The King is Dead... Long Live the King

On this day in 1975, FIDE, the international chess federation, proclaimed Anatoly Karpov its world chess champion, officially ending the both tumultuous and uneventful two-and-a-half-year reign of the enigmatic superstar, Bobby Fischer.

Since winning the world championship from Boris Spassky in the epochal Match of the Century in September of 1972 (a victory so huge that it actually landed Fischer on the cover of SI), the champion had played in exactly zero tournament chess games. Fischer's defense against Karpov in '75 was mandatory, and the chess world awaited this showdown with possibly more anticipation than the Spassky match, because Karpov was also a prodigy-genius that many thought could beat Fischer.

True to form, Fischer laid down an exhaustive and largely crazy set of demands for the Karpov match (among them that anyone entering the room of play had to remove any hats or head covering). But the sticking points of his list came down to three conditions that were in direct contradiction of FIDE rules - that draws would not count, that there would be no limit to the number of games played, and that the champion retained his title in the event of a 9:9 tie. It was the third of these three conditions that could not be met, because it gave an enormous advantage to Fischer (he only needed nine wins to keep his title, while Karpov needed a 10-8 result rather than merely being the first to nine). Because of the clear one-sidedness of this demand, many have since postulated that Fischer was not so much crazy at the time as he was afraid of Karpov.

Rather than concede this point, Fischer resigned as world champion in a telegram to FIDE president Max Euwe in June of 1974, writing that "the match conditions I proposed were non-negotiable." Karpov was finally given the crown by default on this day 32 years ago. Having won the title in this fashion would later haunt Karpov, as he was criticized by his adversaries for being "a paper champion." But in 1978 he won the world title outright in a thrilling and bizarre world championship match with Viktor Korchnoi.