Greatest Legend

 Mikhail Nekhemyevich Tal (Latvian: Mihails Tāls; Russian: Михаил Нехемьевич Таль, Mikhail Nekhem'evich Tal, pronounced [mʲɪxɐˈiɫ nʲɪˈxʲemʲɪvʲɪtɕ
ˈtalʲ]; sometimes transliterated Mihails Tals or Mihail Tal; 9 November 1936 – 28 June 1992)[1] was a Soviet chess Grandmaster and the eighth World
Chess Champion (from 1960 to 1961).
 Widely regarded as a creative genius and one of the best attacking players of all time, Tal played in a daring, combinatorial style.[2][3] His play was
known above all for improvisation and unpredictability. It has been said that “Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a
poem".[4] He was often called "Misha", a diminutive for Mikhail, and "The magician from Riga". Both The Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess
Games[5] and Modern Chess Brilliancies[6] include more games by Tal than any other player. In addition, Tal was a highly regarded chess writer. He
also previously held the record for the longest unbeaten streak in competitive chess history with 95 games (46 wins, 49 draws) between 23 October
1973 and 16 October 1974, until Ding Liren's streak of 100 games (29 wins, 71 draws) between 9 August 2017 and 11 November 2018. [7] [8]
 The Mikhail Tal Memorial has been held in Moscow annually since 2006 to honour Tal's memory.
 Contents
 1Early years
 2Personality
 3Soviet champion
 4World Champion
 5Later achievements
 6Team competitions
 7Tournament and match wins (or equal first)
 7.11950–1965
 7.21966–1979
 7.31981–1991
 8Score with some major grandmasters
 9Health problems and death
 10Playing style
 11Notable games
 12Writings
 12.1Book titles
 13References
 14Further reading
 15External links

 Early years[edit]
 Tal was born in Riga, Republic of Latvia, into a Jewish family.[9] According to his friend Gennadi Sosonko, his true father was a family friend
identified only as "Uncle Robert";[9] however, this was vehemently denied by Tal's third wife Angelina.[10]
 From the very beginning of his life, Tal suffered from ill health. He learned to read at the age of three, and was allowed to start university studies
while only fifteen. At the age of eight, he learned to play chess while watching his father, a doctor and medical researcher.
 Shortly thereafter Tal joined the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers chess club. His play was not exceptional at first, but he worked hard to
improve. Alexander Koblents began tutoring him in 1949, after which Tal's game rapidly improved, 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. That same year he also scored his first
win over a Grandmaster when Yuri Averbakh lost on time in a drawn position. Tal graduated in Literature from the University of Latvia, writing a
thesis on the satirical works of Ilf and Petrov, and taught school in Riga for a time in his early twenties. He was a member of the Daugava Sports
Society, and represented Latvia in internal Soviet team competitions.
 In 1959 he married 19-year-old Salli Landau, an actress with the Riga Youth Theatre; they divorced in 1970. In 2003, Landau published a biography
in Russia of her late ex-husband.
 Personality[edit]
 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.[11]
 Soviet champion[edit]
 Tal lived in this house in Riga
 Tal first 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 20. He had not played in enough international tournaments to qualify for the title of Grandmaster, but FIDE decided at its 1957
Congress to waive the normal restrictions and award him the title because of his achievement in winning the Soviet Championship. At that time, the
Soviet Union was dominant in world chess, and Tal had beaten several of the world's top players to win the tournament. [12]
 Tal made three appearances for the USSR at Student Olympiads in 1956–1958, winning three team gold medals and three board gold medals. He
won nineteen games, drew eight, and lost none, for 85.2 percent. [13]
 He retained the Soviet Championship title in 1958 at Riga, and competed in the World Chess Championship for the first time. He won the
1958 Interzonal tournament at Portorož, then helped the Soviet Union win its fourth consecutive Chess Olympiad at Munich.
