important tournaments coincided with my exams at the Institute.”
On a different occasion, Spassky told how he ended his first marriage in 1961, which became one of his most famous quotes: “We are opposite-colored bishops; we go on different diagonals, and we need to get divorced.”
We are opposite-colored bishops; we go on different diagonals, and we need to get divorced.
—Boris Spassky
1963 saw two big changes for Spassky: he moved to Moscow, and he started working with Igor Bondarevsky, who would be crucial for his career. They started a fruitful cooperation that eventually resulted in the world title. Bondarevsky would later write a book about their early years together: Boris Spassky Storms Olympus.
GM David Bronstein noted (translated by Kasparov):
“Another might have abandoned chess altogether, never mind abandon any dream of the world crown. But Spassky decided to proceed all over again along the thorny path and set about implementing a deeply conceived training plan.”
Spassky would later say, “I remember all my coaches with the greatest respect. Vladimir Zak gave me a weapon, Alexander Tolush sharpened it, Igor Bondarevsky hardened it.”
From the 31st Soviet Championship in 1964, Spassky qualified for the Amsterdam Interzonal tournament, where he tied for first place with Tal, Smyslov, and the Danish grandmaster Bent Larsen.
Spassky then won his 1965 Candidates matches against Keres (6-4, Riga), Geller (5.5-2.5, Riga), and Tal (7-4, Tbilisi) to qualify for his first world title match against Petrosian, who had beaten Botvinnik in 1963. The “patriarch” of Soviet chess, Botvinnik, had withdrawn from the upcoming world championship cycle after FIDE did not grant him the automatic right to a rematch anymore.
Spassky lost his first match with Petrosian in 1966 but won several top tournaments in that period such as Santa Monica 1966. There, he crushed six-years-younger Fischer in what was only their second encounter; Spassky had also won a King’s Gambit game in 1960.
Spassky then fought himself through another world championship cycle brilliantly—a cycle where Fischer was notably absent as he withdrew from the 1967 Sousse Interzonal. However, Kasparov wrote that he doubts whether Fischer would have been able to stop Spassky in his prime.
As the losing finalist, Spassky directly qualified for the 1968 Candidates matches where he beat Geller (again 5.5-2.5, Sukhumi), Larsen (5.5-2.5, Malmo), and Korchnoi (6.5-3.5, Kyiv). And so, three years later, Spassky and Petrosian again sat at the board, in Moscow, for the highest prize in chess.
This time Spassky won (12.5-10.5), thanks to his universal style and strong psychology. For instance, he used the Tarrasch Defense several times, an opening that was hardly developed in those days and directly leads to a worse pawn structure, which provoked Petrosian to overpress.
At a lecture during the second Carlsen-Anand match in Sochi 2014, Spassky said: “I never dreamed of becoming a world champion. It somehow came by itself as a result of my efforts. I was becoming a more and more powerful chess player, and in the end, it gave a result.”
I never dreamed of becoming a world champion. It somehow came by itself as a result of my efforts.
—Boris Spassky
Three years later he described it as follows:
“But to defeat Petrosian, something new was required. It is very important to feel the inevitability of your victory. The enemy feels it. But for this, your spirit and matter must be in harmony. In my case, I was a poor student, unsettled, and quite far from high thoughts. In the first match, I rushed towards Petrosian like a kitten on a tiger. And it was easy for him to repel my blows. And now, in the second, I had matured and turned into a bear.”
Petrosian (translated by Kasparov):
“Already after my first match with Spassky I had a feeling that a new encounter with him was possible. I was staggered by his tenacity and resourcefulness in defense, and his composure and endurance after a defeat. And, of course, to twice make such a difficult ascent to the top is something that few could have done.”
In 1967 the Chess Oscar was founded, and after Larsen won the first, Spassky won it in both 1968 and 1969. In the Kingpin interview, he said:
“I think that I was stronger than the others in the middlegame. I had a very good feel for the crucial moments in the game. This made up for certain deficiencies in opening preparation and, possibly, some flaws as regards endgame technique.”
One of Spassky’s most famous games is the following miniature from the celebrated USSR vs. World event at Belgrade 1970, played on board one.
During his reign as world champion, Spassky beat Fischer one more time, at the Siegen Olympiad in the same year. Their score was 3-0 for Spassky with two draws before their famous match in 1972 in Reykjavik.
The story is well known, with Fischer arriving late, setting lots of demands, and forfeiting the second game but winning after all. Here’s a clip from just before the match when Spassky is already in Iceland.
Spassky lost his title to Fischer, who won the match 12.5-8.5 despite starting 2-0 down, after losing the first game and forfeiting the second.
