My chess buddy Paul has posted an interesting article about Tal with many nice quotes. This reminded me that I still have to finish / continue my book with Tal’s sacrifices and I did the first step last night.
I don’t have to tell you how unique Tal was so let’s head over to his fascinating game against GM Hans-Joachim Hecht, which you can replay here. What would you do in the following position?
Definitely not 19. exf6!, a queen sacrifice à la Tal. The story goes that Najdorf kissed Tal for this move and people were feeling the echos of the game Lilienthal – Capablanca, 1935 where the following happened:
Lilienthal played the forcing 20. exf6 and Capablanca resigned 6 moves later. It’s not a real sacrifice, Black’s king is trapped in the center and White will capture at least one more minor piece. With a potential doubling of the rooks on the e-file and a pawn on g7 White is clearly better here. In the game Black played the queen to the e-file and White ended with 2 minor pieces for a rook and a huge advantage in activity.
In the Tal game it wasn’t so clear although the computer evaluates the position as equal. This is a clear reminder that you have to look at all candidates even if they look completely crazy at first sight. Chess is a creative game and playing unconventional moves is great fun. Look at the position after move 21:
Would you like to play Black? Hecht mentioned that he was a bit shocked by this move and that it took him minutes until he was able to calculate the variations. Under this pressure he was able to find the best defensive move 21…Nxh4. He later made positional inaccuracies that lost the game.
There are two interesting conclusions:
- If you have the choice between a solid move or a positional sacrifice, chose the latter. Humans don’t like pressure and often collapse if they have to find many only moves in a row. Not to mention that the defensive capabilites on club level are not the best.
- Always look for a defense, no matter how lost the position may look. It’s amazing what you can do to stay in the game and stubborn resistance is an important skill to get better in chess.
Tal’s games are great for motivation. Right now it’s not really necessary because you can enjoy good chess in the Wijk an Zee tournament. And if you still wonder why learning to make with bishop + knight is good for your chess, look at Carlsen’s win against Aronian. That’s piece coordination!
Yeah, Tal’s splendid combinations are always good to get pumped up about chess again. Problem in our own games is that after seeing such things from Tal we want to do it in our game aswell but we have to remember that we aren’t Tal and so have to be either more cautious or improving our calculation to a level we can see such combinations from start to finish.
*Patiently waiting for a gamefragment of your own where you played Tal-like*
I disagree! Tal is the perfect player for a club level player to study. He is far easier to emulate than say Karpov and the defensive skills of club players is far lower. Don’t start by sac-ing your queen… maybe try a pawn!!
I didn’t say Tal shouldn’t be studied. I only said that we shall not implement the Tal style in our own game in one two three there. First trying to play actively will be our first step. Then bring that up to a higher level step by step will be already an enormous achievement, well atleast for me.