19
Feb
Mikhail Tal – Soviet Union
Mikhail Nekhemievich Tal Latvian: Mihails TÄls; Russian: Михаил Ðехемьевич Таль) (November 9, 1936–June 28, 1992) was a Jewish Latvian chess player and the eighth World Chess Champion.
Career
Early years
Tal was born in Riga, Latvia. At the age of eight, Mikhail learned to play chess while watching his father, a doctor. Shortly thereafter he joined the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers chess club. His play was not exceptional at first but he worked hard to improve. Alexander Koblencs began tutoring Tal in 1949. Tal’s game improved rapidly thereafter and by 1951 he had qualified for the Latvian Championship. In the 1952 Latvian Championship Tal finished ahead of his trainer. Tal won his first Latvian title in 1953 and was awarded the title of candidate master. He became a Soviet master in 1954 by defeating Vladimir Saigin in a qualifying match. Tal graduated in Literature from the University of Riga, and taught school in Riga for a time in his early 20s. He was a member of the Daugava Sports Society, and represented Latvia in internal Soviet team competitions.
Soviet champion
Tal qualified for the USSR Chess Championship final in 1956, finishing joint fifth, and became the youngest player to win it the following year, at the age of twenty. He had not played in enough international tournaments to qualify for the title of Grandmaster, but FIDE decided to waive the normal restrictions and award him the title anyway because of his achievement in winning the Soviet Championship.[1]
He retained the Soviet Championship title the following year, and competed in the World Chess Championship for the first time. He won the 1958 Interzonal tournament at Portorož, then helped the Soviet Union to retain the Chess Olympiad.
World champion
Tal won a very strong tournament at Zurich, 1959. Following the Interzonal, the top players carried on to the Candidates’ Tournament, Yugoslavia 1959. Tal showed superior form by winning with 20 / 28 points, ahead of Paul Keres with 18.5, followed by Tigran Petrosian, Vasily Smyslov, Fischer, Svetozar Gligoric, Fridrik Olafsson and Pal Benko. Tal’s victory was much attributed to his dominance over the lower half of the field—winning all four individual games against Bobby Fischer, and taking 3½ from Gligoric, Olafsson, and Benko.
In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal thoroughly defeated the relatively staid and strategic Mikhail Botvinnik in a World Championship match, held in Moscow, by 12.5–8.5 (six wins to two with 13 draws), making him the youngest ever world champion (a record later broken by Garry Kasparov, who earned the title at 22). Botvinnik won the return match against Tal in 1961, also held in Moscow, after a lengthy study of Tal’s style. Botvinnik’s margin was 13-8 (ten wins to five with six draws). Tal’s chronic kidney problems may also have contributed to his defeat. His short reign atop the chess world made him one of the two so-called “winter kings” (the other was Smyslov) that broke up Botvinnik’s long domination (1948–1963).
His highest ELO rating was 2705 achieved in 1980. His highest Historical Chessmetrics Rating was 2799, in September 1960. This capped his torrid stretch which had begun in early 1957.
Later achievements
After he lost his title back to Botvinnik, Tal played in several Candidates’ Tournaments. In 1965, he lost the final match against Boris Spassky, after defeating Lajos Portisch and Bent Larsen. He lost the 1968 semi-final against Viktor Korchnoi, after defeating Gligoric. Health worries caused a slump in his play from late 1968 to late 1969, but he recovered his form after having a kidney removed. In 1980 he lost the quarter-final against Lev Polugaevsky. He had won the 1979 Riga Interzonal with a dominant score of 14 / 17. He also played in the 1985 Montpellier Candidates’ Tournament, a round-robin of 16 qualifiers, finishing in a tie for third and fourth places, and narrowly missing further advancement after drawing a playoff match with Jan Timman. He later defeated Timman in a 1988 exhibition match.
He was a six-time winner of the Soviet Championship (1957, 1958, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1978), a number that is only equalled by Botvinnik. He won the 1961 Bled supertournament, ahead of a star-studded field which included Fischer, Petrosian, Keres, Gligoric, Efim Geller, and Miguel Najdorf. He was also a five-time winner of the International Chess Tournament in Tallinn, Estonia, with victories in 1971, 1973, 1977, 1981, and 1983.
One of Tal’s greatest achievements during his later career was an equal first place with Anatoly Karpov in the 1979 Montreal “Tournament of Stars”, at the time the strongest event ever held. In 1988, at the age of 51, he became World Champion in Blitz chess at Saint John.
In Olympiad play, Mikhail Tal was a member of eight gold medal winning Soviet teams (1958, 1960, 1962, 1966, 1972, 1974, 1980, and 1982), won 59 games, drew 32 games, and lost only 2 games. He played close to 3,000 tournament games, winning over 65 percent of the time.
Health problems
Tal suffered from bad health, and had to be hospitalized frequently throughout his career. Tal was a chain smoker and a heavy drinker; he was also briefly addicted to morphine[2]. Tal’s untimely death was likely related to these problems, e.g. at the Hastings tournament of 1973, which he won, he drank the hotel dry of brandy.
On June 28, 1992, Mikhail Tal died in a Moscow hospital, officially of kidney failure. But his friend and fellow Soviet Grandmaster Genna Sosonko reported that “in reality, all his organs had stopped functioning.”
Playing style
Tal loved the game in itself and considered that “Chess, first of all, is Art.” He was capable of playing numerous blitz games against unknown or relatively weak players purely for the joy of playing.
Known as “The Magician from Riga”, Tal can be considered as the archetype of the attacking player, developing an extremely powerful and imaginative style of play. His approach over the board was very pragmatic—in that respect, he is one of the heirs of the ex-World Champion Emanuel Lasker. He often sacrificed material in search for the initiative in chess, which is defined by the ability to make threats to which the opponent must respond. With such intuitive sacrifices, he created vast complications, and many masters found it impossible to solve all the problems he created over the board, though deeper post-game analysis found flaws in some of his conceptions. Although this playing style was scorned by ex-World Champion Vasily Smyslov as nothing more than “tricks”, Tal convincingly beat virtually every notable grandmaster with his trademark aggression. Viktor Korchnoi and Paul Keres are two of the very few with a significant plus record against him.
Of the current top-level players, the Latvian-born Spaniard Alexei Shirov has probably been most influenced or inspired by Tal’s sacrificial style. In fact he studied with Tal as a youth. Many other Latvian grandmasters and masters, for instance Alexander Shabalov and Alvis Vitolins, have played in a similar vein, causing some to speak of a “Latvian School of Chess”.
He remained to the end of his shortened life an immensely popular figure in the world of chess.
Quotes on chess
“Some sacrifices are sound; the rest are mine.”[3]
“To play for a draw, at any rate with White, is to some degree a crime against chess.”[4]
“If (Black) is going for victory, he is practically forced to allow his opponent to get some kind of well-known positional advantage.”
“It is also important to remember that he was a real chess gentleman during games. He was always very fair and very correct.” (On Bobby Fischer)
“I drink, I smoke, I gamble, I chase girls—but postal chess is one vice I don’t have.”[5]
“They compare me to Lasker, which is an exagerated honor. He made mistakes in every game and I in only every second one!”
Source page: Wikipedia under Wikipedia license
