Times Colonist Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Saturday, December 16, 1978 - Page 40
Chess, From Riches To Rags To Riches
Gone are the days when chess masters wandered across Europe, chess boards slung across their shoulders, shouting their challenges. For a few pesos, they would take on the locals and then travel on.
The best of these did much better than that, especially in Spain and Portugal. Royal courts welcomed these talented wanderers and they could win both fame and fortune.
In more modern times, the lot of the chess playing professional has often been much sadder. One of the great masters, Kurt Schlecter of Vienna, actually starved to death in 1917; Kurt van Bardeleben of Germany, absolutely poverty-stricken, committed suicide in 1924. So did Frederick Dewhurst Yates, also impoverished, a dour Yorkshireman of tremendous ability who was several times champion of Great Britain.
Chess history has hundreds of cases of excellent players who never made ends meet. Even the great Bobby Fischer led a penurious existence in his early years. But it is largely thanks to Bobby that the lot of the chess professional is growing better. He thought it scandalous that players in the world's most cerebral game should be paid less than ditch diggers. In his 1972 world title match with Boris Spassky, he demanded an unheard-of purse of $100,000, and he got it.
At two extremes, contrast this with the purse for the just-concluded world title ($700,000, with the winner getting $450,000) and the 1927 world title match in Buenos Aires, where winner Alexander Alekhine got a paltry $6500 to loser Jose Capablanca's $3500.
There's now talk of a million dollar match between Bobby Fischer and World Champion Anatoly Karpov…