At the highest level the lowest was probably ₤5 for Morphy for his match against Harrwitz and Anderssen both in 1858 and $5,000,000 sponsored by FIDE President Kirsan Ilyumzhinov for the World Championship Tournament organised in 1997.
ECHESSPEDIA
Quotes of the Day
16. “By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don’t swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.
Anatoly Karpov
My chess method is without formulas, without orthodox thinking. I always explain that chess is an art and that there are no definite judgments.
Lev Polugaevsky 1990 NIC
Tal develops all his pieces in the centre and then sacrifices them somewhere.
David Bronstein
Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they’re going to know the truth when I do this book!
Robert Fischer September, 1 1992
People knew about 110 years of chess history. Nowadays, nobody is able to tell you the name of the world champion of 2000.
Anatoly Karpov 2005