Quiet Move Journal · Vol. 015
October 28, 2026
Boris Spassky once pointed out to Mikhail Tal that he was sacrificing pieces left and right. Tal's answer was short: "I know. But I want to."
That is most of the story. Tal knew the safe move. He usually just preferred the interesting one.
A champion at 23
Tal was born in Riga, Latvia, in 1936. By the late 1950s he was tearing through Soviet chess with a style built on improvisation, initiative and a willingness to hand over material to get it. Vasily Smyslov, a former world champion, at first dismissed it as tricks.
The tricks kept working. Tal won the 1959 Candidates Tournament in Yugoslavia and beat a teenage Bobby Fischer in all four of their games there. In 1960 in Moscow he beat Mikhail Botvinnik 12½–8½, with six wins, two losses and thirteen draws. At 23 he was the youngest world champion there had ever been. Smyslov would later put it differently: "The chess pieces seemed to come to life under his hand."
Into the forest
The idea behind Tal's chess was simple to describe and very hard to copy. He gave up material to make the position complicated, then asked his opponent to find the one path out, at the board, with the clock running.
The most famous line attached to him puts it this way: "You must take your opponent into a deep, dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one." It appears to be a popular shortening of a longer passage, quoted by Garry Kasparov, about steering games into unexplored territory where a player must "demonstrate that two times two is five." Another favorite, "There are two kinds of sacrifices: correct ones, and mine," has no known original source at all.
That fans keep repeating them anyway says something. They sound like Tal, because Tal played like that.
He offered a plainer explanation himself. He began winning the decisive games, he wrote, when he realized "a very simple truth": he was not the only one at the board who was worried.
Later analysis has found holes in some of his sacrifices. In tournament conditions, the masters facing him found them very hard to refute.
The price, and the comeback
Botvinnik won the rematch in 1961, 13–8. He had studied Tal's play and steered the games into slow, grinding positions. Tal was also ill. He had chronic kidney trouble, and his doctors in Riga had advised postponing the match. He had a kidney removed in 1969, and his health declined in the years that followed.
He kept playing, and kept winning. He took six Soviet championships. Between October 1973 and October 1974 he went 95 games without a loss, the kind of record a reckless player does not set. In 1988 he won the World Blitz Championship. On May 28, 1992, he beat Garry Kasparov in a blitz tournament in Moscow. A month later, on June 28, he died in a Moscow hospital at 55.
Why people love him
Botvinnik, who knew Tal's chess as well as anyone, summed it up: "He was loved; isn't that happiness?" The historian Vladislav Zubok wrote that "every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem."
Part of the appeal is that Tal's risks are visible. You don't need to understand a position deeply to see that someone has just given away a piece on purpose and is daring the other player to prove it was a mistake. Part of it is a kind of generosity toward the game. Tal once called playing for a draw, especially with White, "to some degree, a crime against chess."
Beyond the board
Today a phone can check any of Tal's sacrifices in seconds, and some of them don't survive. It hasn't hurt his reputation, because what people admire was never the arithmetic.
It was the choice. Most of us, in most of life, take the safe move when it's on offer. Tal kept choosing the uncertain one, trusting that the person across the table was just as unsure as he was. Often enough, he was right.