Mikhail Tal: the Magician from Riga, his life, style and games

Mikhail Tal (Riga, 1936 – Moscow, 1992) was the eighth world chess champion and the most feared attacker of his era. He took the title from Mikhail Botvinnik in 1960, aged 23, playing a style of sacrificial chess that often could not be refuted over the board, even when later analysis found holes. That is why he was called "the Magician from Riga", and why his games are still studied more than sixty years later.

Who Mikhail Tal was

Tal was born on 9 November 1936 in Riga, the capital of Latvia, which soon afterwards became part of the Soviet Union. He learnt the game as a child and developed in his city's chess club, in a country where chess was almost state policy and domestic competition was ferocious.

His rise was one of the fastest in chess history. In 1957 he won his first USSR Championship —the strongest national event in the world at the time— and became a grandmaster the same year. He won the Soviet title again in 1958 and then in 1967, 1972, 1974 and 1978: six USSR championships in all, against the strongest generation the game had ever seen.

His health was fragile for most of his life, with kidney problems that required surgery and meant he often played while ill. He died in Moscow on 28 June 1992, aged 55. A month earlier he was still playing blitz.

The road to the title: 1959 and 1960

In 1959 Tal won the Candidates Tournament held in Yugoslavia —Bled, Zagreb and Belgrade— with 20 points out of 28, ahead of players such as Paul Keres, Tigran Petrosian, Vasily Smyslov and a 16-year-old Bobby Fischer, whom he beat in all four of their games.

That earned him the right to challenge Botvinnik, the champion: a scientific, methodical player famous for his preparation. The match was played in Moscow between 15 March and 7 May 1960 and Tal won 12.5–8.5, with six wins, two losses and thirteen draws. At 23 he became the youngest world champion up to that point, a record only broken by Garry Kasparov in 1985, at 22.

The reign lasted a year. Botvinnik had the right to a return match, prepared thoroughly against Tal's style and won the title back in 1961 by 13–8, against a Tal whose health had suffered. Tal never played another world championship match, although he stayed among the world's best for almost thirty years.

Tal's style: attack even when the calculation does not close

What set Tal apart was not that he sacrificed material —every great attacker does— but when he did it. Morphy and Anderssen sacrificed against weak defenders; Tal did it against the best players in the world, in positions where not even he could calculate to the end whether the offer was sound.

His bet was different: if the pieces become active, the enemy king is exposed and the defender has to find several only moves in a row with the clock ticking, sooner or later he is likely to go wrong. That is not luck. It is a very sharp reading of what happens in a real game between people, where defending is harder than attacking.

Three ideas sum up how he played:

• The initiative is worth material. A pawn or a piece in exchange for time and activity was, for Tal, a reasonable price.
• Chaos favours whoever creates it. In complicated positions, the player who understands the dynamics better has a practical edge even if the objective evaluation is level.
• A king in the centre is a target. Many of his famous games start with a sacrifice to stop the enemy king castling or to open lines towards it.

Today's engines have found refutations of several of his sacrifices. That does not make them any less instructive: at the board, against the clock and against champions, they worked. Understanding why they worked —and when it pays you to take such risks— is half the value of studying him. Learning how to think in the middlegame with judgement, not just calculation, helps with that too.

Two games that explain him

Botvinnik – Tal, Moscow 1960 (game 6)

In the sixth game of the title match, Tal had Black in a King's Indian against Botvinnik's fianchetto. On move 21, in a position that looked quiet, he gave up a knight: 21...Nf4 22.gxf4 exf4. There was no mate and no material gain in sight. What he got was a pawn on f4 that opened the diagonal of his g7 bishop, squares for his pieces and much more dangerous play on the queenside.

Botvinnik, taken by surprise, did not find the best defence and Tal won the game. For decades people argued whether the sacrifice was sound, and engine analysis kept finding nuances. It is the perfect example of a positional sacrifice: you do not calculate it to the end, you evaluate it. If the structure of that opening interests you, the guide to the King's Indian Defence explains its typical plans.

Tal – Larsen, Bled 1965 (game 10)

In 1965 Tal played the Candidates semi-final against the Dane Bent Larsen. After nine games the match was level at 4.5–4.5, so the tenth was decisive. Larsen chose a Sicilian Scheveningen and Tal answered with his aggressive set-up:

White prepares to castle queenside and push the kingside pawns against Black's king. On move 16 Tal gave up a knight on d5, in the centre of the board, a speculative sacrifice that opened lines towards the black king with no immediate gain. Larsen accepted, the position became a maze and Tal won the game and the match.

It is the other side of his style: the practical sacrifice at the moment of maximum pressure, when a draw was no use to him and his opponent had to defend without mistakes. The same Sicilian structures appear in the guide to the Sicilian Najdorf.

Records and stories worth knowing

Tal was not only a brilliant attacker. He was also an extraordinarily solid player at certain stages of his career:

• Between July 1972 and April 1973 he played 86 games in a row without losing (47 wins and 39 draws).
• Between October 1973 and October 1974 he beat his own mark with 95 unbeaten games (46 wins and 49 draws). That record lasted until 2018, when Ding Liren reached 100.
• In 1988, aged 51, he won a world blitz championship in Saint John, Canada, ahead of Kasparov and Karpov.

Those streaks disprove the idea that Tal was only a reckless sacrificer: he knew how to play quiet positions and played them very well. The sacrifice was a tool he chose, not a reflex.

What you can learn from Tal today

Copying Tal by sacrificing everything that moves is the quickest way to lose games. What does work, at any level:

• Count tempi, not just pawns. Before accepting or offering material, ask how many developing or attacking moves are gained or lost.
• Look at the enemy king. If it is in the centre with undeveloped pieces around it, look for a way to open lines. If it is well defended, the sacrifice probably will not be enough.
• Evaluate after the sacrifice, not before. The question is not "am I losing material?" but "what position am I left with?": active pieces, squares, the opponent's weaknesses.
• Practise tactics. Without spotting combinations quickly no sacrifice will work; well-chosen tactical puzzles are the foundation.
• Analyse your own games looking for moments when a sacrifice was possible and you missed it, or played it when it was not enough. If an idea like that still puzzles you, you can ask about that exact move in Ask the GM.

How to study Tal at AcademiaTal

The course Mikhail Tal's Legacy: Intuition, Sacrifice, and Controlled Chaos is devoted entirely to him: how he prepared the sacrifice, unsound sacrifices that still work, the king in the centre, the role of intuition, Tal against Stockfish and what remains of his legacy today. It is the place to move from admiring him to using his ideas in your own games. The lessons are in Spanish with English subtitles.

To put him in context with other great attackers, Tactical masters: from Morphy to Shirov devotes a tribute to him alongside Morphy, Steinitz, Fischer, Kasparov and Shirov, and Master Chess: Attack, Openings and Endgames includes a lesson on his creative play. All three are included in the subscriptions that open the whole catalogue.