Early years[edit]
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 Koblentsbegan 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]
World Champion[edit]
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).
Later achievements[edit]
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
[8], 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.
Health problems and death[edit]
Tal's gravestone, showing a death date of "1992 27 VI" (27 June 1992)
Naturally artistic, witty and impulsive, Tal led a bohemian life of chess playing, heavy drinking and
chain smoking. His already fragile health suffered as a result, and he spent a great deal of time in the hospital, including an operation to remove a kidney in 1969.
[21] He was also briefly addicted to
morphine, prescribed due to intense pain.
[22]
On 28 June 1992,
[1] Tal died in a Moscow hospital, officially of a hemorrhage in the esophagus. But his friend and fellow
Soviet grandmaster
Genna Sosonko reported that "in reality, all his organs had stopped functioning."
[23]
Tal had the congenital deformity of
ectrodactyly in his right hand (visible in some photographs). Despite this, he was a skilled piano player.
[9]
Playing style[edit]
Tal loved the game in itself and considered that "chess, first of all, is art." He was known to play numerous
blitz games against unknown or relatively weak players purely for the joy of playing.
Known as "The Magician from Riga", Tal was 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 ex-world champion
Emanuel Lasker. He often
sacrificed material in search of the
initiative, 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. The famous sixth game of his first world championship match with Botvinnik is typical in that regard: Tal sacrificed a knight with little compensation but prevailed when the unsettled Botvinnik failed to find the correct response. Tal's style of play was so intimidating that James Eade listed Tal as one of the three players contemporaries were most afraid of playing against (the others being Capablanca and Fischer). However, while Capablanca and Fischer were feared because of their extreme technical skill, Tal was feared because of the possibility of being on the wrong side of a soon-to-be-famous brilliancy.
[24] Although Tal's sacrifices were formidable, some of the best players of the time were successful in refuting them, contributing to his negative record against some of the top players of the time. These included Spassky, Petrosian, Polugaevsky, Korchnoi, Keres, Smyslov, and Stein. (Tal has a positive record against Fischer with his four wins from the 1959 candidates tournament.)
Although his playing style at first was scorned by ex-world champion Vasily Smyslov as nothing more than "tricks", Tal convincingly beat many notable grandmasters with his trademark aggression. Prevailing against Tal's attack required extraordinary ability. It is also notable that he adopted a more sedate and positional style in his later years; for many chess lovers, the apex of Tal's style corresponds with the period (approximately from 1971 to 1979) when he was able to integrate the solidity of classical chess with the imagination of his youth.
[25]
Of the current top-level players, the Latvian
Alexei Shirov has been most often compared to Tal. 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".
[26]Tal contributed little to opening theory, despite a deep knowledge of most systems, the
Sicilian and the
Ruy Lopez in particular. But his aggressive use of the
Modern Benoni, particularly in his early years, led to a complete re-evaluation of this variation. A
variation of the Nimzo-Indian Defence bears his name.