Mikhail Tal — chess champion with roots in the USSR
He was born in Riga in November 1936, into the Jewish community of a Latvia that was still independent and would be Soviet within four years. He learned chess at six, was Latvian champion and a national master at sixteen, graduated from Riga University in 1957, and took the grandmaster title the same year. He won the Soviet championship that year and the next, and eventually six times in all, which remains the record.
He won the Interzonal in 1958 and the Candidates in 1959, and in the spring of 1960 he played Mikhail Botvinnik for the world championship in Moscow. Botvinnik was forty-eight, the most systematic player alive, and had held the title for most of twelve years. Tal was twenty-three. He won by 12½ to 8½ and became the youngest world champion there had been - a record that stood until Kasparov took it at twenty-two, and then Gukesh Dommaraju at eighteen.
He held it for a year. The rules of the time gave Botvinnik an automatic rematch, and in 1961 Botvinnik took the title back by 13 to 8. At the time this was put down to superior preparation, and it largely was. But Yuri Averbakh disclosed in 2002 that Tal's doctors in Riga had advised him to postpone the match on health grounds, and that Botvinnik would agree to a postponement only if Moscow doctors certified him unfit. Tal decided to play anyway, on the assumption that he would win regardless.
He was ill for essentially his whole adult life, chronically so with kidney disease, and the treatment and the pain shaped a good deal of what followed. It did not stop him. He stayed at or near the top of the game for three more decades, reached a rating of 2705 and second in the world in 1980, played on eight Soviet Olympiad teams that won gold every time, and entered six Candidates cycles.
What he is remembered for is not the record but the method. He played sacrificial, tactically unclear chess of a kind the Soviet school had spent decades trying to eliminate, and he did it at the highest level against the man who embodied that school. In the 2004 edition of a standard anthology of the greatest games ever played, no player was represented more often. His 1975 autobiography, written as a dialogue with a sceptical interviewer, is still among the best-regarded books in chess literature.
His opponents liked him, which is rarer than it sounds. When Pal Benko turned up for their Candidates match wearing dark glasses to avoid Tal's stare, Tal borrowed an enormous pair from someone in the audience and wore them at the board.
He played a blitz tournament a month before his death and died in Moscow in June 1992, aged fifty-five - a Soviet champion who had outlived the Soviet Union by six months, and who had become, in the last year of his life, a citizen of Latvia again.
"Riga throughout; Soviet citizen from 1940, Latvian again from 1991"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Riga (Latvia)
He represented the Soviet Union on eight Olympiad teams and won the Soviet championship six times, a record. He became a Latvian citizen again in 1991 and died in Moscow in June 1992, six months after the state he had played for ceased to exist.
Born in Riga in 1936 into the Latvian Jewish community, four years before the Soviet annexation of Latvia. Latvian champion at sixteen, graduate of Riga University in 1957, grandmaster the same year.
Riga (Latvia). At the time, this region was one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union.
A career defined by ambition
"You must take your opponent into a deep, dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path out is only wide enough for one."