Tal "the Magician from Riga", born in Latvia in 1936, was relatively unknown
to the chess world compared to his famous Soviet compatriots, viz., Botvinnik,
Smyslov, Keres, Bronstein, Spassky, Petrosian, etc., until the late 1950's, when
his name shot around the chess world when he won the Championship of the Soviet
Union both in 1957 and 1958, and then winning the World Championship Interzonal
Tournament in 1959 to become the official challenger to Botvinnik's chess
throne. In the 1959 tournament, he even scored 4-0 against the young, but
brilliant future World Champion, Bobby Fischer. Tal's style mesmerized the chess
world, and GM Ragozin explained the reason best: "Tal does not move chess pieces
by hand, he uses a magic wand".
Tal was one of the greatest attacking geniuses in the history of recorded chess.
His attacking style consisted of beautiful displays of multiple, cascading
fireworks, where the true nature of the positions during the execution of his
combinations was unfathomable by his opponents, even Tal himself!, in the scant
time limit imposed in human over-the-board chess games.
Tal purposely played moves that created the maximum complications for both
sides. He once said, "One doesn't have to play well. One only needs to play
better than his opponent". Dr. Lasker would have loved that quote, for he too
deemed the game of chess as a struggle between two minds, as opposed to each
player blindly making "correct" moves.
Tal was so intimidating in those years that he made seasoned Grandmaster
opponents shudder with fear. A case in point is a game played between GM Tal (as
Black) and Hungarian GM Pal Benko (as White) at the Interzonal Tournament in
Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1959. This was the third cycle (the first two were played
in Bled and Zagreb, respectively), and Benko was starting to think that Tal had
been hypnotizing him due to his poor record against him so far. So Benko took
with him sunglasses and wore them while at the chessboard. But Tal, who had
heard of Benko's plan to wear sunglasses before the game started, borrowed
enormous dark glasses from GM Petrosian. When Tal put on these ridiculously
enormous glasses, not only did the spectators laugh, but other participants in
the tournament did, as did the tournament controllers, and finally even Benko
himself laughed. But unlike Tal, Benko did not remove his glasses until the 20th
move when his position was hopeless.
After winning the 1959 Interzonal, skeptics still thought that Botvinnik was
such a solid, positional player, that Tal's attacking style, somewhat purposely
flawed by Tal's design, would not be able to penetrate Botvinnik's granite-like
defense. But in 1960, when Tal played Botvinnik for the World Championship, he
won the 6th game with an outrageously complicated and risky piece sacrifice,
because Botvinnik couldn't navigate through all of the complicated variations
that Tal created on the board. Tal then went on and won the match and was
crowned the 8th Chess Champion of the World.
However, Tal faded away as quickly as he sprang out of anonymity. Not that he
started playing badly or sloppily; he remained one of the strongest chess
players in the world until his death in 1992. But in 1961, he played against
Botvinnik in the obligatory return match and found that Botvinnik had spent the
time since the first match doing his homework and systematically finding ways to
take advantage of the kinks in Tal's incredibly complicated attacking style.
Botvinnik retained his World Championship title, and Tal never reached the
pinnacle ever again, due to the succession of chess geniuses Petrosian, Spassky,
Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov.
Play through Mikhail Tal's games