Thursday
Jan132011
A Tal Tale
Thursday, January 13, 2011 at 6:40PM
Alas, so far it is only being told in German. Lubosh Kavalek writes about a new book on the great Mikhail Tal, written by GM Karsten Müller and Raymond Stolze, with contributions (or at least extended quotations and/or analyses) from Boris Spassky, Anatoly Karpov, Vladimir Kramnik, Robert Hübner and Artur Yusupov. Those who are friends of Müller's or know the Edition Olms people should harrass them as soon and as much as possible to get this book out in an English translation. (Meanwhile, I may have to brush up on my German!)
tagged Tal
Reader Comments (3)
Detailed, very emotional annotations by GM Hecht can be found in the book "Die besten Partien deutscher Schach-Großmeister" by Helmut Pfleger (ed.) (Falken Verlag 1983; the rights may have passed on to Olms with the rest of the Falken chess catalog). On the pages 31 to 35 Hecht describes (lots of words, only few variations) what happened. How the (then) young IM Hecht played his first olympiad - also his first big international tournament at all - , drew against Keres and then had to play against the freshly dethroned WCh Tal. How Tal sank into thought, the ash tray became fuller and fuller, a demo board was hurriedly put next to them ...
I still have to smile about Hecht calling his pawn structure "Streuselkuchenbauern" (streusel cake pawns) in his comment to 26.-Ba6!.
There's also a picture of this game. Hecht on the left, Tal on the right, the audience only a felt 2 meters away. Hechts mother seated in row 1, in the best place, "between the players" relative to the picture geometry.
This old book by Pfleger is good entertainment for a weekend, but apart from this game and historical data it doesn't have much lasting value.
I was a little confused how Hecht could have played both Tal and Keres in the same Olympiad, so I looked it up. I had forgotten that they used to ahve preliminaries and then a final,like the World Cup in soccer. Anyway, I was amused by the Tal - Hecht game because of the variation. They played a Queen's Indian Defense: Kasparov variation - a year before Kasparov was born!
[DM: When it becomes a Nimzo-Queen's Hybrid, it should not be labeled the "Kasparov variation". That not only existed, but was popular even in the 1950s.]
Yes, Tal was the player who inspired me most when I was young and learning chess. His games were out of this world for me at this time.
I was fascinated by them tremendously as they were full of fire... Let's hope that Edition Olms translates this book about Tal into English.