What games?? there were no games!! Karpov became the new champ due to Fischer's forfeit and as far as Karpov unfairly recieving the title, you got it all wrong, it was Fischer who unfairly and cowardly gave it back to the russians without a fight. (I mean, come on!!!, that stupid 9-9 rule proposal, FIDE was never going to buy into that!, Fischer was just asking to be disqualified.)

There is a conversation on the Karpov page.

I posted:

"The early Steinitz matches 1886 and 1889 were 10 wins but I don't think the 9-9 clause was in the conditions until 1889. The match against Gunsberg was a 10 wins or best of 20 with the 9-9 Champion retains".

<According to Karpov, they got as far as getting a contract drawn up, and a pen in Fischer's hand to sign it [in 1979]. At the last minute, Fischer wanted to know what to call it. He thought it should be "The Professional Chess Player's World Championship". Karpov balked at that. The Soviet Party Line was that their players were officially amateurs, and they wouldn't let him play in a match with "Professional" in the title. Campomanes said just sign the contract and we'll work out a name later that both sides can live with. Fischer said "No, I can't do it that way, in stages", and refused to sign.

<Fischer was smart enough to know that Karpov was a real threat. Who knows if Fischer could have defended his title? I think Spassky's assessment is at least as good as anyone else's: that Fischer would defend it in 1975, but that Karpov would win in 1978. I think this is reasonable. If people think they know more than Spassky, then by all means disagree, but I think his statement is reasonable. Iron sharpens iron, as they say. Still, you couldn't rule someone like Karpov out of any match.>

Good points. Here are some relevant quotes on this topic.

Interview with Kasparov
http://www.chesscafe.com/text/skitt...

[excerpt]

[...]

HR: 1968-75, ‘75 he becomes champion by default through ‘85, which is when he holds the title, and he at that time appears to be on a mission to prove that he really deserves to be champion. ‘86-90 and then ‘91-98. But in the ‘68-75 period, what struck me was the emphasis that you placed on his improvement almost match by match. You say on page 249, just before the Spassky match, “that Spassky had no conception of the strength of the grandmaster against whom he had been drawn,” which tells me that there had been massive improvement Spassky either didn’t know or couldn’t know.

GK: Yes, he didn’t know, probably he couldn’t know. Spassky was never good at preparing in great depth for his opponents, and as I explain in the book that this match was the final demonstration of the failure of Bondarevsky’s concept of this “fresh head.” So just coming with an open mind and not over-working on opening ideas and on the profile of your opponent. Karpov, according to Razuvaev and others who worked with him, spent more time on chess than ever in his life and his progress ... HR: In that period?
GK: In that period. His progress from the early 70’s to the match with Spassky, the end of the match, which in my view was probably one of the highest quality ever played. It’s more than significant, it’s amazing. Spassky played this match better than he played in Reykjavik, much better, and he lost 7-4, which speaks for itself.

HR: And Karpov is that much stronger because he’s hard-working, because he’s inspired, because he’s matured ...

GK: It was a combination. I’m not sure I could be absolutely correct in presenting the reasons why he played so well. I’m just looking at the moves, and you could see by the very unusual rate of the number of games picked up from the match. For instance, from the Karpov-Korchnoi final match I picked only one game, because from my perspective, from the perspective of someone who is analyzing the development of the game of chess, the final match made very little contribution. I discovered there was very little I could present to the public, both in terms of general development of the game of chess and also from Karpov’s prospects. While out of the 11 games he played with Spassky, I picked 8. I picked eight because I thought it was an amazing quality for an event of that magnitude. In my view the Karpov-Spassky match was to a certain degree a substitute to the world championship match we didn’t see in that cycle.

HR: Well, you’ve already said that you thought Karpov would defeat Fischer.

GK: No, I didn’t say he would defeat Fischer. I think that Fischer, after the Karpov-Spassky match, probably lost faith in his ability to beat Karpov. It doesn’t mean that Fischer was inferior to Karpov, but for Fischer, psychological confidence was everything. And looking at what Karpov did to Spassky in 1974, I think shocked Fischer, because he knew Spassky’s strengths and he could recognize that Spassky played in Leningrad better than Reykjavik, and he had no chance. So that’s why I think Fischer was so aggressive in pushing the unlimited match, ten wins, because he knew that would be his best chance. The long match offered him a much better chance than a short event. I’m sure he was impressed by the quality, and also the creativity … but the way Karpov played. It was so light but also so deep. It was a unique mixture, which could remind you of Morphy’s games, not in style, but just in the invisible relative easiness of doing things, while every move and every concept had a profound substantial idea behind it. [...]

