Shelby Lyman, a chess master who found fleeting fame in 1972 by hosting an improbably popular show on live television as it followed the historic world championship chess match between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, died on Aug. 11 in Johnson City, N.Y. He was 82.

His death, at a hospital there, was announced by the United States Chess Federation. His wife, Michele Merrell Lyman, said the cause was cancer. He lived in Windsor, N.Y., about 15 miles east of Binghamton.

The Fischer-Spassky match was one of the most ballyhooed competitive events of the 1970s, a Cold War confrontation in Reykjavik, Iceland, between the two most brilliant chess players in the world, the elegant Russian grandmaster Spassky and the enigmatic American Fischer. It was the first professional match to offer a prize fund of $250,000 — an unheard-of amount then (the equivalent of more than $1.5 million today).

The match, beginning in July, was not scheduled to be televised live. But at PBS, seeking to capitalize on the event nonetheless — and to fill airtime during the slow summer months — the producer Michael Chase conceived of a program that would follow the match, move by move, from afar. And he thought that Mr. Lyman, a top American player who had taught the game to Mr. Chase, would be the ideal person to host it.