Unlike the smooth, almost effortless style of a Capablanca, Tal purposely played moves that created the maximum complications for both sides. He once said, "One doesn't have to play well. One only needs to play better than his opponent". Dr. Lasker would have loved that quote, for he too deemed the game of chess as a struggle between two minds, as opposed to each player blindly making "correct" moves.
Born in Latvia in 1936, Tal was relatively unknown to the chess world compared to his famous Soviet compatriots, viz., Botvinnik, Smyslov, Keres, Bronstein, Spassky, Petrosian, etc., until the late 1950's, when his name shot around the chess world when he won the Championship of the Soviet Union both in 1957 and 1958, and then winning the World Championship Interzonal Tournament in 1959 to become the official challenger to Botvinnik's chess throne. In the 1959 tournament, he even scored 4-0 against the young, but brilliant future World Champion, Bobby Fischer. Tal's style mesmerized the chess world, and GM Ragozin explained the reason best: "Tal does not move chess pieces by hand, he uses a magic wand".
Tal was so intimidating in those years that he made seasoned Grandmaster opponents shudder with fear. A case in point is a game played between GM Tal (as Black) and Hungarian GM Pal Benko (as White) at the Interzonal Tournament in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1959. This was the third cycle (the first two were played in Bled and Zagreb, respectively), and Benko was starting to think that Tal had been hypnotizing him due to his poor record against him so far. So Benko took with him sunglasses and wore them while at the chessboard. But Tal, who had heard of Benko's plan to wear sunglasses before the game started, borrowed enormous dark glasses from GM Petrosian. When Tal put on these ridiculously enormous glasses, not only did the spectators laugh, but other participants in the tournament did, as did the tournament controllers, and finally even Benko himself laughed. But unlike Tal, Benko did not remove his glasses until the 20th move when his position was hopeless.
After winning the 1959 Interzonal, skeptics still thought that Botvinnik was such a solid, positional player, that Tal's attacking style, somewhat purposely flawed by Tal's design, would not be able to penetrate Botvinnik's granite-like defense. But in 1960, when Tal played Botvinnik for the World Championship, he won the 6th game with an outrageously complicated and risky piece sacrifice, because Botvinnik couldn't navigate through all of the complicated variations that Tal created on the board. Tal then went on and won the match and was crowned the 8th Chess Champion of the World.
However, Tal faded away as quickly as he sprang out of anonymity. Not that he started playing badly or sloppily; he remained one of the strongest chess players in the world until his death in 1992. But in 1961, he played against Botvinnik in the obligatory return match and found that Botvinnik had spent the time since the first match doing his homework and systematically finding ways to take advantage of the kinks in Tal's incredibly complicated attacking style. Botvinnik retained his World Championship title, and Tal never reached the pinnacle ever again, due to the succession of chess geniuses Petrosian, Spassky, Fischer, Karpov and Kasparov.
But we all learned so, so much from Tal, that it will be only rarely in the forever future of the Game of Chess that mankind will see the likes of him in other players.
In 1988, I played in the American Open in Long Beach, California, USA, and Tal was playing in the same tournament. He spent little time at the board, however, because they didn't allow smoking in the tournament hall, and he was almost always standing out in the corridor, dressed in disheveled clothing, chain-smoking away, while all of his fans, including me, would be inside staring at his current game's position. He would casually stride in between cigarettes; make a dazzling reply (usually very quickly); and then return back to his little smoking area outside. It was very exciting for me to see such a character live in action like that. He will always remain one of my favorites. One of my all-time favorite chess stories is the famous "Hippopotamus Game" that Tal divulges in his Autobiography. To illustrate what a chess player can actually be capable of thinking during play, he created a hypothetical (hippothetical?) dialogue between a journalist and himself. I will quote the story by Tal straight from the Autobiography:
Journalist: It might be inconvenient to interrupt our profound discussion and change the subject slightly, but I would like to know whether extraneous, abstract thoughts ever enter your head while playing a game?
Tal: Yes. For example, I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov on a USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not obvious; there was a large number of possible variations; but when I began to study hard and work through them, I found to my horror that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the infamous "tree of variations", from which the chess trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity. And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Ivanovic Chukovsky:
"Oh, what a difficult job it was. To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus".
I don't know from what associations the hippopotamus got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippopotamus out of the marsh ? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder. After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on ... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.
Journalist:
Anyway, records show that GM Mikhail Tal (as White) against GM Evgeny Vasiukov (as Black) in the 1964 Soviet Union Championship at Kiev, won in 58 moves.