Tal-Botvinnik 1960
by Mikhail Tal
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Book Summary Information
Author: Mikhail TalEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-08-01
ISBN: 1888690089
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Russell Enterprises
Book Reviews of Tal-Botvinnik 1960
Book Review: A classic with one of my all-time favourite games in it
Summary: 5 Stars
Mikhail Tal's rise from obscurity to become the youngest person ever to win the World Chess Championship in 1960 is a very well-known story. However, the aggressive, tactical style of his play - a feature that he was never to discard - took its toll in 1961 when Botvinnik crushed him by eleven wins to five to regain the World Championship. After this, though Tal remained a strong grandmaster until his death in 1992, he was never able to sustain his form well enough to again come into serious contention for the title, despite a few superb spells such as his 86 games without loss in the early to middle 1970s and a brilliant win in the 1979 Riga Interzonal.
Throughout his career, Tal loved not only playing chess but also analysing it, and his published writings on chess are thus more highly regarded than those of any other player to reach World Champion status. This does show in "Tal-Botvinnik 1960" because, in contrast even to the first book I ever read on the topic of the World Chess Championship, there are some really good annotations of those moves important in shaping the game, from Tal's anti-positional opening in the third game, to Botvinnik's blunders in the sixth and seventh, to Tal's terrible exchange of queens in the ninth, and the key moves in his three later victories and the epic eighteenth game where Botvinnik failed to win because of a serious blunder. The analysis on Tal's seventy-two-move epic thrust-and-parry win in the eleventh game, which has been for a long time one of my favourite chess games of all time and certainly my favourite by Tal (though most would think its length makes it atypical of him) is very good and agrees wonderfully with later studies, whilst the two epic draws that bookended this highlight were analysed very well and there was a great deal I did not know about them to be found.
The introductions to the games, which in other books on matches are used to help the reader find out about the general course of the match, are instead used by Tal to show how he felt about the match as it was moving. This is a little hard to get used to even for someone who has had an extremely long history reading books on old chess matches and tournaments, but when one thinks about it Tal is in no way doing the wrong thing: indeed he might almost be doing a better job of looking at how real players actually approach the problem of playing in a chess match (which, as all serious students of chess know, is a very different thing from purely tournament-based play).
All in all, "Tal-Botvinnik 1960" does deserve its reputation as the best book ever written on a World Championship Match. This is certainly a justifiable claim when one considers how much less sophisticated analysis was in the 1960s compared to what it became in the days of Kasparov and Karpov. I have seen very little indeed that contradicts what Tal found about the course of games in this match.
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