Talk:Mikhail Tal

lengthy quote (about his personality)

His first wife, actress and singer Salli Landau, described Tal's personality:

Misha was so ill-equipped for living... When he travelled to a tournament, he couldn't even pack his own suitcase... He didn't even know how to turn on the gas for cooking. If I had a headache, and there happened to be no one home but him, he would fall into a panic: "How do I make a hot-water bottle?" And when I got behind the wheel of a car, he would look at me as though I were a visitor from another planet. Of course, if he had made some effort, he could have learned all of this. But it was all boring to him. He just didn't need to. A lot of people have said that if Tal had looked after his health, if he hadn't led such a dissolute life... and so forth. But with people like Tal, the idea of "if only" is just absurd. He wouldn't have been Tal then.

I think he had the soul of an actor. There was a reason why he always loved appearing as master-of-ceremonies. He needed an audience. He couldn't play without one - people inspired him.

I can't imagine him without a cigarette in his mouth - he'd smoke five packs a game! He never needed a lighter - he'd finish one, and light the next one from it. Most of his illnesses were inherited. When it came time for us to marry, a doctor from the Riga Special Clinic, where Dr. Nehemiah Tal once worked, told me that I shouldn't marry a man with that kind of health. He was always ill. And in the last years of his life, all his illnesses got worse. There were three whole years in which his temperature simply never went down. I have no idea how a man playing with a constant temperature of 38-39 degrees could become World Blitz Champion in 1988! And on May 28, 1992, at the Moscow blitz tournament, he became the only player to defeat Kasparov. I'm told he even left the hospital to play. The strongest chess-player in the world still lost to a dying Tal.

He was an unusual man. I miss him terribly. Sometimes I think that Misha flew in from another planet - just to play chess, and then fly home. He was asked once how he would categorize chess - is it a sport, or an art? He was simply exasperated: how can you call chess a sport? I don't know much about it myself - but they did call Tal the Mozart of chess. And he was a genial sort in real life, too. He was kind, cheerful, and never had a bad word to say about anyone.

I removed the above quote from the article because quotes of such length are against policy. A summary of the quote can be written and placed in the article. And it might be nice to add other details about his personality that don't come from Salli Landau. Kingturtle = (talk) 13:10, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Kingturtle - my suggestion if you don't like the length of a quote is not to remove it, but just trim out some of what you feel is unnecessary. If you just revert the addition, Wikipedia does not move forward, and you end up disrespecting the efforts of others. He was married to Salli for years. She is an excellent source on Tal. Billyshiverstick (talk) 17:02, 13 August 2024 (UTC) thanks for listening

References

"Every game"

"Every game, he once said, was as inimitable and invaluable as a poem." Is this a reference to every game of chess, or all of his games? Toccata quarta (talk) 07:46, 17 May 2013 (UTC)

I think it refers to the games he played, because that is his way of approaching chess, and life. Billyshiverstick (talk) 16:59, 13 August 2024 (UTC) Other people's games are not his concern. Compare him to Tigrosian, lol.

'Personality' section removed

Article shortened and made less informative, I would argue unnecessarily, with this deletion Knot Lad (talk) 12:16, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

It was done by this change: Bruce leverett (talk) 12:53, 23 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm with you, knot. I hate wholesale deletions. You were on the right track. People would be better to build on what you did, or improve it, than revert. Billyshiverstick (talk) 16:38, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

It looks like the section consisted of a single quotation, which was appropriately sourced, so you could consider bringing it back. The editor who removed it suggested putting it in a "Personal life" section rather than a "Personality" section, which seems like a reasonable suggestion, since a lot of biographical articles about chess players have "Personal life" sections. Bruce leverett (talk) 03:12, 14 August 2024 (UTC)

No mention of his personal life?

There are a lot of stories about his relationships with his wife and other women. None of them appear. Sadly missing from this piece on his life. They are who he is. Billyshiverstick (talk) 16:37, 13 August 2024 (UTC)

Quotations

I started a Wikiquote page for Mikhail Tal. I'm having trouble sourcing some of his most well known / widely attributed quotes, so if anyone who could help with that it would be appreciated. IOHANNVSVERVS (talk) 20:36, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

Tone rework

Would anyone with MOS experience be willing to help rework this article? The style and tone are quite flawed, especially for something with top/high-importance to several projects. I've removed some of the more egregious errors and will do what I can. Thanks. BrotherGunk (talk) 15:54, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, this needed to be done. Bruce leverett (talk) 17:30, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Of course! :) BrotherGunk (talk) BrotherGunk (talk) 18:13, 24 February 2025 (UTC)

Quotation from Life & Games

@Khiikiat: The reference to The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal doesn't give the author, so it appears that it was by Kasparov, whose name appears before the preceding reference to My Great Predecessors.

