I was reminded of this game when I saw it in Cyrus Lakadwala's new book on Viktor K -- <Korchnoi: Move by Move>.

His note to move 13 is superb (he'd already given a '!!' to 11.Qd2):

"13.Nxh7!
Glass shatters, concrete crumbles and metal bends. White attackers flow from nowhere with unified intent. The knight nursed a grudge against h7 for quite some time now, the long-festering resentment bubbles over into violence, and the strain on the defence surpasses capacity."

Lovely stuff from Lakdawala.

I couldn't believe it when people said, '13-11 to Fischer' and so on, assuming the match duration would have been the same as in 1972. Certainly, most opinions I have come across over the years are that Fischer would have won.

I disagree.

Fischer maintained that a very long match, of unlimited duration, with the winner being the first to win ten games, would be a better way to determine which of the two players was better.

He was proved wrong in 1984, when the World Championship match was abandoned after forty-eight games, with Karpov leading Kasparov by 5-3.

What that match proved was that a very long match would become a test of endurance rather than ability.

Interesting point about Korchnoi's having been in Leningrad during the siege!

If I remember correctly, by the point, both of Petrosian's parents perished during the siege.

Oddly enough, Chess Life & Review back then game full coverage to all the Candidates games during the quarterfinals and the semifinals, giving annotations to most of the games. But for this match, they gave just the bare game scores!

To be fair, Mednis analyzed a lot of the endings over a span of three issues in the magazine, though.

It is the kind of move an intermediate player would avoid because it prevents the Bishop from developing smoothly.

One interesting side note to this game,
after 17...Bxd5, Korchnoi had forgotten if you could castle with your rook attacked. He asked the Match Arbiter if 18.0-0 was legal!
When he was told he could, that's what he played.>

I remember reading Korchnoi's account of this incident in his autobiography.

I have just come across this account of a similar incident involving a game played by grandmaster Averbakh in Australia:

https://www.chesshistory.com/winter...

Larry Evans' spelling derives from the fact that Averbakh is an English transcription of the Russian transcription of the German name Auerbach.

https://www.aish.com/atr/Half-Jewis...

It is a ruling that dates back 3,300 years.

With apologies to the veteran grandmaster.
As you can see, I didn't check his Wikipedia entry, which confirms he is still alive, but it also confirms what I wrote about the origin of his family name:

Bobby Fischer's mum was Jewish....(says I tossing a can of worms into the thread. I'm off to bed, I'll be back in the morning to see who has opened it.)>

The ruling you refer to is the view according to Jewish religious law.

I met Korchnoi once and heard him say to a journalist that he himself was half-Jewish, and that so was Averbakh, then chairman of the USSR Chess Federation.

It is just a straightforward arithmetical measure of how much Jewish ancestry one has.

For example, Helena Bonham Carter is three-eighths Jewish!

As for Bobby Fischer, his real father was Paul Nemenyi (originally Neumann, another German name), who was also Jewish.

That makes Fischer four-quarters Jewish, a fact of which he was painfully aware.

I only mentioned it because a number of years ago I said someone was 'half Jewish' and was quickly corrected by people in my company.

(nothing new for me there, I think I was born with my foot in my mouth. )