Mikhail Tal

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.

Mikhail Tal (9 November 1936 – 28 June 1992) was a Latvian chess player who became the eighth World Chess Champion.

Quotes

• Later, I began to succeed in decisive games, perhaps because I realised a very simple truth: not only was I worried, but so was my opponent.
  • Life and Games of Mikhail Tal (1997)

• When one of us first plays chess, he is like a man who has already caught a dose of microbes of, say, Hong Kong flu. Such a man walks along the street, and he does not yet know that he is ill. He is healthy, he feels fine, but the microbes are doing their work.
  • Life and Games of Mikhail Tal (1997)

• 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.
  • Widely attributed to Tal, no known original source. An example attribution is in All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything (2019), Sasha Chapin

Disputed

• There are two kinds of sacrifices: correct ones, and mine.
  • Widely attributed to Tal, no known original source[1]

Quotes about

• The chess story of Mikhail Tal is about the act itself of straining against the leash of limited human imagination to create mammoth combinations on the chessboard. During his games, Tal wished to go where no chess player had ever gone before, choosing the middlegame as his metier for creative expression. He burned energy profligately. A chain-smoker and a heavy drinker, Tal pulsated nervous energy, pacing like a caged tiger in between moves. And as a young man with those famous fierce, hooded eyes and that imposing hooked nose, he bulldozed all before him.
  • Larry Parr, The Kings of Chess: A 21-Player Salute

• Late in his career, Tal did win another, albeit unofficial world championship: the 1988 World Blitz Championship in St. John, Canada. The 32-player field included Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov and numerous other greats. Pleasantly fortified with a few drinks, Tal played nervelessly at age 51. "I did not take the tournament too seriously," he later said. "I walked around the pressroom, smoked a few cigarettes and sacrificed some pieces." Then he added, "I am waiting until next year when I can become a new ex-world champion."
  • Larry Parr, The World Chess Championship and Champions: 1747-2001

• Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem.
  • Vladislav Zubok, Zubok, Vladislav. Zhivago's Children. Harvard University Press, 2009. p. 179 ISBN 9780674033443

• Misha was so ill-equipped for living... When he travelled to a tournament, he couldn't even pack his own suitcase... He didn't even know how to turn on the gas for cooking. If I had a headache, and there happened to be no one home but him, he would fall into a panic: "How do I make a hot-water bottle?" And when I got behind the wheel of a car, he would look at me as though I were a visitor from another planet. Of course, if he had made some effort, he could have learned all of this. But it was all boring to him. He just didn't need to. A lot of people have said that if Tal had looked after his health, if he hadn't led such a dissolute life... and so forth. But with people like Tal, the idea of "if only" is just absurd. He wouldn't have been Tal then.
  • Tal's first wife Sally Landau in a 2003 interview with the Russian newspaper Chess Week[2]

• I can't imagine him without a cigarette in his mouth - he'd smoke five packs a game! He never needed a lighter - he'd finish one, and light the next one from it.
  • Sally Landau[3]

• He was an unusual man. I miss him terribly. Sometimes I think that Misha flew in from another planet - just to play chess, and then fly home.
  • Sally Landau[4]

• Some years ago I was playing in the Hastings tournament with Mikhail Tal. One evening, he picked up an English newspaper, casually glanced at the chess column and started laughing. What had attracted his attention was the position given for readers to solve: it was from his own game against Platonov played at Dubna in 1973.
  The amusement, however, was caused by the set of par solving times appended in order to rate one’s achievement in finding the answer. These began at 20 seconds, indicating grandmaster strength, then proceeded via master, county player and club player to stop at "average" – five minutes. "That’s very funny", said Tal. "I spent 15 minutes looking at the position before I saw it, and my opponent didn’t see it at all."
  • William Hartston, Now! magazine, 4-10 January 1980, page 98, per Edward Winter [5]