"Look at what happened betwen Tal and Petrosian in Varese. They played four draws in maybe fifty moves altogether. It's unsporting, it's unfair. I have no words to describe it. But Tal punished himself. Huh? Ah ... you do not understand this. It is because Petrosian is a great force in the Soviet Union. He leads all the politics of the Soviet chess Federation, of the chess press. Everyone has to consider his opinions and desires. Tal submits to him. Even when Portisch was already sure of qualification and it was clear that one Russian had to drop out, Tal did not try to win against Petrosian. Well, he punished himself."

"One starts selling his soul by bits and pieces until it's all gone."

Having devoted his time on this planet to moving bits of wood around a chequered board holding his own, relative to most mortals, against pretty much all opposition including 8 world champions he can say whatever he wants as far as I am concerned.

Here's a collection of quotes from the time:

<Roald Dahl <Roald Dahl??> called Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist”; Tory Party chairman Norman Tebbit, “an outstanding villain ... who has insulted the country that protects him and betrayed and reviled those to whom he owes his wealth, his culture, his religion and now his very life.” John Le Carré declared that “absolute free speech is not a God-given right. ... Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion.” Alexander Cockburn, by contrast, took up Rushdie's defense but complained that Rushdie managed no outcry on behalf of other victims of censorship and intimidation. Edward Said called The Satanic Verses “the Intifada of the imagination,” while the great Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih called it “tedious,” a cause célèbre only because Iran had made it so. Despite the violence of the much-publicized rhetoric against Rushdie from a variety of Islamic quarters, many commentators observed that those quarters did, after all, have a point. Gobind Kumar, for example, reminded readers of the “tendency for the Western media to propagate derogatory images of minority and foreign cultures.” Conor Cruise O'Brien was there to oblige him, stating baldly that “Muslim society looks repulsive ... because it is repulsive” and Anthony Burgess weighed in with the claim that “the Koran is no literary masterpiece. The Bible is.”>

http://www.dist113.org/dhs/Library/...

Yes, he is fairly despicable. I won't speak too much on the subject though as I don't want to let my Swiss sponsors down. (-; I will say that I have very little respect for the excuse that says "oh, but he is such a great player, so let him do what he wants."

There were other surprising reactions. The English philosopher Michael Dummett wrote a bad and incoherent piece in the Telegraph (the incoherence might have been sub-editing) attacking Rushdie.

Petrosian: +1-0=6
Portisch: +1-1=6
Tal: +0-1=6

Each player plays 4 games against each other. Petrosian had beaten Portisch in their first game. The last two had been drawn in 11 and 13 moves. Portisch was ignoring Petrosian to focus on Tal, whom he succeeded in beating in their third game.

If Tal had won this game, then all three players would have finished at +1-1=6. From Korchnoi's comments that one of the Russians had to drop out, we can infer that in the event of a tie, the spot in the Candidates would have been decided by tiebreak points. From Korchnoi's claim that Tal had something to play for in this game, we can assume that Petrosian would have been the one eliminated on tiebreak, had Tal won this game.

Or at least we can assume that that's Korchnoi's claim. I don't see it, personally. The Sonnenborn tiebreaks from the Interzonal were Petrosian: 110.75, Portisch: 108.25, Tal: 107.50. So if they were using Sonnenborn points, as they usually do, Tal would have still been eliminated <even if he had won this game>. If they were using some other tiebreak system, what was it? Korchnoi never said, and Chess Life & Review's otherwise pretty good coverage, never mentioned it either.

He was until he got turned.

<(Technically that COULD be true, and that's all we need to state it as a fact, right?)>

Reminds me of a joke from Get Smart, Again. Something like "We had a mole in their organziation until he got turned." "Into what??"

<It depends, sometimes we can make it up as we go along. If we did that it would be no different than some posters in these parts.>

Here's a .pdf if you want to see it again:

http://www.academicchess.org/images...