From the Kingpin interview:
“Fischer made short work of me. Tal was right when he said, ‘There was no Spassky in this match.’ I had actually lost before the match. My nervous system was completely broken. The Soviets were bothering me, and I also made my life difficult. Both Fischer and I were fighting windmills!”
If not for Spassky continuing the match after Fischer had forfeited the second game, chess history would have been quite different.
“Some days before the start of the third game, I spoke for half an hour on the telephone with Pavlov, the president of the Soviet Sports Committee. He demanded that I should declare an ultimatum which, I was sure, Fischer, [Max] Euwe [the FIDE President at the time – PD], and the organizers would have never accepted; so, the match would be broken off. The whole telephone conversation was just a never-ending exchange of two phrases: ‘Boris Vasilievich, you must declare an ultimatum!’—to which I responded, ‘Sergei Pavlovich, I shall play the match!’
“After this conversation I spent three hours in bed shivering with nervousness. Actually I saved Fischer when I agreed to play the third game. So, the match was practically finished after this game. In the second half of the match, I simply did not have the energy.”
Actually I saved Fischer when I agreed to play the third game.
—Boris Spassky
“After Reykjavik, the Sports Committee couldn’t forgive me for declining the chance to retain the world championship title. I could easily have done that simply by leaving the match. I had every justification, with FIDE President Max Euwe even telling me: ‘Dear Boris, you can quit the match at any moment. Take as much time as you need, go to Moscow or wherever else, but recover and think things over.’ I replied: ‘Thanks for the good advice, Max, but I’ll do things my way.’”
In his article “A Chess Player’s Hell,” published in De Tijd on July 31, 1972, GM Jan Hein Donner wrote:
“Spassky is the only grandmaster I know who states emphatically that he does not like chess. ‘I am my most difficult opponent myself,’ he said repeatedly, and just before the start of the match he surprised each and everyone with the remark that nobody would be happier than he if he were to lose the world championship. This has nothing to do with cowardice. Spassky has always been like this. His exceptionally clear mind has always prevented him from not knowing himself. At the same time, it always brought him final victory over unwillingness, too. His career has been slow, step by step, because every step had to be taken in. Now, however, he is knocking himself out against Fischer, in a way in which he has never beaten himself up before.”
In later years, Spassky regretted his decision: “Now, in hindsight, I understand that I was wrong. I had to let Fischer finish what he started. He started to resign the match! Let’s imagine that we are boxers. If one says, “I give up,” the other one has to accept! But I refused.”
In 2015, Spassky traveled to Berlin where he saw the film Pawn Sacrifice, a 2014 Hollywood movie based on the 1972 match that has Liev Schreiber playing Spassky and Tobey Maguire playing Fischer.
Spassky didn’t like it.
“There’s no intrigue in the movie,” Spassky he said. “They failed to show the main thing: how I agreed to continue the match. I could have just stopped everything and walked away as the champion!”
The official trailer of Pawn Sacrifice.
A year after losing the title, Spassky played what was probably the best tournament of his career. He won the 41st Soviet Championship with 11.5/17, a full point more than the rest of the field which included Korchnoi, Geller, Keres, Petrosian, Taimanov, Tal, Smyslov, the Belarus grandmaster Lev Polugaevsky, and future world champion Karpov. This tournament was later called Spassky’s “swan song” by Korchnoi.
Spassky unexpectedly lost his Candidates semifinal match to Karpov in 1974. The latter would be declared world champion the next year when Fischer could not agree with FIDE on the terms for a new match.
Spassky features in the 1986 documentary “Chess: A State of Mind.” (Go to 17:40 to enjoy his impersonation of Anatoly Karpov.)
In the next cycle, Spassky reached the 1977-1978 Candidates final match in Belgrade where he lost to Korchnoi 10.5-7.5. It was a match with a lot of tension.
“There was a moment when I grew to really hate him,” Spassky later said. “It was the first time Korchnoi faced hatred from his opponent. Usually he was the one hating.”
In his memoir, Korchnoi wrote: “We began our match as buddies and ended it as enemies.”
Spassky was seeded into a Candidates quarterfinal match in 1980 against Hungarian grandmaster Lajos Portisch. The score was level after 13 games when for the first time in history a tiebreak method was used where Black had to win. Spassky came close, but Portisch held the draw and thus won the match.
In 1985 Spassky tied for sixth place in the Montpellier Candidates Tournament. It was the last time he played really well, as he said himself.
Outside the world championship cycles, Spassky won numerous events and scored many medals at student Olympiads, European Team Championships, and Olympiads. In Siegen 1970 he won the gold medal on board one, besides team gold for the Soviet Union.
