Tal Tales
Monday, July 3, 2017 at 12:49AM
Dennis Monokroussos in Mikhail Tal

The tournament in Leuven is over, but the internet being what it is, there's always another event to see. This one's in the more distant past, in 1988: the first World Blitz Championship, held in St. John, in Canada. It was a very strong event, including the two players who were clearly #1 and #2 in the world at the time: Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov. Spoiler alert: neither won or even came close to winning.

(Neither did Yasser Seirawan, who was a Grand Chess Tour-level player in that day and very strong in blitz, but almost surely not as strong as he fancied himself to be. A Seirawan quote from the video: "I don't think of myself as a boastful person, and yet I do boast about my blitz ability because I quite frankly consider myself the best in the world. Period." His first round loss to Igor Ivanov proved to be a boon to the rest of us, because he ends up doing commentary in the remaining rounds.)

Almost all of the games shown can be found in databases, but the footage is fun both for those of us who were around when the event occurred and for you youngsters who may be surprised to see what a young Karpov, Seirawan, and Kasparov actually looked like. Some of the games are shown not just live but on a very old-style computer screen as well, accompanied by some pleasant guitar music or something more suited to the elevator. This was very helpful in the old days, before databases, but when you get to those parts of the videos you might want to dig up the games in ChessBase instead. Regardless, have a look - you may find it a nice treat from the past.

Part 1 is here, the second part is here and the finale (which doesn't take up the full length of the video) is here. (HT: Brian Karen)

Bonus: Want more Mikhail Tal? Here is an hour-long (plus) talk by him in that same year of 1988. It's in Russian, but with English subtitles, so if you can read this, you can read that too.

Article originally appeared on The Chess Mind (http://www.thechessmind.net/).
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