When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties – before he died in the early forties.
Americans really don’t know much about chess. But I think when I beat Spassky, that Americans will take a greater interest in chess. Americans like winners.
I studied that first Karpov-Kasparov match for a year and a half before I cracked it, what they were doing, and discovered that it was all prearranged move-by-move. There’s no doubt of it in my mind.
There was open collusion between the Russian players. They agreed ahead of time to draw the games they played against each other. Every time they drew they gave each other half a point.
The United States is evil. It has to be brought down, it has to be eliminated from the world scene. They are the ones who have made the world the hell that it is.
As Olafsson showed me, White can win… It’s hard to believe. I stayed up all night analysing, finally convicing myself, and, incidentally, learning a lot about Rook and Pawn endings in the process.
