1968 Candidates Matches

Having lost the 1966 title match, Boris Spassky came back to fight through the Candidates a second time. In a bracket of eight he beat Efim Geller, Bent Larsen and finally Viktor Korchnoi to become challenger again, and this time he won the world championship.

◇The field

The 1968 Candidates kept the knockout format introduced in 1965. Eight players contested it: Spassky, Tal, Larsen, Geller, Portisch, Reshevsky, Gligorić and Korchnoi — a mix of the previous cycle's leaders and fresh qualifiers from the Interzonal.

The matches were spread across Europe through 1968, from Sukhumi, Belgrade, Poreč and Amsterdam in the spring to the semifinal at Malmö and the final in Kiev that September.

◇Spassky over Korchnoi

Spassky moved efficiently through the draw: 5½–2½ over Efim Geller in the Sukhumi quarterfinal, then 5½–2½ over Bent Larsen in the Malmö semifinal, winning the first three games of that match. On the other half, Viktor Korchnoi came through a tight semifinal with Mikhail Tal, 5½–4½.

The final, in Kiev, went to Spassky 6½–3½. He had reached a second consecutive world championship match; Bent Larsen took the third-place play-off, staged in the Dutch town of Eersel early in 1969.

◇The 1969 title

This time Spassky converted. In the spring of 1969 he met Tigran Petrosian again and won the match to become the tenth World Chess Champion. The two 1968 finalists went on to shape the following decade of chess: Spassky as champion, and Korchnoi as the era's most relentless challenger.

The archive folds the sixty-three games of the main bracket into one collection, so the cross-table below simply totals each player's match points rather than a finishing order. A knockout has no linear ranking — read the table as a record of the games and the bracket above for the result.