The 1962 Curaçao Collusion Scandal

Tigran Petrosian, Efim Geller, and Paul Keres, the tournament's three leading Soviet players, played each other repeatedly across the four-cycle format, and their games kept ending in short, uneventful draws while they saved their energy for decisive results against everyone else, Fischer included. Viktor Korchnoi, playing in the same event, later said he personally noticed a ten-move draw between Geller and Petrosian in the second cycle and grew suspicious himself.

A quadruple round-robin means each pair of players meets four times. If three of the strongest players in the field guarantee themselves six free draws against each other (four cycles times three pairings would actually be four games per pairing; regardless, repeated meetings across cycles), they can direct all their competitive effort at the remaining players instead. In tropical heat, over two months, that energy advantage compounds round after round.

Petrosian won the tournament outright with 17.5/28, half a point ahead of Keres and Geller in second and third. Fischer published his account in Sports Illustrated under the headline "The Russians Have Fixed World Chess," an article timed almost exactly with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which only amplified how the story landed with a mainstream American audience already primed to see the Soviets as adversaries.

Modern chess historians generally regard Fischer's accusation as more likely correct than not, based on the pattern of results and later accounts from players involved, though no formal proof or admission settled the matter definitively at the time. What is not in dispute is the consequence: FIDE abandoned the round-robin Candidates format for a knockout, match-based system starting in 1965, specifically to make this kind of coordinated energy-conservation impossible. A single accusation, aggressively published, permanently changed how the sport selects its championship challenger.