World Chess Championship 1978
chess match between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi
The 1978 World Chess Championship was played between Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi in Baguio, Philippines, from 18 July to 18 October 1978. Karpov won, thereby retaining the title.
The match had many bizarre incidents. Karpov's team included noted Soviet psychologist and hypnotherapist Vladimir Petrovich Zukhar, while Korchnoi enlisted the help of two American Ananda Marga yoga specialists who had recently been convicted of attempted murder and released on bail. There was more controversy off the board, with histrionics ranging from X-raying of chairs, protests about the flags used on the board, and Korchnoi's complaints that Zukhar, sitting in the front row, attempted to hypnotize him. When Karpov's team sent him a blueberry yogurt during a game without any request for one by Karpov, the Korchnoi team protested, claiming it could be some kind of code. They later said this was intended as a parody of earlier protests, but it was taken seriously at the time. It has also been alleged, based on the Mitrokhin Archive, that prior to the match the KGB assembled a team of eighteen foreign intelligence operations officers to try to ensure Korchnoi's defeat.
In quality of play, the match itself never measured up to the press headlines that it generated, although as a sporting contest it had its share of excitement. The match would go to the first player to win six games, draws not counting.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1999918. Authority coordinates are 16.412, 120.593. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “World Chess Championship 1978” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.