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Early years Tal was born in Riga, Latvia. At the age of eight, Mikhail learned to play chess while watching his father. Shortly thereafter he joined the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers chess club. His play was not exceptional at first but worked hard to improve. Alexander Koblencs began tutoring Tal in 1949. Tal's game improved rapidly thereafter and by 1951 he qualified for the Latvian Championship. In the 1952 championship Tal finishing ahead of his trainer. Tal won his first national title in 1953 and was awarded the title of candidate master. Soviet champion He qualified for the USSR Chess Championship 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. He retained the Soviet Championship the following year, and competed in the World Chess Championship for the first time. He won the interzonal tournament at Portorož, then helped the Soviet Union to retain the Chess Olympiad. World champion After the interzonal, the top players carried on to the Candidates Tournament, 1959. Tal showed superior form by winning with 20 / 28 points, ahead of Paul Keres with 18.5, followed by Petrosian, Smyslov, Gligoric, Fischer, 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 of the other three. In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal defeated the relatively staid and strategic Mikhail Botvinnik in a World Championship match, 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 after a lengthy study of Tal's style. 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 Vasily 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. Later achievements After he lost his title back to Botvinnik, Tal played in several Candidates Tournaments. In 1965, he lost the final against Boris Spassky, 1968 the semi-final against Viktor Korchnoi, and 1980 the quarter-final against Lev Polugaevsky. He was a six-time winner of the Soviet Championship (1957, 1958, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1978), a number that is only equaled by Botvinnik. 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". In 1988, at the age of 52, he became World Champion in Blitz chess. In Olympiad play, Mikhail Tal 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. 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 officially ofkidney failure in a Moscow hospital. 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 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 every notable grandmaster with his trademark aggression. Viktor Korchnoi and Paul Keres are two of the 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 brief life an immensely popular figure in the world of chess. Quotes on chess Notable chess games Writings Although he did not publish much, Tal became also known as an exceptional chess writer who did not provide an abundance of variations but was able to communicate the intuition behind his reasoning to the reader. His account of his successful World Championship match against Botvinnik is regarded by many as one of the best chess publications ever. Further reading | ||||||||||
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