Mikhail Tal - The Magician From Riga
"Insanity is not a destination, but a journey of lost perspectives, shattered realities, and echoes of forgotten sanity."
TABLE OF CONTENT
1. EARLY LIFE (1936-1950)
2. RISE OF A PRODIGY (1950-1953)
3. THE POLITICS OF BEING TAL
4. STRENGTH ADMIST SICKNESS
4. THE MAESTRO OF FANTASY
5. NOTABLE CHESS GAMES
6. LATER LIFE
7. APPROACH TO LIFE
8. CONCLUSION
EARLY LIFE:- (1936-1950)
Mikhail Nekhemyevich Tal (born November 9, 1936, Riga, Latvia—died June 28, 1992, Moscow, Russia) was a Latvian chess grandmaster who in 1960, at the age of 23, became the youngest world chess champion when he upset the defending champion, Mikhail Botvinnik , by a score of 121/2 to 81/2. According to Wikipedia, Vladislav_Zubok said of him, "Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem"
Quick Facts:-
Born: November 9, 1936, Riga, Latvia
Died: June 28, 1992, Moscow , Russia (aged 55)
Awards And Honors: International Grandmaster (1957)
Tal, who learned to play chess at the age of six, was known for his complex and audacious moves. He became a national master and Latvian champion in 1953, at age 16. In 1957, the year he graduated from Riga University, he became an international grandmaster and won the first of his six titles as champion of the U. S. S. R
RISE OF A PRODIGY:- (1950-1953)
Mikhail Tal lived for, breathed, and spun magic in chess. The most creative attacking player who ever graced the planet, Mikhail Nekhemevich Tal is a name that brings with it a poignant reflection: a chess genius who burnt himself out too quickly like a blazing candle in the wind.
The 8th World Champion, Tal was one of the most aggressively attacking players to grace the title. At the age of 13, Tal played for his native Latvia youth team. He won the Latvian championship when he was 17. By the age of 21, he would win the USSR championship.
My head is filled with sunshine’ – these were the first words of the 23 -year-old Misha Tal in an overcrowded hall in Moscow, immediately after his brilliant victory in the candidates tournament in Yugoslavia in 1959. It was there, too, that he said: ‘In the first game of the match with Botvinnik I will play e2 -e4 and beat him! ‘
A Dutch newspaper made an observation that was typical of the general reaction of the entire chess world: ‘For a player of world class, Tal’s play is amazingly reckless, not to say foolhardy and irresponsible. For the moment he is successful , because even the most experienced and tested defenders are unable to withstand this terror on the chess board. He aims first and foremost for attack, and in his games one commonly sees sacrifices of one or even several pieces. Opinions are sharply divided about this foolhardy way of playing. Some see him as nothing more than a gambler, who has luck on his side, while others think that he is a genius who is opening up unknown fields in chess.’
Mikhail Tal rose to fame and glory in the late 1950s. Young and fierce, Tal won the Soviet Chess Championship successively in 1957 and 1958. In 1960, Mikhail Tal became the then-youngest World Chess Champion, winning the crowns at the Interzonal Tournament and the Candidates Tournament in 1958 and ’59 respectively.
In his career, Mikhail Tal won five International Chess Tournaments. He held the record of winning the Soviet Championship six times. Tal represented the Soviet Union eight times on Olympiad teams and won the team gold on all eight occasions. He also participated in six Candidates Tournaments.
THE POLITICS OF BEING TAL
The young and adventurous ‘Misha’ - as he was called - seemingly breached all prevalent rules of the game, basking in the awe and adoration of a huge fan base.
Chess was everything for Tal. He cast his magic with his games and lived for it. Everything else – money, luxury, or politics - never bothered him. He was indifferent to life’s trivia and sidelined them: including daily routine and domestic life. “Misha” was regularly late for flights, would wear two different shoes for days and never notice the difference, forget about a prize worth thousands or just lose a large sum of money.
Living in the then Soviet Republic, he was seldom bothered by the political realities. Unlike his compatriots like Botvinnik, Petrosyan, Smyslov, and Karpov who explicitly displayed their communist loyalties and received favor from the authorities, Tal found the political affairs a hindrance that must be evaded. Tal was never anti-Soviet, he was beyond noticing the shortcomings of a system that seemed to ignite other contemporaries like Spassky. While Spassky was a rebel with a sharp tongue against the Soviet government, Tal was alien to all these considerations.
Anything that seemed to block his stream of ‘chess’ consciousness was bluntly removed, just like the pawn in one of the Olympiads. When a surprised Michael Botvinnik enquired about a pawn that Tal gave up – for no particular benefit – Misha’s answer was “It disturbed me.”
