The Battle of World Champions: Karpov vs. Spassky on TV in 1982
In 1982, Hamburg TV ran a very strong tournament in two stages. In the first stage there were two double round-robin quads. In one, Anatoly Karpov won with 4.5/6, a point ahead of John Nunn; Slim Bouaziz and Yasser Seirawan tied for last with two points apiece. In the other, Boris Spassky won with an enormous 5.5/6 score, ahead of Jan Timman (3), Eric Lobron (2) and Eugenio Torre (1.5).
In the final match, Karpov played Spassky. I won't tell you what happened, if you want to see the drama for yourselves, but after you watch the videos, click here - I give all the games from that match.
For those of you who prefer the drama, you can watch the Hamburg presentation of the two 1-hour games between Karpov and Spassky - complete with voice-over commentary by the players themselves. The links from one to the other aren't so clear, so I'll provide them all here.
And remember to check out the replayable boards on here when you're done watching!
(HT: Ben Vinyard)
Reader Comments (11)
fyi, the link to the replayable boards is broken
Awesome!
Fixed, ami - thanks.
Great findings !
By the way, I just noticed how casually Spassky lights himself a cigarette at the beginning of the first time. Today they would probably throw him out of the building for this.
Correction : At the beginning of the second game he lit up the coffin nail.
I love this series. It's amazing to be able to get into the heads of great players like this!
Thank's a lot for posting the link. It was great fun to watch the videos!
I remember watching the Mastergame on BBC as a kid. With great players such as Larsen, Spassky, Karpov and Miles commenting over their games. It was fantastic. The BBC were going to publish the Mastergame on the Web but unfortuantely the lost the footage! Doh!
That Pirc game was a beautiful Karpov victory, very inspiring.
YouTube alias "SearchBucket"
It was I that uploaded these vids from my own collection!
Having watched Anand - Topalov and been disappionted with the internet only coverage I decided to dig out some stuff I'd recorded.
I thought like-minded people would appreciate me sharing them and see how it used to be done. I have one or two others from the event to upload .... and I recorded over one or two:-(.
I'm sure I have quite a lot of TV chess but my VHS collection is very large, spanning many years. These programs tended to be recorded in "gaps" on my tapes, so much searching will be required to find them. I also have audio tapes of BBC's Mastergame, which I intend to merge with some sort video output.
Sorry about the links between segments. I should have constructed a playlist, but I was keen to just get some material uploaded quickly.
Thank you, Steve! Let us know when you add some more.