---
Kramnik and Spassky on Karpov

Kramnik vs Anand, 2008

- Has Karpov followed the versatile pattern?

Kramnik: - Of course he has. Additionally, THERE IS SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS ABOUT HIS PLAY, no one else could cope with things like he did. It is easier for me to talk about Karpov because his collection of games was my first chess book. I studied his work when I was a child, later I played quite a few games against him. He is a versatile chess player, a good tactician who brilliantly calculates lines and positionally very strong. He also has a distinctive feature. Funnily enough, he has effectively denied Steinitz's pronouncement: if you have an advantage you must attack, otherwise, you will lose it. When having an edge, Karpov often marked time and still gained the advantage! I don't know anyone else who could do that, it's incredible. I was always impressed and delighted by this skill. When it looked like it was high time to start a decisive attack, Karpov played a3, h3, and his opponent's position collapsed.

Karpov defeated me in Linares-94 where he scored 11 out of 13. I got into an inferior endgame. However, it did not seem awful. Then I made some appropriate moves AND COULD NOT UNDERSTAND HOW I HAD MANAGED TO GET INTO A LOSING POSITION. Although I was already in the world top ten, I FAILED TO UNDERSTAND IT EVEN AFTER THE GAME. This was one of the few games after which I felt like a complete idiot with a total lack of chess understanding! Such things happen very rarely to top level players. Usually you realize why you have lost. This moment defies description - there is something almost imperceptible about it and so characteristic of Karpov.

Spassky's strong performance in USSR championship before the Karpov match does also support this view.

As well as you could claim Kasparov to be biased in this matter, without any evidence of course.., you could claim Mednis to be biased because he was an American grandmaster like Fischer. I am eager to see direct quotes of Mednis saying that Spassky played worse in the semifinal match than the Fischer match.

He wasn't that direct, memory serves. But he does list a multitude of Spassky errors, which are in the comments to some of the games on this site, if you look. Take this game, for example:

Spassky vs Karpov, 1974

These arguments based on impugning people's motives are too squalid to want to dirty one's hands with them. But as a matter of fact Fischer was the guy Mednis beat:

Mednis says that Spassky made no less than six (!) errors in this game.>

So you are basing your argument on one comment made by one poster referring to one Spassky game, where he simply says that Mednis identified 6 ¨errors¨ which you follow with an exclamation mark for theatrical effect, as if they were blunders.

The poster who mentions this in the comments to the above game calls them ¨errors¨ on his first mention and ¨inaccuracies¨ on the second. What was Mednis definition of ¨inaccuracy¨ and how many GM games is he aware of that contain no inaccuracies? Since Mednis apparently made no attempt to compare inaccuracies with the 72 match, there is no basis at all to make the claim that Spassky played worse in 74, and so Mednis didn´t make any such claim. General agreement long before Kasparov went through those games, was that Karpov had played very well against Spassky.

I reject the notion that the accuracy of a chess analysis increases with its temporal proximity to the games being analyzed -- I reject it completely. The quality of a chess analysis is dependent first of all on the chess strength of the analyzer. And second on the tools and knowledge at his disposal (which tend to increase rather than decrease with time).

I always found this kind of analysis of who could beat who gets people in a twist. Kasparov himself indulged in it by declaring Karpov a new breed of player who would have shown up Fischer as a dinosaur. Therefore Kasparov is declaring himself the supreme chessplayer as he defeated Karpov. But really if a contest could be decided so clinically, even a chess match where preparation is key, no one would care. Personally i think Fischer would have won the '75 contest, but his major problem would have been that his style was based on clear, clean positions with no irrationality. Karpov too was a genius in positional games and would have been very comfortable in Fischers world.

Many of these games would have been played to an endgame, and no doubt would have produced books on how to approach them!