Biography of Mikhail Tal

Mikhail Nekhemievich Tal (November 9, 1936 – June 28, 1992), born in Riga, Latvia, was the eighth World Chess Champion. 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 the search for initiative in chess which was defined by the ability to make threats to which the opponent must respond. His first and most influential trainer was Alexander Koblentz.

Tal’s playing style was scorned by ex-World Champion Vasily Smyslov as nothing more than “tricks,” yet he 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). Tal’s intuitive sacrifices 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.

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.

Tal’s dominance over Bobby Fischer in his early years helped his rise to the top. In 1960, at the age of 24, 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).

Tal was 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”-there he delivered a superb performance against many of the strongest grandmasters of the day.

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.”