Soviet chess grandmaster and tenth-world champion Boris Spassky has passed away in Moscow. The Russian Chess Federation announced this. He was 88. He was famously defeated at the height of the cold war. The federation in a statement called it a “great loss for the country”. Spassky is best remembered for his duel with US player Bobby Fischer in 1972, which was emblematic of the confrontation between East and West, and was later referred to as “the match of the century”.