Saturday, March 21, 2009

Postscript to Spassky - Bronstein

We have a postscipt to this post about Spassky - Bronstein. Yesterday I received an email from John Henderson, chess columnist for The Scotman and who also now works for the ICC, to remind me of his column from way back on 12 December, 2006. In that article, John wrote:

The only difference between the two games was that in the Bond movie there were no pawns on d4 and c5 – and this was a critical error, because Black could have drawn at the end with 22 ..Ne6! 23 Ng6 Qc5+ 24 Kh1 Qb5! 25 Bc4 Qc6 26 Qf7+ Kh7 27 Qf5 Ng5! forcing a perpetual with 28 Nf8+ and Ng6+. It was only in 2002, when the Bond franchise reached its 40th anniversary, did the reason for the missing pawns come to light: Bond producers Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and Harry Saltzman mistakenly believed there to be a copyright on chess games, so therefore opted to omit the pawns!

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