Saturday
Sep032016
This Week's World Chess Column: Tal in the Olympiads
Saturday, September 3, 2016 at 12:21AM
It's an interesting fact that among players who have participated in four or more Chess Olympiads, the player with the highest scoring percentage is Mikhail Tal. There are some reasons that make it a little less surprising than it would otherwise be, but even so he's probably not the first name that would come to mind. Nevertheless, he owns that distinction, and in my column for World Chess this week I take a look at some of his finest games from various Olympiads from 1958 to 1974. There are few better ways to spend one's time as a chess fan than with Tal's games, so please have a look.
tagged AGON, Mikhail Tal
Reader Comments (2)
Thanks for the analysis of some beautiful games. Regarding the general evaluation of Tal’s performance, you say “It is debatable whether he was the greatest performer in the history of the Chess Olympiads”; taking into account the strength of his opponents, I think it’s quite clear that he wasn’t. Apart from 1960 he played on lower boards, and most of his opponents were considerably weaker than him – did he beat any real top players apart from Szabo & Najdorf?
Now consider Kasparov’s Olympic career – “only” 78.7% (http://www.olimpbase.org/players/ssimw2af.html), but he played on the 1st board in six of his eight performances – in four of them he had the best TPR in the Olympiad and in another the 2nd best; in 1992 he scored 8.5/10 including wins over Shirov, Kamsky, Ivanchuk & Nikolic.
[DM: I agree with you, though it's always fun to write on Tal. The only problem with writing the article using TPRs is that there aren't any ratings pre-1970. A follow-up article at some point just looking at players in the ratings era would be worthwhile, though - do you know of a site where all-time TPRs are listed?]
Well, if you mean TPRs of all the Olympic performances together then no. http://www.olimpbase.org has the data about each player's TPR in each Olympiad starting from 1972 - though the top-3 in each Olympiad according to this criterion are listed in the general information section only from 1984. In any case, I suppose that comparing TPRs across long periods of time would also raise the issue of rating inflation.
[DM: I can live with the alleged specter of rating inflation - I basically trust Ken Regan's conclusion that the evidence for rating inflation is somewhere between minimal (over a certain time period) and non-existent. To my mind, it would be shocking if chess didn't improve at the top given computers, the huge increase in the number of participants, the information explosion and so on.]