Happy Birthday Mikhail Tal!

Hi all

Happy Birthday to Mikhail Tal!

I am a huge fan of Mikhail Tal and admire how he had to deal with multiple health issues and troubles but still after becoming World champion in 1960, was in the top 20 in the world for many years after and played chess basically until the month before his death. His 1960 peak was also correlated with peak popularity of the modern Benoni - he championed this opening, which today is not considered as sound and solid as say the Slav defense or Gruenfeld defence. But in Tal's time, the refutation variations of such an opening were not readily available or understood. A hugely passionate chess player. I very much enjoyed going over many of his games both on Youtube over the years and more recently in a course I created about some of his more amazing games.

My free Mikhail Tal Youtube playlist is at : https://kingscrusher.tv/tal
My Mikhail Tal course which I found actually thrilling each day to work on: https://kingscrusher.tv/mikhailtal

It seemed to be strange but I also experienced a peak bullet rating during my study of Tal games recently. I think one reason why this happened is :

"Checkmate ends the game"

And in bullet chess, if you can checkmate, there is less risk of losing on time - say compared to try and play more positional chess.

I also feel Tal's relentless interest in King soft-spots paves the way for a more detailed understanding of how we should approach the art of attacking chess - we should consider not just direct routes to the opponent's king but also those "bouncy roads" as another blog post I did before this highlights.

Some of my more popular game videos include:

His encounter with a young Bobby Fischer - very instructive attacking pressure across the a8-g2 diagonal:

https://youtu.be/ihJPMevm9HM

My top Mikhail Tal sacrifices video:

https://youtu.be/ctLyPHckiws

Bilek vs Tal

https://youtu.be/qDm8f6jNwU4

Mikhail Tal vs Vassily Smyslov - Brilliancy Prize Game - Caro Kann Defence

https://youtu.be/TPKv--socOg

Mikhail Tal vs Garry Kasparov - Mikhail Tal's last tournament game

The story is that Mikhail Tal escaped his hospital bed to go and play in a nearby Blitz tournament on hearing that Garry Kasparov would be there. Tal played in his typical trademark way of creating complexity and it was simply too much for Kasparov who overstepped the time limit later on, trying to solve all the problems that Tal set him. Kasparov believed Mikhail Tal had a unique talent for just setting variations intuitively as opposed to having to calculate them.

https://youtu.be/WGkrwga21iY

Key takeaway points

• I hope you check out the samples of my Tal course which I loved creating recently:
  https://kingscrusher.tv/mikhailtal or my Mikhail Tal playlist on Youtube:
  https://kingscrusher.tv/tal
• Tal was a huge chess enthusiast till the very end of his life
• Tal would play anybody and was a big fan of blitz chess and friend of Nezmetindinov
• The notion of relentless attacking King soft spots was highlighted when I studies his games for my Mikhail Tal Course
• King soft-spots may highlight the "bouncy roads" of attack, e.g. Bxg6xf7 to get to the f7 soft spot as well as the more straightforward lines of attack to the opponent's king position
• Tal used the complexity of positions as a weapon to confuse opponents and make it impossible to sustain a level of accuracy needed to defend against Tal's attacks.

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Hope you enjoyed this blog :). Any likes and follows are really appreciated. Also, I also have some interesting chess courses at https://kingscrusher.tv/chesscourses to check out.
Cheers, K