But this leads us to the next problem. Life and Games was autobiographical. So how did Tal know the date of his own death? Presumably this date was added in some introductory material written by someone else. Who was that someone else? Bruce leverett (talk) 12:03, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

@Bruce leverett: It was John Nunn. In the "Editor's Foreword" on page 6, he states: "He died on 28th June 1992, and the chess world is a much poorer place for his absence." It is an odd situation. The gravestone clearly states that Tal died on 27 June, but reliable sources state that he died on 28 June. Khiikiat (talk) 16:12, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

Unanswered historical questions pop up sometimes in Wikipedia (and elsewhere), and I think that your way of handling it, picking one of the alternatives and explaining the other in a footnote, in a reasonably neutral way, is correct. You should probably not cite Britannica -- that is a tertiary source, i.e. it's at our level of the food chain; but Nunn and Kasparov are reasonable choices. Bruce leverett (talk) 18:19, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

I've removed the Encyclopædia Britannica and added The New York Times and The Independent. Khiikiat (talk) 21:19, 20 August 2025 (UTC)

Not all those removals were justified

Even if it didn't include an actual "<ref>", some of the material did make clear references to a book source. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 06:03, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

This material should be rescued and returned to the article as it's important biographical material.

Alexander Koblents began tutoring him in 1949, after which Tal's game rapidly improved, and by 1951 he had qualified for the Latvian Championship. In the 1952 Latvian Championship, Tal finished ahead of his trainer. Tal won his first Latvian title in 1953, and was awarded the title of Candidate Master. He became a Soviet Master in 1954 by defeating Vladimir Saigin in a qualifying match. That same year he also scored his first win over a grandmaster when Yuri Averbakh lost on time in a drawn position. Tal graduated in Literature from the University of Latvia, writing a thesis on the satirical works of Ilf and Petrov, and taught school in Riga for a time in his early twenties. He was a member of the Daugava Sports Society, and represented Latvia in internal Soviet team competitions.

In 1959, he married 19-year-old Salli Landau, an actress with the Riga Youth Theatre; they divorced in 1970. In 2003, Landau published a biography in Russian of her late ex-husband.

Also we should be able to find a WP:RS for something like this as it is a frequently mentioned aspect of Tal's career

Although Tal's sacrifices were formidable, his style of play was very risky, contributing to his negative record against world-class defensive players. These included Spassky, Petrosian, Polugaevsky, Korchnoi, Keres, Smyslov, and Stein. (Tal has a positive record against Fischer with his four wins from the 1959 candidates tournament, when Fischer was only 16 years old, but never beat Fischer again.)

Finally, the rename of the section "Score [sic] with some major grandmasters" to "Various scores with major grandmasters" made it a little worse. "Various" is a poor word for a section title and something such as "selected" would be better. (Putting the winning records in bold in that list is a bad idea as it looks completely random and confusing, more ransom note than encyclopedic list. [Boldface is more tolerable in plain text but looks terrible when applied to wikilinks.] The reader can easily determine which scores are winning records.) Quale (talk) 07:12, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

The section titled "Writings" should be restored. It did not use a footnote or citation template, but it directly quoted two subject matter experts, Soltis and Chandler. Also, the list of published titles confirms that he was a successful writer. Thus the sentence in the lead saying that he was a highly regarded writer should also be restored.

The nutshell summariess of the Notable games have been removed. These are supposed to be explanations of why the game is notable. Winning a brilliancy prize, clinching a championship, etc., are useful to mention in this context. A nutshell description that only describes the course of the game is less helpful. Bruce leverett (talk) 12:39, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Tal is a favourite of many chess players because he had such an exciting style, and was a bit of a "hooligan", a "punk rock" kind of player who upset the establishment (Botvinnik and the Soviet machine). This has led to a lot of hyperbolic comment about him in the literature of the game. MaxBrowne2 (talk) 13:12, 14 July 2026 (UTC)