Boris Spassky - the tenth world chess champion, holder of the title from 1969 to 1972. Spassky participated in three world championships: he lost to Tigran Petrosyan in 1966; defeated Petrosyan in 1969 to become world champion; then lost to Bobby Fisher in a famous match in 1972.
Boris Vasilievich Spassky was born on January 30, 1937 in Leningrad. He learned to play chess at the age of five during a trip on a train when the family was forced to evacuate from the besieged Leningrad. And already at the age of ten, he defeated world champion Mikhail Botvinnik in a simultaneous game.
Chess career
In 1953, Spassky played in a tournament in Bucharest, Romania, and received the title of international master. Two years later, he won the World Junior Chess Championship in Antwerp. At 18, he became the youngest candidate for the title of International Grandmaster.
In 1956, Spassky received the right to his first world championship challenger tournament. However, he sacrificed it for his term work at the University of Leningrad.
He won his first of two USSR championships in 1961 and again was able to return to the candidates tournament in 1965. In the chess world, he had a reputation as a multifaceted player, capable of both aggressive attacks and a long siege, patiently waiting for an opponent's mistake.
In 1966, Spassky could not claim the world title, which at that time belonged to Tigran Petrosyan. Got another chance three years later, he beat him to become the 10th world chess champion.
Spassky was the chess king for three years until he was defeated by the American Bobby Fisher in Reykjavik in 1972.
Spassky for several years remained among the best players in the world, winning the USSR Championship in 1973 and participating in several qualifying tournaments. At the same time, he settled in a suburb of Paris with his third wife and became a French citizen in 1978.
By the end of the 1980s, Spassky could no longer play in the major league of world chess, his peers noted that he was trying to reduce the matches to a draw.
In 1992, he lost the widely publicized revenge against the hermit Fisher in Yugoslavia. Fisher already had problems with tax evasion; after his arrest in 2004, Spassky wrote a letter to US President George W. Bush, in which he said: "Bobby and I committed the same crimes. Impose sanctions on me, arrest me and put me in the same cell with Bobby Fischer. And give us the chess set.".
Personal life
Boris was married three times. His first wife (1959-1961) was hope Konstantinovna Latyntseva. Together they have one daughter, Tatyana (1960). His second wife was Larisa Zakharovna Solovieva. They gave birth to a son, Vasily Solovyov-Spassky (b. 1967). His third marriage happened in 1975 in Marina Yuryevna Shcherbacheva, the granddaughter of White Movement activist Dmitry Shcherbachev. They have a son, Boris Spassky, Jr. (born in 1980).
His younger sister Iraida Spasskaya (born November 6, 1944) is the four-time USSR champion in Russian drafts and the vice-world champion in international drafts (1974)
