World Chess Championship Blog: World Championship eBay Auctions

So many years of following
Top eBay Chess Items by Price (March 2010)
[…]
My short list for this post had a dozen items, any one of which could have been featured for the post. By coincidence, the three most expensive items on the list were all related to the 1972 Fischer – Spassky match.

That started me wondering how many earlier eBay posts featured an auction related to the World Championship.

There’s no easy way to count these using the search available on this public-facing blog, but the private site to create blog posts, Google’s Blogger.com, allows for search on multiple tags/labels, e.g. ‘eBay and WCC’.

I found 49 posts with those tags, including ‘Fischer – Spassky Top Items’.

I loaded the control info about the 49 posts into a database and sorted on number of views by descending order. Following are the top five posts ranked by apparent popularity. I say ‘apparent’, because the number of views depends on factors external to the post. The oldest posts, for example, appeared before blog statistics were introduced on Blogger.com. During the period 2012-2018, posts were affiliated by Chess Club Live (CCL), which greatly boosted their viewing stats. Here’s the list of no.1-5:-

• 2013-03-03:
  1972 Fischer – Spassky Poster

• 2013-11-24:
  Carlsen – Anand, Signed Board
  •
  ‘The Carlsen – Anand World Championship match ended just two days ago, so I […] looked for Carlsen – Anand items.’

• 2016-02-23:
  The Real Bobby Fischer?
  •
  ‘While I was studying the [Darrach] book I was reminded of the many press photos that appeared in the news before, during, and after the 1972 match. I gathered as many of these as I could find and started to sort them. I found close to 100, of which 30 are shown in the following composite photo.’

• 2008-02-05:
  Halldor Petursson Cartoons

• 2016-07-12:
  Chess Champion Trading Cards
  •
  ‘Svijet Sporta card[s] from Yugoslavia in 1980-1981. ‘Svijet Sporta’ translates to ‘Sports World’ in English.’

Three of those five posts were related to the 1972 Fischer – Spassky match. Among the posts ranked no.6-10, two were related to the same match. I suppose this all stems from Fischer’s mystique, especially among Americans.