 World Champion
 Tal won a very strong tournament at Zürich, 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 18½, followed by Tigran Petrosian, Vasily Smyslov, the sixteen-year-
old Bobby Fischer, Svetozar Gligorić, Friðrik Ólafsson, and Pal Benko. Tal's victory was attributed to
his dominance over the lower half of the field;[14] whilst scoring only one win and three losses versus
Keres, he won all four individual games against Fischer, and took 3½ points out of 4 from each of
Gligorić, Olafsson, and Benko.[15]
 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 12½–8½ (six wins, two losses, and
thirteen draws), making him the youngest-ever World Champion (a record later broken by Garry
Kasparov, who earned the title at 22). Botvinnik, who had never faced Tal before the title match
began, won the return match against Tal in 1961, also held in Moscow, by 13–8 (ten wins to five, with
six draws). In the period between the matches Botvinnik had thoroughly analyzed Tal's style, and
turned most of the return match's games into slow wars of maneuver or endgames, rather than the
complicated tactical melees which were Tal's happy hunting ground.[16] Tal's chronic kidney problems
contributed to his defeat, and his doctors in Riga advised that he should postpone the match for
health reasons. Yuri Averbakh claimed that Botvinnik would agree to a postponement only if Tal was
certified unfit by Moscow doctors, and that Tal then decided to play.[17] His short reign atop the chess
world made him one of the two so-called "winter kings" who interrupted Botvinnik's long reign from
1948 to 1963 (the other was Smyslov, world champion 1957–58).
 His highest Elo rating was 2705, achieved in 1980. His highest Historical Chessmetrics Rating was
2799, in September 1960.
 Later achievements[edit]
 Tal in 1988
 Soon after losing the rematch with Botvinnik, Tal won the 1961 Bled supertournament by one point over Fischer, despite losing their individual game, scoring 14½ from nineteen games
(+11−1=7) with the world-class players Tigran Petrosian, Keres, Gligorić, Efim Geller, and Miguel Najdorf among the other participants.
 Tal played in a total of six Candidates' Tournaments and match cycles, though he never again earned the right to play for the world title. In 1962 at Curaçao, he had serious health problems,
having undergone a major operation shortly before the tournament, and had to withdraw three-quarters of the way through, scoring just seven points (+3−10=8) from 21 games. He tied for
first place at the 1964 Amsterdam Interzonal to advance to matches. Then in 1965, he lost the final match against Boris Spassky, after defeating Lajos Portisch and Bent Larsen in matches.
Exempt from the 1967 Interzonal, he lost a 1968 semifinal match against Viktor Korchnoi, after defeating Gligoric.
 Poor health caused a slump in his play from late 1968 to late 1969, but he recovered his form after having a kidney removed. He won the 1979 Riga Interzonal with an undefeated score of
14/17, but the next year lost a quarter-final match to Lev Polugaevsky, one of the players to hold a positive score against him. He also played in the 1985 Montpellier Candidates'
Tournament, a round-robin of 16 qualifiers, finishing in a tie for fourth and fifth places, and narrowly missing further advancement after drawing a playoff match with Jan Timman, who held
the tiebreak advantage from the tournament proper.
 From July 1972 to April 1973, Tal played a record 86 consecutive games without a loss (47 wins and 39 draws). Between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, he played 95 consecutive games
without a loss (46 wins and 49 draws), shattering his previous record. These were the two longest unbeaten streaks in competitive chess for more than four decades [7], until Ding Liren broke
the record in 2018 with 100 games, although with far fewer wins than either of Tal's streaks (29 wins, 71 draws).
 Tal remained a formidable opponent as he got older. He played Anatoly Karpov 22 times, 12 of them during the latter's reign as World Champion, with a record of +0−1=19 in classical games
and +1−2=19 overall.
 One of Tal's greatest achievements during his later career was an equal first place with Karpov (whom he seconded in a number of tournaments and world championships) in the
1979 Montreal "Tournament of Stars", with an unbeaten score of (+6−0=12), the only undefeated player in the field, which also included Spassky, Portisch, Vlastimil Hort, Robert
Hübner, Ljubomir Ljubojević, Lubomir Kavalek, Jan Timman and Larsen.
 Tal played in 21 Soviet Championships,[18] winning it six times (1957, 1958, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1978). He was also a five-time winner of the International Chess Tournament in Tallinn, Estonia,
with victories in 1971, 1973, 1977, 1981, and 1983.