In 1975 Spassky married for the third time, to Marina Shcherbachova, the granddaughter of the Russian war general Dmitry Shcherbachev. A year later, the Soviet Union made a rare exception that allowed him to go and live in Paris. After Korchnoi’s defection, the Soviets were milder on Spassky but things were cool as long as he wasn’t too successful.
From the Kingpin interview:
“I remember that I won the first prize in Linares in 1983 leaving Karpov behind. At that time I was already living in France, but I was still playing under the Soviet flag. Karpov was evidently furious, and soon afterward the Soviets took away the red flag from my table; what is more, they deprived me of my stipend from the Soviet Sports Committee. These 250 roubles I needed very much to help my family in Russia—my mother, my brother and sister, my children.”
In 1976, together with Botvinnik and Bronstein, Spassky did not sign the letter that condemned Korchnoi for his defection to the West.
“I was in Paris. To sign the letter against Korchnoi, I had to come to the Soviet embassy. There, I said: ‘You can do without me.'” Then I turned around and left. Just like that.”
The move to France in 1976 allowed Spassky himself to choose which tournaments to play. He became a French citizen in 1978 but kept playing under the Soviet flag until 1984. He would later participate in three Olympiads for France.
During the closing ceremony of the 1972 match, Fischer had told Spassky: “Boris, we’ll play another match.” Exactly 20 years later, he kept his promise.
In 1992 Fischer and Spassky met again, in a match that Fischer insisted on calling the official world championship. It was held in Sveti Stefan (Montenegro) and Belgrade, both part of Yugoslavia which was under U.N. sanctions during the war. The prize fund was $5 million (sponsored by Yugoslav millionaire Jezdimir Vasiljevic). Fischer won 10-5 with 15 draws in what was Fischer’s last major event.
The first time Spassky saw Fischer was when the latter made his famous visit to the Central Chess Club in Moscow in 1958.
“He was a man of tragic fate. I understood that immediately after seeing him for the first time. He was 15 years old, a tall boy. He came with his sister Jane. In the chess club on Gogolevsky Boulevard, he played blitz with Petrosian, Bronstein, Vasiukov, Lutikov… I first played him two years later, at the Mar del Plata tournament.”
The two main characters of a symbolic battle between the U.S. and the USSR, at the height of the Cold War, remained friends until Fischer’s death in 2008. Spassky said that in his last phone call with Fischer, the two discussed which move is stronger: 1.e2-e4 or 1.d2-d4. “We concluded it was the second since the pawn is defended by the queen.”
That this special friendship between the calm 10th and the erratic 11th world champion of chess was even possible says much about Spassky. He knew how to deal with Fischer’s highly sensitive character.
“For example, he could not stand it when they called him. And I never bothered him. He always dialed me himself,” Spassky said.
A year after his return match with Fischer, Spassky lost narrowly in a match with GM Judit Polgar. After that he only played occasionally, such as the Women vs. Veterans tournaments sponsored by Joop van Oosterom. His last official games are from a friendly match that he played with Korchnoi in 2009 in Elista, which ended 4-4.
Spassky’s last game in the database is an 11-move draw with Korchnoi, the last one of their match. This game was played the day before on Christmas Day 2009.
Spassky said he stopped playing competitive chess because “I felt that I had no more energy to play, that I had lost any desire to win.”
A year after that match with Korchnoi, in September 2010, Spassky suffered a stroke which left him paralyzed on his left side. “My left arm and left leg misbehave. They sometimes go on strike!” he would describe it himself jovially.
Spassky had suffered an earlier stroke in 2006, during a chess lecture in San Francisco, from which he had recovered.
He had been living in Paris but in the summer of 2012 he returned to Russia after a dispute with his wife. It was Valentina Kuznetsova who took him to Russia. Spassky called her “my guardian angel.”
Since then he had been living in a small, first-floor apartment in Moscow. He was often the guest of honor at chess events and was present at a meeting with Vladimir Putin who had invited GMs Boris Gelfand and Vishy Anand after their match in 2012 in Moscow.
In the last few years Spassky was involved in the Spassky Chess School located in the Urals, and he had been trying to get his archive from Paris to Moscow. In February 2018 he was elected honorary president of the Russian Chess Federation.
In a report on Russian television on the occasion of his 80th birthday, the 10th world champion remarked: “I, unfortunately, had classic Russian drawbacks: laziness and faith in luck.”
Unlike other world champions, Spassky wasn’t known for having a specific playing style at the chessboard. On the contrary, he is remembered as a universal player.
In his My Great Predecessors, Kasparov wrote about Spassky:
“[His play] does not lend itself to a distinct division into any clearly expressed components, making it unique and unrepeatable. With Spassky everything is somehow diffuse and misty—and this, evidently, confirms his image of a universal chess player. It is generally considered that the universal chess style, involving an ability to play the most varied type of positions, stems from Spassky.”
