1971 Candidates Matches

The 1971 Candidates matches are remembered above all for one thing: Bobby Fischer's astonishing run. He shut out Mark Taimanov 6–0, shut out Bent Larsen 6–0, and then beat former world champion Tigran Petrosian to become the challenger for the 1972 world title.

◇The bracket

Eight players qualified for the 1971 Candidates: Fischer, Taimanov, Larsen, Uhlmann, Petrosian, Hübner, Korchnoi and Geller. The quarterfinals and semifinals were best-of-ten, the final best-of-twelve. Alongside Fischer's matches, Larsen beat Uhlmann, Korchnoi beat Geller, and Petrosian defeated a young Robert Hübner, who withdrew after seven games in Seville.

The archive also carries the six-game reserve play-off from Portorož, where Lajos Portisch and Vasily Smyslov — level at the 1970 Palma de Mallorca Interzonal — drew 3–3, Portisch taking the reserve place on his tournament tie-break.

◇6–0, and 6–0 again

Then came the run this cycle is famous for. In the Vancouver quarterfinal Fischer beat Mark Taimanov 6–0, winning every game. In the Denver semifinal he did it again, beating Bent Larsen 6–0. No one had ever won two matches by clean sweeps against world-class grandmasters at this level, and no one has since.

On the other side of the draw Tigran Petrosian, the deposed champion, ground out a 5½–4½ semifinal win over Viktor Korchnoi to reach the final.

◇Petrosian, and the challenge

Only Petrosian stood between Fischer and the title match. Fischer won the first game in Buenos Aires to extend his winning streak to twenty straight games, and Petrosian broke it by taking game two. But Fischer surged again and won the final 6½–2½, earning the right to face Boris Spassky for the world championship in Reykjavík in 1972.

Because this was a knockout, the automatic cross-table below is not a finishing order — it merely totals each player's match points across the games the archive holds. Read it as a record of the games, and the bracket above for the result.