Mikhail Tal
Soviet-Latvian chess player (1936-1992) · Latvia · Chess Players · Died at 55
Mikhail Tal is read about 1,244 times a day, in 69 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 22 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 397 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?The eighth World Chess Champion attacked the board like a poet writing in fire - improvising, daring, impossible to predict. "The Magician from Riga" turned every game into something unrepeatable, and the anthologies bear it out: more of his brilliancies are preserved than any other player's.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
Photos 7
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In their own words 3
, Later, I began to succeed in decisive games, perhaps because I realised a very simple truth: not only was I worried, but so was my opponent.
To play for a draw, at any rate with White, is to some degree a crime against chess.
When one of us first plays chess, he is like a man who has already caught a dose of microbes of, say, Hong Kong flu.
Awards
In their orbit
About this person
Mikhail Tal was born 9 November 1936 in Soviet Latvia and became a grandmaster whose combinatorial style defied preparation - he didn't calculate so much as conjure. He won the World Championship in 1960 at twenty-three, the youngest holder of the title at the time, and went on to compile a 95-game unbeaten streak between October 1973 and October 1974, a record that stood for decades. Vladislav Zubok said every game was "as inimitable and invaluable as a poem," and the assessment stuck: both The Mammoth Book of the World's Greatest Chess Games and Modern Chess Brilliancies feature more of his work than anyone else's. Beyond the board he wrote extensively about the game, admired for clarity and insight. He died 28 June 1992 in Moscow; a memorial tournament ran in his name for years afterward.
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