A tribute to Misha Tal.
'Magnus Carlsen, The crown prince of chess'. My uncle read out the title of the article aloud a few years back. 'You follow chess', he said to me. 'Do you think it has an apt title?'. 'Yes' I replied, 'The boy certainly deserves it. And after all it is the royal game. Perhaps it is more appropriate in chess than anything else'. At this point, a lot of my friends would be wondering how to avoid the rant that follows.But my uncle was not accustomed to my chess ravings and he watched me with interest, sensing that I had more to tell.
"Chess really is a kingdom. Having played it keenly and having followed it with even more interest, I had seen all those characters in chess that would be found in an exhaustive folklore of royalty. Chess has it's share of kings, queens, princes, abdicators, throne aspirants, court advisers, aesthetic artists and composers, and even court jesters and magicians". My uncle laughed "Now, now.. Are'nt you resorting to hyperbole? What do you mean magicians? Name a magician of chess". Any other category would have made me ponder over the best example. Not this one. "Mikhail Nechemevich Tal" I replied.
Magicians in chess, are the same as you know them. People who do things in a perfectly logical way, but make the results appear so fantastic, that sometimes you do not want to know how it was done. You just want to savor the apparent illusion and tell your nephews and uncles about it. But unlike the real world, chess players do not have the luxury of coming to the stage with tricks. They have to go about their routine act, which seems mostly mundane, and keep waiting for the right moment to present their performance. Some wait hundreds and thousands of games for one neat act where they make thousands smile. In such a world, Mikhail Tal had a regular show.
Before I came across the games of Mikhail Tal, chess was just a game. A very interesting one, which I could play for hours; but it was still a game. After going through his games, chess turned into art. There have been many times, when I have restrained from clapping while looking at his games with a friend. Of course, we saw the most dramatic ones at first, and for a while that was all we had seen. I had come to the conclusion that if Misha Tal had nothing left to sacrifice on the board, he would offer his shirt and chair to his opponent. And yet, he would go home winning.
In the world of chess, where everybody hates everybody; Tal was a man liked by all. He seemed free of all the politics and hatred. He seemed a man with just one characteristic - the love for the game. He was a man about whom they could write legends. And they did. But it turns out most of what they wrote was true. Tal did not like or dislike publicity, he did not care about it. Perhaps that's why he got even more of it. Thousands and thousands of kids have come to love the game inspired by Tal's play. Some of them are out there, elite grandmasters in their own right.
Tim Krabbe, whose website Chess Curiosities, I have liked to read again and again, is one of my favorite chess critics. He was asked 20 questions on Chessville, most of his answers being frank and laconic. He was also asked who were his favorite players among living and dead. His answer : "Among the dead, nobody compares with Tal" :) It is a coincidence that I first came across two sobriquets about little known Riga in the same year. The first was from the Odessa File and tragic, "The Butcher of Riga - the Nazi officer Eduard Roshmann". The second has come to bring joy to me on numerous occasions and will continue to do so. "Tal - The Magician of Riga".
