The chess of Mikhail Tal

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Radical_Drift

Hello!

 

It seems that, even among world chess champions, few players generate the interest Mikhail Tal generates even to this day. He is known for daring plans, extraordinary imagination, dazzling sacrifices, and a personality to match. However, is this the whole story? After all, in order to be world chess champion, especially in order to defeat Botvinnik, one must have a strong all-around game. Mikhail Tal is no exception. In particular, he played this nice ending in their first match.

This game, barring the hypermodern opening, is played with a bit of a classical flair that reminds me of Capablanca's games. In particular, it includes probably as many positional finesses as tactical finesses. 

What I wish to discuss is the unique nature of Tal's chess and what made him the world champion he became.

Radical_Drift
chessmicky wrote:

When we discuss the playing style of the great players, we tend to focus on the things that make them different from one another. But every great player is a fantastic tactician, a great endgame player, and a fine positional player. 

Yes, this is true. Any grandmaster will play the board rather than his or her preferences when play is clear-cut. However, I was also interested in the choice of opening. The Reti opening is very rarely aggressive or tactical, in my experience, which makes it inherently interesting when discussing Mikhail Tal. Was he, perhaps, in a mood for a prolonged positional struggle with some traces of dynamism?

Twinchicky

The thing about Tal was that, as he was (in my opinion) the best attacker of all time, he was also a good defender and knew what to do when he was on the other end of an attack. He preferred to attack and play tactically because that was what he most excelled at, and could squeeze an offensive out of just about any position, but still had sufficient positional and endgame skills to keep up with his contemporaries. He needed this in order to be WCC, for example:

Rashid Nezhmetdinov was Tal's teacher, and perhaps one of the best attacking players of all time, but lacked any defensive or positional skill whatsoever and thus had dismal scores against players like Petrosian. A top-level GM certainly doesn't need to be the best at EVERY aspect of the game, but if he excels at one aspect he must also be competent (A very, very relative term) in all the others.