STRENGTH ADMIST SICKNESS
Though he remained strong in his game in the successive decades, Tal’s long-standing smoking habits and varied illnesses began taking a toll on his health. He was a chain-smoker, was not a stranger to alcohol, and refrained from any other physical sport.
In 1960 he lost his championship title to his compatriot and namesake Mikhail Botvinnik. In the 1962 Candidates Tournament, he spent three-quarters of the qualifying tournament on pills, only to end up in hospital.
Though chronic illnesses strangled his career Tal played on – until death beckoned him in 1992. Tal was also known for his cheeky humor – something that kept him going amidst persistent ill health. Unlike his predecessors Paul Morphy who got deranged during his final years or Capablanca who suffered from extreme hypertension that turned fatal, Tal pulled himself through life’s melodrama with a cheerful spirit.
Perhaps it must have been his amazing sense of humor that helped him climb out of the miry pit of illnesses and get back to the game. His comments, observations, and responses were liberally salted with pun and wit.
During the late sixties, Tal’s health deteriorated badly. Major newspapers even kept obituaries ready for the young magician from Riga who was barely thirty. Misha got back to his feet and back on to the track by 1964, as his health improved. He tied for first in the Interzonal, with a score of +11 and devoid of a single loss. Though he beat Portis and Larsen on his way to the world championship, he lost to Spassky in the final Candidates match. Tal became the official rank-3 player in the world.
In 1966, the Olympiad in Havana too turned tragic for Tal. A bottle from an anonymous source hit his head in a bar and had him sent to the hospital. Though confined to bed for a few days, Tal bounced back with his aggressive strike at his opponents. As Tigran Petrosian remarked, "only Tal with his cast-iron health could come round so quickly".
In 1968, Mikhail Tal lost to Kortchnoi and crashed out of the world championship cycle. Not only did Tal make it to the Olympic team, but he was also ‘replaced’ on the previous day of the departure by an older and lesser ranked Smyslov. Smyslov had no better ground than Tal to be a part of the delegate but Tal was clearly not the authorities’ darling.
THE MAESTRO OF FANTASY
Tal was incredibly good against players who were strong enough but less skilled than himself. He was brilliant in psychologically intimidating his opponents: getting them confused, stumbling into time trouble and making mistakes. Much like Capablanca and Fischer, Tal was a player opponents were scared of. With a dare-devil attitude he never hesitated to even sacrifice pieces to gain a thrilling breakthrough.
However, cracking opponents – world champions - who were of his level, as well as strong counter punchers like, William stein, Victor Korchnoi , or Lev Polugaevsky – was a tough nut for Tal.
He would soar high on creativity, but harsh reality often brought him and a few pieces down. His style worked well when he was in his best spirit and health, but turned disastrous when he wasn’t suffering physically or emotionally.
In the late sixties and early seventies, Tal experimented with his game style but in vain. In the USSR Championship 1970, held in his native place Riga, he was even denied entry.
Though he managed to catch up with his old glory during 1972-1973, his destructive ill-health backlashed, leaving him devastated at the most significant tournament of the year, the Interzonal in Leningrad (1973).
The next year Tal won the USSR Championship, sharing the title with the young Alexander Belyavsky, but sadly, the spark that kindled the Magician from Riga was long gone.
In the following years, Tal failed to qualify for the Candidates. An almost forty Tal had track marks all over his arms. His peers teased him over apparent “morphinism”.
NOTABLE CHESS GAMES
There were so many, I could only offer an opinion. So, rather than doing that, I’ll post a game made famous by Tal’s confession in his autobiographical, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal which you can purchase on Amazon Here.
Playing against six-time Moscow champion, Evgeni Vasiukov, Tal had an earworm. It wasn’t a song repeating in his mind, but a Russian nursery rhyme about a hippopotamus being stuck in a bog.
He became so absorbed in how a hippo could be dragged from the swamp—ropes, a crane, a helicopter?—that he forgot where he was, and that the clock was running. Eventually he snapped out of his reverie, looked at the position he had been trying to calculate, sacrificed the knight he had planned to give up before he was distracted, and went on to win
The next edition of the Shakhmatny Bulletin carried the headline, “Tal calculates for forty minutes, sacrifices a knight, and wins.” (Quoted from memory; may not be verbatim.) It’s an interesting game, and Agadmator (accompanied by his dog) provides a briefer-than-usual commentary on his excellent YouTube channel.
“There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones, and mine” - Mikhail Tal
Only Tal can play like Tal. We mortals can at best occasionally capture the magic that he brought to the game so regularly. If you want to try to emulate him, you’d want to study his games, the sort of practical decisions he made, and the openings he chose to play.
