  Chess and chance are seemingly strange bedfellows. Luck and/or randomness
have no apparent role in move selection when the game is played at the highest
levels. However, when competition is at the ultimate level, that of the World
Chess Championship (WCC), chess and conspiracy are not strange bedfellows,
there being a long and colorful history of accusations levied between
participants. One such accusation, frequently repeated, was that all the games
in the 1985 WCC (Karpov vs Kasparov) were fixed and prearranged move by move.
That this claim was advanced by a former World Champion, Bobby Fischer, argues
that it ought be investigated. That the only published, concrete basis for this
claim consists of an observed run of particular moves, allows this
investigation to be performed using probabilistic and statistical methods. In
particular, we employ imbedded finite Markov chains to evaluate run statistic
distributions. Further, we demonstrate how both chess computers and game data
bases can be brought to bear on the problem.
