wrote:
Spassy assumed that Fischer would always used the openings he had
used in the past, and then was surprised (as was the chess world)
when Fischer pulled out this English Opening, something he had never
used before in tournament play:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1044367

That link is to game 8 of the match. The surprise was in game 6 and
it wasn't really 1.c4 but 3.d4 that was the shock, transposing into a
queen's gambit.

Fischer quite often played Reti and KIA systems early on and
occasionally used 1.c4 throughout his career --- a well-known example
is his game against Polugayevsky at the 1970 Inter-Zonal. (There's the
story that Polugayevsky arrived a couple of minutes late for that game
and thought he'd gone to the wrong board because Fischer had gone for
a walk and 1.c4 had been played.) To the best of my knowledge,
though, Fischer had never transposed from 1.c4 into a queen's pawn
opening before the sixth game of the Spassky match.


Dave.

--
David Richerby Confusing Edible Chicken (TM): it's
www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~davidr/ like a farm animal but you can eat it
and you can't understand it!