Mikhail Tal (9 November 1936 – 28 June 1992) was a Soviet Latvian chess grandmaster and the eighth World Chess Champion. He is considered a creative genius and is widely regarded as one of the most influential players in chess history. Tal played in an attacking and combinatorial style. His play was known for improvisation and unpredictability. Vladislav Zubok said of him, "Every game for him was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem".
His nickname was "Misha", a diminutive for Mikhail, and he earned the nickname "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. He also held the record for the longest unbeaten streak in competitive chess history with 95 games (46 wins, 49 draws) between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, until Ding Liren's streak of 100 games (29 wins, 71 draws) between 9 August 2017 and 11 November 2018.
Tal died on 28 June 1992 in Moscow, Russia. The Mikhail Tal Memorial chess tournament was held in Moscow annually between 2006 and 2014, with two more tournaments in 2016 and 2018.
Tal was born in Riga, Latvia, into a Jewish family. According to his friend Gennadi Sosonko, his true father was a family friend identified only as "Uncle Robert"; however, this was vehemently denied by Tal's third wife Angelina. Uncle Robert had been a taxi driver in Paris in the 1920s and had lost all his family in World War II. His mother, Ida Grigoryevna, was the eldest of four sisters; Tal frequently visited the Netherlands to see his aunt, Riva, and another of his aunts settled in the United States but visited Riga.
As a child, Tal joined the Riga Palace of Young Pioneers chess club. In 1949, he played Ratmir Kholmov, a young master who had recently competed in the Chigorin Memorial chess tournament in 1947, in a simultaneous exhibition. Tal used an imaginative combination to win his game at the age of 13.
Tal made his first significant appearance at the 1956 USSR Chess Championship, sharing 5th–7th place with Lev Polugaevsky and Ratmir Kholmov. Grigory Levenfish called him "the most colourful figure of the championship" and a "great talent" who strove for "sharp and complicated play". He was criticised by the media, however, for taking unnecessary risks and having restricted creative views. Tal then went to play on board three at the students' championship in Sweden, scoring 6 out of 7.
He became the youngest player to win the 1957 USSR Chess Championship, at the age of 20. He had not played in enough international tournaments to qualify for the title of Grandmaster, but FIDE decided at its 1957 Congress to waive the normal restrictions and award him the title because of his achievement in winning the Soviet Championship. At that time the Soviet Union was dominant in world chess, and Tal had beaten several of the world's top players to win the tournament.
Tal made three appearances for the USSR at Student Olympiads in 1956–1958, winning three team gold medals and three board gold medals. He won nineteen games, drew eight, and lost none, for 85.2 percent.
He retained the title of champion at the 1958 USSR Chess Championship, and competed in the World Chess Championship 1960 for the first time. He won the 1958 Interzonal tournament at Portorož, then helped the Soviet Union to win the 13th Chess Olympiad, being its fourth consecutive victory in Munich.
In 1959, Tal won a very strong tournament in Zurich, Switzerland. Following the Interzonal, the top players carried on to the Candidates' Tournament, Yugoslavia, 1959. Tal won with 20/28 points, ahead of Paul Keres with 18½, followed by Tigran Petrosian, Vasily Smyslov, Bobby Fischer, Svetozar Gligorić, Friðrik Ólafsson, and Pal Benko. Tal's victory was attributed to his dominance over the lower half of the field; whilst scoring only one win and three losses versus Keres, he won all four individual games against Fischer, and took 3½ points out of 4 from each of Gligorić, Olafsson, and Benko. When Benko arrived for his match with Tal, he wore dark glasses in order to avert the gaze of Tal, which could be intimidating. In response and as a joke, Tal wore large sunglasses which he borrowed from a member of the crowd.
In 1960, at the age of 23, Tal defeated the strategically minded Mikhail Botvinnik in a World Championship match, held in Moscow, by 12½–8½ (six wins, two losses, and thirteen draws), making him the youngest-ever World Champion (a record later broken by Garry Kasparov, who earned the title at 22, and broken again by Gukesh Dommaraju who earned the title at age 18). Botvinnik, who had never faced Tal before the title match began, won the return match against Tal in 1961, also held in Moscow, by 13–8 (ten wins to five, with six draws). In the period between the matches Botvinnik had thoroughly analysed Tal's style, and turned most of the return match's games into slow wars of maneuver or endgames, rather than the complicated tactical melees which were Tal's happy hunting ground. Tal's chronic kidney problems contributed to his defeat, and his doctors in Riga advised that he should postpone the match for health reasons. Yuri Averbakh claimed that Botvinnik would agree to a postponement only if Tal was certified unfit by Moscow doctors, and that Tal then decided to play. His short reign atop the chess world made him one of the two so-called "winter kings" who interrupted Botvinnik's long reign from 1948 to 1963 (the other was Smyslov, world champion 1957–58).
His highest Elo rating was 2705, achieved in 1980. According to Chessmetrics, a historical rating system that includes performances before the Elo system was adopted in 1970, Tal was world number one for 32 months, from October 1958 (after scoring 13½/15 at the 1958 Olympiad in Munich and 13½/20 at the 1958 Interzonal in Portoroz) through April 1961.
Soon after losing the rematch with Botvinnik, Tal won the 1961 Bled supertournament in SFR Yugoslavia, by one point over Fischer, despite losing their individual game, scoring 14½ from nineteen games (+11−1=7) with the world-class players Petrosian, Keres, Gligorić, Efim Geller, and Miguel Najdorf among the other participants.
Tal played in a total of six Candidates' Tournaments and match cycles, though he never again earned the right to play for the world title. In 1962 at Curaçao, then part of Netherlands Antilles, he had serious health problems, having undergone a major operation shortly before the tournament, and had to withdraw three-quarters of the way through, scoring just seven points (+3−10=8) from 21 games. He tied for first place at the 1964 Amsterdam Interzonal to advance to matches. Then in 1965, he lost the final match against Boris Spassky, after defeating Lajos Portisch and Bent Larsen in matches. Exempt from the 1967 Interzonal in Sousse, Tunisia, he defeated Gligorić 5½–3½ in Belgrade in 1968, but then lost the semi-final match against Viktor Korchnoi in Moscow.
Poor health caused a slump in his play from late 1968 to late 1969, but he recovered his form after having a kidney removed. He won the 1979 Riga Interzonal with an undefeated score of 14/17, but the next year lost a quarter-final match to Lev Polugaevsky, one of the players to hold a positive score against him. He also played in the 1985 Montpellier (France) Candidates' Tournament, a round-robin of 16 qualifiers, finishing in a tie for fourth and fifth places, and narrowly missing further advancement after drawing a playoff match with Jan Timman, who held the tiebreak advantage from the tournament proper.
From July 1972 to April 1973, Tal played a record 86 consecutive games without a loss (47 wins and 39 draws). Between 23 October 1973 and 16 October 1974, he played 95 consecutive games without a loss (46 wins and 49 draws), shattering his previous record. These were the two longest unbeaten streaks in competitive chess for more than four decades, until Ding Liren broke the record in 2018 with 100 games, although with far fewer wins than either of Tal's streaks (29 wins, 71 draws).