I've just been going through Tal's account of his 1960 championship match with Botvinnik.  The following possible variation arose in one of the games:

If it hadnt been for his health issues along with his weakness for alcohol and smoking he would have been without a doubt one of the very best of all time, and his reign as world chamion would have beeb much longer.

CPawn - i am very agreed with you. But Tal always was Tal, he didnt wont neither to play best board moves nor to live good healthy live - because he considered it boring! :) He wanted to take all the live and game pleasure, and even more then all, to get fun and feel alive, to entertain himself and all people. So he payed the high cost in both lines, but he never regret about. So dont be sorry for him - just enjoy his deeds/games. :)

Sorry, but you are wrong. As you can see in his many games and as you can find in his own confessions - he didnt want to play best board moves. He wanted to play best Tal-style moves, not board, and of course he wanted to win with them. In other games against Botvinnik Tal made a lot of bad positional moves (purposely) just to lure Botvinnik to mistakes, just to take him out of theoretical positions and put him in tactical complications. And even here in this example Tal choosed not the best board line, but the line that promises possible attack and sacrifices to him. I cant translate you correctly his most famous statement about his chess play, but one of the points of it is that he wanted to play exactly that way, he wanted express himself this way. And he trained the required calculation skills for many years, for making such brilliant tactical play, he not just found that he can combinate and calculate to 100 moves ahead, he wanted this and go for that step by step, while most of others study the positional play, strategy and openings.

Tal was a world champion, so obviously he was pretty darn good.

That said, I think his popularity causes him to be a bit overrated in comparison to the rest of the fraternity of world champions.  IMO, it's hard to make a case that he was really a stronger player overall than Botvinnik, much less the caliber of, say, a Kasparov or Capablanca.

(His plus score against Fischer notwithstanding; Tal's 4 victories against him were all when Fischer was 16.)

This obit of Tal was written by Harold Lundstrom and published on July 3, 1992 in Salt Lake City's Deseret News, seems rather pertinent here.

   Mikhail Tal, the world champion in 1960-61, died in Moscow on Sunday after a long illness. He was 55 and one of the most daring, exciting and popular great players.
   After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tal had hoped to represent his native land, Latvia, in the recent world Chess Olympiad in Manila. He was, however, unable to make the long trip because of illness. He had suffered from liver and kidney ailments for many years.Tass reported that he died after being taken to a hospital to undergo surgery for his severe kidney illness.
   Tal was well-known in the chess world as a swashbuckling attacker who reveled in daring sacrifices, and all but unfathomable complications over the board.
   Tal won the world championship in 1960 at the age of 23 - becoming the youngest person to hold the title in this century by defeating Mikhail Botvinnik, who had been champion since 1948.
   After winning the Candidate's Tournament, Tal played Botvinnik, who was generally expected to repulse Tal's sacrificial attacks and win, but Tal was unbeatable and handed Botvinnik his worst-ever defeat.
   In the return match the experts favored Tal, who had won so convincingly and had youth on his side, but again the experts were proved wrong. Tal had spent some time in the hospital following an operation and was in poor health, while Botvinnik had prepared thoroughly.
Botvinnik forced the games into balanced positions unsuited to Tal's style, and Tal suffered an even more crushing defeat than Botvinnik had.
According to Dr. Max Euwe, world champion from 1935-37, "In powers of combination Tal perhaps outdoes even Alexander Alekhine. Sacrifice is second nature to him. While other players will make sacrifices that they are convinced are sound, Tal will make sacrifices if he cannot prove them unsound."
   Tal joked about this and said, "There are two kinds of sacrifices: Tal sacrifices and correct ones."
   Botvinnik said of Tal: "For him the ultimate soundness of a move is relatively unimportant. Like Lasker he chooses the moves that cause the most problems for his opponents."
   Tal learned to play chess when he was 8, and became a Soviet master at 16. In 1957 he graduated in history and philology from Riga University (with a dissertation on Russian humorists). In the same year he began a meteoric rise by winning the Soviet Championship.
   After his reign as world champion, Tal's chess form was sometimes erratic. Periods when he had been invincible, such as in 1972, alternated with times when his kidney illness severely handicapped him.
   He was in peak form in 1972. He won five major tournaments and played 60 tournament games without a single defeat. In the 1973 Leningrad interzonal he came in eighth.
   While his slashing style earned him the sobriquet "Tal the Terrible," friends called him "Misha." He was known in the chess fraternity as one of the game's most popular and amiable figures: a gentle, witty man who seemed totally immersed in chess and displayed none of the egotism that is common among top-level contenders.
   Experts said it was Tal's capacity to envision combinations and deeply analyze complex variations that made him formidable over the board. Tal's characteristic flare for the dramatic - a series of sudden, entirely risky moves - turned the games into inextricably complex positions. Months of analysis later proved many of these moves to be unsound, but his opponent was unable to solve them over the board.
   "He had an insatiable appetite for the game," Robert Byrne, an American grandmaster who is the New York Times chess columnist, said of Tal. "It sounds trite, but few love the game as much as he did. You could just see it. Some players consider it labor. This man loves chess."

wow he truly is freakin good! saw it and after black gains a rook! :)

nice post ! thanks

Thank you! (at last somebody who actually seemed to look at the diagram, not just read the title...)

Tal was so good that Chuck Norris wouldn't sit across the board.

Tal was the absolute best attacker ever, a demon at the board, and a very precise calculator. He was certainly one of the strongest players to date, and probably for all time.

He must have been good because he died the SAME day I was born!

tal liked very complicated positions.

he was amazing.  the best. 

 Truely the greatest compliment that could ever be paid to anyone!

Tal was so good that when he challenged Norris, Chuck said he heard his mom calling and ran home.

Kasparov was so good, he could make Deep Blue blink.

Tal was so good, he could make Chuck Norris blink.

I've read it a few times, maybe even in these forums, that Botvinnik said, "If Tal would program himself correctly, it would be impossible to play him."

If Tal could have combined the early Tal of wild combinative play with the Tal of the 1970s who had two healthy unbeaten streaks, that would have been spectacular.

All of this is true, but...has anyone actually looked at the accompanying position? (that title was just meant as a lead-in).

Waitzkin  analysed two of Tal's games in chessmaster, and they were magnificient.

Definitely top-10 of all time