Mikhail Tal
Mikhail Nekhemievich Tal was born in Riga, Latvia in 1937. He learned to play chess at the age of eight by watching his father play, and soon started to attend the chess club at the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers. At first, his play was not exceptional, but he world hard at the game and began to be tutored by Alexander Koblentz in 1949. He improved quickly and in 1951 he reached the final of the Latvian Championship. In 1952, he competed again and finished ahead of his trainer. In 1952, he won the tournament for the first time and earned the title of candidate master.
In 1956, Tal qualified for the U.S.S.R. Championship and finished tied for fifth place. The following year, at the age of 20, he became the youngest player to win the championship. Although he had not played in enough international tournaments to qualify for the title of grandmaster, FIDE decided to waive the normal restrictions and award him the title anyway because of his achievement in winning the Soviet Championship. He won the championship again the following year and competed in the World Chess Championship for the first time. He won the interzonal tournament in Portoro, then helped the Soviet Union win the Chess Olympiad. After the interzonal, the top players went on to the Candidates Tournament of 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.
In 1960, he defeated Mikhail Botvinnik in a World Championship match. At the age of 24, he was the youngest ever World Champion (this record was later broken by Garry Kasparov who won the title when he was 22). After studying Tal's style, Botvinnik won the rematch in 1961. After this loss, he played in several Candidates Tournaments. He lost in the finals against Boris Spassky in 1965, in the semi-final against Viktor Korchnoi in 1968, and in the quarter-final against Lev Polugaevsky in 1980.
Tal has won the Soviet Championship six times - in 1957, 1958, 1967, 1972, 1974, 1978. This number is only equalled by Botvinnik. He has also won the International Chess Tournament in Tallinn, Estonia five times - in 1971, 1973, 1977, 1981, and 1983. During his later career, one of his greatest achievements was a tie for first place with Anatoly Karpov in the 1979 Montreal "Tournament of Stars". In 1988, at the age of 52, he became the World Champion in Blitz chess.
Mikhail Tal has won 59 games, drew 32, and lost only 2 games in Olympiad play. He has played close to 3,000 tournament games, winning over 65 percent of the time and his highest ELO rating was 2700. Although he has not published much, he became 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 as one of the best chess publications ever. During his career he suffered from bad health and was frequently hospitalized. He was a chain smoker, a heavy drinker, and also suffered from a morphine addiction for a while. Tal died of kidney failure in a Moscow hospital on June 28, 1992.
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