page_title: Mikhail Tal
section_title: Playing style
hierarchical_section_title: Mikhail Tal / Playing style
caption_attribution_description: English: Mikhail Tal, European Championship 1961 at Oberhausen, Photographer Gerhard Hund. Deutsch: Mikhail Tal, Europa-Mannschaftsmeisterschaft 1961 in Oberhausen, Photo von Gerhard Hund.
context_page_description: Mikhail Tal was a Soviet Latvian chess player and the eighth World Chess Champion.
  Widely regarded as a creative genius and one of the best attacking players of all time, Tal played in a daring, combinatorial style. His play was known above all for improvisation and unpredictability. It has been said that “Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem". He was often called "Misha", a diminutive for Mikhail, and "The magician from Riga". Both The Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games and Modern Chess Brilliancies include more games by Tal than any other player. In addition, Tal was a highly regarded chess writer. He also previously held the record for the longest unbeaten streak in competitive chess history with 95 games between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, until Ding Liren's streak of 100 games between 9 August 2017 and 11 November 2018.
  The Mikhail Tal Memorial has been held in Moscow annually since 2006 to honour Tal's memory.
context_section_description: Tal loved the game in itself and considered that "chess, first of all, is art." He was known to play numerous blitz games against unknown or relatively weak players purely for the joy of playing.
  Known as "The Magician from Riga", Tal was the archetype of the attacking player, developing an extremely powerful and imaginative style of play. His approach over the board was very pragmatic—in that respect, he is one of the heirs of ex-world champion Emanuel Lasker. He often sacrificed material in search of the initiative, which is defined by the ability to make threats to which the opponent must respond. With such intuitive sacrifices, he created vast complications, and many masters found it impossible to solve all the problems he created over the board, though deeper post-game analysis found flaws in some of his conceptions. The famous sixth game of his first world championship match with Botvinnik is typical in that regard: Tal sacrificed a knight with little compensation but prevailed when the unsettled Botvinnik failed to find the correct response. Tal's style of play was so intimidating that James Eade listed Tal as one of the three players contemporaries were most afraid of playing against (the others being Capablanca and Fischer). However, while Capablanca and Fischer were feared because of their extreme technical skill, Tal was feared because of the possibility of being on the wrong side of a soon-to-be-famous brilliancy. Although Tal's sacrifices were formidable, some of the best players of the time were successful in refuting them, contributing to his negative record against some of the top players of the time. These included Spassky, Petrosian, Polugaevsky, Korchnoi, Keres, Smyslov, and Stein. (Tal has a positive record against Fischer with his four wins from the 1959 candidates tournament, when Fischer was only 16 years old, but never beat Fischer again.)
  Although his playing style at first was scorned by ex-world champion Vasily Smyslov as nothing more than "tricks", Tal convincingly beat many notable grandmasters with his trademark aggression. Prevailing against Tal's attack required extraordinary ability. It is also notable that he adopted a more sedate and positional style in his later years; for many chess lovers, the apex of Tal's style corresponds with the period (approximately from 1971 to 1979) when he was able to integrate the solidity of classical chess with the imagination of his youth.
  Of the current top-level players, the Latvian Alexei Shirov has been most often compared to Tal. In fact, he studied with Tal as a youth. Many other Latvian grandmasters and masters, for instance Alexander Shabalov and Alvis Vitolins, have played in a similar vein, causing some to speak of a "Latvian School of Chess".
  Tal contributed little to opening theory, despite a deep knowledge of most systems, the Sicilian and the Ruy Lopez in particular. But his aggressive use of the Modern Benoni, particularly in his early years, led to a complete re-evaluation of this variation. A variation of the Nimzo-Indian Defence bears his name.
caption: Tal in 1961
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