 Tal also had successes in blitz chess; in 1970, he took second place to Fischer, who scored 19/22, in a blitz tournament at Herceg Novi, Yugoslavia, ahead of Korchnoi, Petrosian and Smyslov.
In 1988, at the age of 51, he won the second official World Blitz Championship (the first was won by Kasparov the previous year in Brussels) at Saint John, ahead of such players as Kasparov,
the reigning world champion, and ex-champion Anatoly Karpov. In the final, he defeated Rafael Vaganian by 3½–½.
 On 28 May 1992, at the Moscow blitz tournament (which he left the hospital to play), he defeated Kasparov. He died one month later.
 Team competitions[edit]
 In Olympiad play, Mikhail Tal was a member of eight Soviet teams, each of which won team gold medals (1958, 1960, 1962, 1966, 1972, 1974, 1980, and 1982), won 65 games, drew 34, and lost
only two games (81.2 percent). This percentage makes him the player with the best score among those participating in at least four Olympiads. Individually, Tal won seven Olympiad board
medals, including five gold (1958, 1962, 1966, 1972, 1974), and two silver (1960, 1982). [13]
 Tal also represented the Soviet Union at six European Team Championships (1957, 1961, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1980), winning team gold medals each time, and three board gold medals (1957,
1970, and 1977). He scored 14 wins, 20 draws, and three losses, for 64.9 percent. [13] Tal played board nine for the USSR in the first match against the Rest of the World team at Belgrade 1970,
scoring 2 out of 4. He was on board seven for the USSR in the second match against the Rest of the World team at London 1984, scoring 2 out of 3. The USSR won both team matches. He was
an Honoured Master of Sport.[19]
 From 1950 (when he won the Latvian junior championship) to 1991, Tal won or tied for first in 68 tournaments (see table below). During his 41-year career he played about 2,700 tournament
or match games, winning over 65% of them.
 Tournament and match wins (or equal first)[edit]
 1950–1965[edit]
 YearTournament / ChampionshipMatch / Team competition1950Riga – Latvia Junior championship,[20] 1st1953Riga – 10th Latvian championship, 1st (14½/19)Leningrad, Soviet Team
Championship final, board 2, 1st–2nd (4½/7)1954Match with Vladimir Saigin for the title of Soviet Master (+4−2=8)1955Riga – 23rd Soviet Championship Semifinal, 1st
(12½/18)1956Uppsala – World students team championship, board 3 (6/7)1957Moscow – 24th URS-ch, 1st (14/21)Reykjavík – Wch-team students, board 1 (8½/10)
Baden, Austria – European Team Championship, board 4, 1st–2nd (3/5)1958Riga – 25th URS-ch, 1st (12/19)
Portorož Interzonal, 1st (13½/20)Varna – Wch-team students, board 1 (8½/10)
Munich 1958 Olympiad, board 5 (13½/15)1959Riga – Latvian Olympiad, 1st (7/7)
Zürich tournament, 1st (11½/15)
Bled–Zagreb–Belgrade – Candidates tournament, 1st (20/28)1960Moscow – Match for the World title with Mikhail Botvinnik (+6−2=13)
Hamburg – Match West Germany vs USSR, 1st (7½/8)
Leipzig 1960 Olympiad, board 1, silver medal (11/15)1960/61Stockholm tournament, 1st (9½/11)1961Bled tournament, 1st (14½/19)1962Varna 1962 Olympiad, board 6
(10/13)1963Miskolc tournament, 1st (12½/15)Moscow, USSR Spartakiad, board 1, 1st (6/9)1963/64Hastings Premier tournament, 1st (7/9)1964Reykjavík tournament, 1st (12½/13)
Amsterdam Interzonal, 1st–4th (17/23)
Kislovodsk tournament, 1st (7½/10)Moscow, USSR Club Team Championship, board 1, 1st (4½/6)1965Riga, Latvian championship, 1st (10/13)Bled – Quarter-final Candidates Match
with Lajos Portisch: (+4−1=3)
Bled – Semi-final Candidates Match with Bent Larsen (+3−2=5)1966–1979[edit]