Games - Mikhail Tal

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	Games - Mikhail Tal

Mikhail Nekhemievich Tal (IPA: , Latvian: Mihails Tāls, Russian: Михаил Нехемьевич Таль) (November 9 1936 - June 28 1992), born in Riga, Latvia, was a Jewish Latvian chess player and the eighth World Chess Champion.

Early years

Tal learned to play chess at the age of eight after watching his father play, and soon started to attend the chess club at the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers. His play was not exceptional at first, but he worked hard at the game, and he began to receive tuition from Alexander Koblentz in 1949. He then improved quickly reaching the final of the Latvian Championship in 1951. He competed again in 1952, finishing ahead of his trainer, and won the tournament for the first time in 1953, thereby earning the title of candidate master.

Soviet champion

He qualified for the Championship of the USSR 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 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).

After the world championship

After he lost his title back to Botwinnik, 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 Botwinnik. 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.

His highest ELO rating was 2700, his highest Historical Chessmetrics Rating was 2799, in September 1960.

Although he has not published much, Tal became also known as an exceptional chess writer who did not provide an abundance of variation but was able communicate the intuition behind his reasoning to the reader. His account of his successful World Championshipship match against Botwinnik is regarded by many as one of the best chess publications ever.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Mikhail Tal ]

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