With Spassky everything is somehow diffuse and misty—and this, evidently, confirms his image of a universal chess player.
—Garry Kasparov
Kasparov then emphasizes that “from childhood he clearly had a leaning towards sharp, attacking play and possessed a splendid feel for the initiative.
“Boris Vasilievich was the only top-class player of his generation who played gambits regularly and without fear. Before then (and also during his time) this weapon was often used by Bronstein, but it would appear that Spassky was even more aggressive and successful.”
Spassky never lost in the King’s Gambit and beat many strong players in this romantic opening. The most famous of these encounters was Spassky-Bronstein, Leningrad 1960, which he named as one of his favorites and which was used in the opening scene of the 1963 James Bond film From Russia With Love.
The chess scene from the James Bond film From Russia With Love.
Spassky was the first great player who was equally successful with 1.e4 and 1.d4. (In fact, he never played 1.Nf3 in his whole life.) Nowadays there is no super grandmaster who sticks to just one of these opening moves.
In his “The Ten Greatest Masters in History” published in Chessworld, January-February 1964, a 20-year-old Fischer wrote that he had included Spassky for his unique style.
“Spassky sits at the board with the same dead expression whether he’s mating or being mated. He can blunder away a piece, and you are never sure whether it’s a blunder or a fantastically deep sacrifice.”
Spassky sits at the board with the same dead expression whether he’s mating or being mated.
—Bobby Fischer
In an interview published in early 2015, Spassky said:
“In general, what a chess player needs has always been the same, with a love of chess the main requirement. Moreover, it has to be loved naturally, with passion, the way people love art, drawing, and music. That passion possesses you and seeps into you. I still look at chess with the eyes of a child.”
Interviewer: “And what do you see?”
Spassky: “A river, with its current and channel, and the gradual flow of the river.”
Interviewer: “And you’re standing on the shore?”
Spassky: “No, I’m already in it, in that river.”
Boris Spassky died at the age of 88. He leaves behind a daughter and two sons, all from different marriages.
Andrei Filatov, the president of the Chess Federation of Russia, said to Russian state news agency Tass: “A great personality has passed away; generations of chess players learned and continue to learn from his games and work. A great loss for the country. Condolences to his family and friends. Eternal memory.”
RIP Boris Vasilievich Spassky
One of the most talented players of his generation, the 10th World Champion Boris Spassky has passed away at the age of 88.
Spassky was considered a chess prodigy. He attained the Grandmaster title at the age of 18 and made his debut in the… pic.twitter.com/zrZBePQeXg
— International Chess Federation (@FIDE_chess) February 27, 2025
RIP to the 10th world champion, Boris Spassky, here looking over my shoulder at my match with Hübner in 1985. Boris was never above befriending and mentoring the next generation, especially those of us who, like him, didn’t fit comfortably into the Soviet machine. (He emigrated… pic.twitter.com/Fahk3XDP1o
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) February 27, 2025
He was not only a wonderful champion, but also a fascinating personality. Anyone who met him will surely remember him – forever. His character came through in every possible way, especially with his sense of humour, his brilliant mind, his facial expressions.
He turned to chess… pic.twitter.com/oXk1sNT0A7
— Judit Polgar (@GMJuditPolgar) February 27, 2025
Boris Vasilievich Spassky was a fascinating person and a great champion. I had a privilege to dine and talk to him on many occasions and i remember his wonderful sense of humor and witty words.
The first time i met him it was around 2005 or 2006. He complimented my play with…
— Levon Aronian (@LevAronian) February 27, 2025
RIP Boris Spassky. A great player and a good friend.
— Jan Timman (@GMJanTimman) February 27, 2025
Rest in peace. pic.twitter.com/wBqwbGbR0e
— Ian Nepomniachtchi (@lachesisq) February 27, 2025
GM Yasser Seirawan commented to Chess.com: “The passing of Boris is a tragic loss for the world of chess. I have so many cherished memories that I could write a book about him whereby author and reader would be laughing alike. Just a wonderful, wonderful man. My condolences to his family as well as all who knew him well.”
This obituary includes extracts from an early 2016 interview with Spassky conducted by Yuri Golyshak and Sergei Kruzhkov for their column “Friday Talk” in the Sport-Express newspaper. It was translated into English by our member Spektrowski here. Other sources include the 1998 interview by Lev Khariton in Kingpin 29, Anatoly Samokhvalov’s 2015 interview in R-Sport (translated by Colin McGourty here), and Kyrill Zangalis’s interview for Soviet Sport.
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