On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 12:33:08 -0500, Louis Blair wrote:

tomic wrote (Wed, 16 Jul 2003 10:05:21 +0200):

Delegates accepted the first Fischer's claim to play without limit
of the game numbers (37:33). But, the second Fischer's claim
was refused. That was Fischer's claim that he detain the title if
the result in match would be undecided, 9:9. That claim was
refused with 35:32 and 3 votes were retired. You know that
Fischer's demand was used by other WCC (e.g. Botvinnik,
Lasker).

_
I know of no world championship match played by Botvinnik
or Lasker where the challenger had to finish two points ahead
of the champion in order to cause the champion to lose his title.

The Capablanca/Alekhine match had that clause, though it was to 6 games,
not 10. A 5-5 score resulted in a tied match and Jose would have retained
his title in the circumstance.

So there _is_ a precedent for the clause.

It's obviously that Fischer was not afraid of Karpov. By
the way, you can see Chessmetric evaluation of the strength
Karpov and Fischer in 1975. The difference was too big ...

_
By 1975, Fischer had been away from serious chess for
three years. Human emotions, especially Fischer emotions,
are not necessarily governed by chessmetrics.

He was also away from serious chess for the last 3 years of the 60s.
But when he came back in 70s he was devastating. It stands to reason
that in 1975 Fischer was still in peak form, and would have beaten karpov.