One of the most insightful elements of Tal’s play was that he did not play the King’s Gambit or other openings that tried to attack prematurely. When you look at Tal’s masterpieces, they feature sound play in dynamic openings that avoid trades and maintain the latent potential of the position.
In his book, Attack with Mikhail Tal, he coined the term “Launching” — placing a piece aimed at the enemy king not as part of an immediate attack, but merely to increase the complexity of the position and the likelihood that such an attack could present itself. No Tal sacrifices will be possible in your games unless you first play a Tal middlegame — increasing the complexity, avoiding trades, and maintaining the tension as much as possible so that unclear sacrifices with dynamic, long-term compensation will begin to present themselves. You can’t be taught to play chess in this manner — you can only experiment, push the boundaries of good sense, and after hundreds of disastrous defeats, you might capture 1% of that Tal magic.
This is probably the best and most Tal-esque sacrifice I’ve managed to pull off recently — sacrificing a knight to sacrifice my queen, and when the dust settles I end up in a position where material is technically equal, but Black is busted despite having the queen.
There’s no mate and I don’t get the queen back, but my dynamic compensation is overwhelming. A beautiful combination, but getting this win and playing in this fashion came at the cost of embarrassing myself in two previous defeats at the hands of this same guy.
Okay.. games:-
As it turned out Botvinnik couldn't survive the tactical battles that Tal pulled him into. The Magician from Riga stormed to victory winning 6-2 (15 draws). Aged just 23, Mikhail Tal was the youngest ever World Champion.
You can find more of Mikhail Tal’s games Here!
Botvinnik of course trained hard and activated his rematch clause to play Tal in 1961. He made sure that the games had a more positional feel this time. It worked because Botvinnik regained the World Championship winning 10-5 (6 draws).
LATER LIFE
Recovered from the disappointment of loosing the world championship with a brilliant victory at bled 1961. Tigran Petrosian and not Tal qualified to challenge and ultimately dethrone Botvinnik in 1963.
Tal won the 1964 Inter Zonal tournament I’m Amsterdam the following cycle. He beat Protisch in the quarter final and Larsen in the Semifinal of the 1965 Candidates Tournament in Bled. Boris Spassky would however have too much for him in the Finals in Tbilisi.
Candidates Tournament followed a year later. Tal went down to Lev Polugaevsky in the Quarter-final. His pursuit of the World Championship was now looking like too high a mountain. Still the 70s had been maybe his most successful decade.
He went on two of the longest unbeaten runs in modern chess history. July 1972 to April 1973: 86 consecutive games unbeaten; 47 wins and 39 draws. October 1973 to October 1974: 95 consecutive games unbeaten; 46 wins and 49 draws.
His career and health began to suffer yet again. He would not feature much in Classical competition now but would always right to the end remain very dangerous in blitz chess. He became World Blitz Champion in 1988. His final act of note was bearing Garry Kasparov just a month before he died in 1992.
Many of the positional giants that he was tormenting in his pomp disapproved of Tal's wrong way of playing. He was not like those who played the right way.
He was compared to Lasker who also played objectively inferior moves in the hope of provoking mistakes from his opponents. As Botvinnik said: he (Tal) was not interested in the objectivity of the position, whether it's better or worse, he only needed room for his pieces.
Tal said himself of the comparisons to Lasker, maybe half in jest: They compare me with Lasker, which is an exaggerated honor. Lasker made mistakes in every game and I only in every second one!
APPROACH TO LIFE
His first wife, Salli Landau, described Mikhail's personality:
Misha was so ill-equipped for living... When he travelled to a tournament, he couldn't even pack his own suitcase... He didn't even know how to turn on the gas for cooking.
If I had a headache, and there happened to be no one home but him, he would fall into a panic: "How do I make a hot-water bottle?"
And when I got behind the wheel of a car, he would look at me as though I were a visitor from another planet. Of course, if he had made some effort, he could have learned all of this. But it was all boring to him. He just didn't need to.
A lot of people have said that if Tal had looked after his health, if he hadn't led such a dissolute life... and so forth. But with people like Tal, the idea of "if only" is just absurd. He wouldn't have been Tal then.
CONCLUSION
Mikhail Tal tormented the great and the good of chess for nearly 40 years with his devilish tricks. He must have been a terrible opponent to be confronted with when at the height of his powers.
If he could have had the iron will and durability of Botvinnik or Karpov along with remarkable trickery, he might well have been the first name to trip off the tongues of the uninitiated when asked about chess. He could have been a household name beyond the game he described as an art. But then, as many who knew him have said, he wouldn't be Tal.
As it was he was one of the two Winter Kingsof the Botvinnik era. He would not be the one to bring that era to an end. That would be Tigran Petrosian.
