April 1961
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April 16 1961
Tampa Bay Times, St. Petersburg, Florida, Sunday, April 16, 1961
Tal's Position Strong In 12th Chess Game
(c) 1961 New York Times
New York - Mikhail Tal of Latvia, the defender, outplayed Mikhail Botvinnik of Russia Friday in the 12th game of their match for the world chess championship at the variety theater in Moscow.
When the game was adjourned after 40 moves, Tal had what was regarded by other masters present as a fairly certain victory. Action was to resume yesterday.
The opening, as in the first game of the match last year, was a French defense played by Botvinnik. It followed the course of the 1960 game. At the 12th move, Botvinnik changed his tactics; nevertheless, his position was still inferior.
Lively play in the middle game led to an exchange of queens, but Tal emerged from the melee with the exchange ahead and four pawns on a side. He had a bishop and rook, on the open file, opposed to a bishop and knight. This advantage, if properly followed out, should lead to a winning superiority for Tal.
May 13 1961
The Guardian, London, Greater London, England Saturday, May 13, 1961
Tal's shortcomings exposed ruthlessly
What Botvinnik's success has shown
By Leonard Barden, our Chess Correspondent
Now that the world championship match has ended so unexpectedly and so decisively, the inquests will be more heated than usual.
During the last few years, Tal has built up a powerful mystique as a player whose demon glare and phenomenal powers of calculation were predestined to sweep aside all opposition.
When Smyslov violently criticized Tal's style in a newspaper article, announced that he would show Tal how a real grandmaster played, and was then defeated by one of the unsoundest sacrifices Tal has ever made, it seemed to the chess public like a judgment of the gods. When the press bureau at the first Botvinnik match called one of Tal's traps “gunshot at sparrows,” Botvinnik promptly fell into it. As Tal routed grandmaster after grandmaster, the swell of criticism of his style was dulled and stilled.
Hole in the hat
After the latest match, however, Botvinnik has become the man who has calmly pointed out the hole in the hat from which the conjurer was pulling rabbits. The match has seen not only the loss of Tal's world title but his transformation from the attacking genius with phenomenal imaginative reflexes to a player who more than once dithered around in the middle game without a constructive idea.
Part of the genesis of this remarkable change is certainly nothing to do with chess. Tal had a painful form of kidney trouble just before the match; he was advised by doctors to postpone it, but retorted that he and not the doctors was playing Botvinnik. The defending champion also went down with influenza after the eighth game, and it was then that he lost three games running, playing moves so clearly contrary to basic principles that one master at Bognor shook his head and said they were only possible if Tal had thought them up during a fever.
There is a reverse side to this coin: it is probable that a greater freedom from private worries also helped to account for Botvinnik's vastly improved form. During last year's match his wife was seriously ill, a fact which he generously did not put forward as an excuse and which has only recently become known to the chess world.
Decisive factor
It would be entirely wrong, however, to regard this just as the victory of a healthy man over a sick one. Given positions which suited him, as in the eighth and twelfth games of the match, Tal was as tactically sure and devastating in attack as ever. The real key to Botvinnik's success was the way he exposed, more clearly and persistently than ever before, how much Tal is vulnerable in both closed and simplified positions.
By the end of the match Botvinnik was setting up fixed pawn formations and offering the exchange of queens at almost every opportunity. He saved two endings, in the sixteenth and twentieth games, when every master spectator had given him up for lost.
Another decisive factor in the match was Botvinnik's superior theoretical preparation. This was again partly a reflection of his better psychological approach to the match. With Black, Tal seemed to be trying to show that he could play positional chess by adopting defences like the Nimzo-Indian and Slav which were foreign to his style but admirably suited to Botvinnik's; as these openings developed, Botvinnik always had a useful innovation ready to spring on his opponent. It was only when Tal switched to the King's Indian that he obtained satisfactory opening positions with Black; but by then he was under the fresh handicap of needing to play for a win in every game, so that Botvinnik could choose simplifying variations and sit back and wait for Tal to overreach himself.
What of the future? Keres and Petrosian, the other leading Russian contenders for the world title, will now be mentally measuring themselves against Botvinnik in 1963 and fancying their chances. One can also imagine Bobby Fischer's Brooklyn voice disturbing the older members of the Manhattan Chess Club from their over-the-board slumbers as he comments on the result:
The future
What will happen to Tal? As the recent careers of Bronstein and Smyslov have shown, it is only too easy to lose your ambition and slip back once you have reached the world title pinnacle and have been repulsed by Botvinnik. Tal will have the additional disadvantage hence forward that his weaknesses have been so ruthlessly and precisely exposed in this match. From now on, Tal will surely receive such a rash of Caro-Kanns and queen swaps in every tournament in which he competes that his mind will dwell sadly a la recherche du temps perdu when his opponents were wont to become ready victims to the slashing attacks against the Sicilian and French in which he specializes. Botvinnik has not only won the match, he has shown the chess world how to play against Tal.
Although it would not be surprising if Tal's career enters a trough for a few years, he is still exceptionally young for a world master and his talents are so great that he will surely make a new bid for the title. He may never eliminate his weaknesses in blocked and simplified positions, but there will be few of his opponents with the strategic depth of a Botvinnik.
The lessons of this match, if Tal cares to learn them, are that not every opening leads to the kind of middle game he likes, and that there are other, subtler weapons besides the dazzling pyrotechnics of an open position.
Yesterday Botvinnik again opened with the Samisch Attack against the King's Indian, but the game developed on more orthodox lines than in the previous games with this opening.
Botvinnik conducted the middle game in a fine enterprising style, sacrificing two pawns for a fierce attack against the king. Even the exchange of queens failed to stem the onslaught, and Tal resigned when faced with decisive material loss. This was one of Botvinnik's best wins of the entire match, and particularly commendable when he only needed a draw. ★
Mikhail Botvinnik vs Mikhail Tal
"King Crimson" (game of the day Aug-04-2024)
Tal - Botvinnik World Championship Rematch (1961), Moscow URS, rd 21, May-12
King's Indian Defense: Saemisch Variation (E80) 1-0
May 22 1961
Evening Standard, London, Greater London, England, Monday, May 22, 1961
For the Top Masters: £4000 A Year Plus A Pension
WHY RUSSIA RULES THE CHESSBOARD
A 49-year-old greying, bespectacled electrical engineer named Mikhail Botvinnik has just given 40 million Russian sports fans their biggest shock for many years.
Sports fans? Yes. Botvinnik has won the world chess title, and chess, which most people here consider a gentle pastime for old men, is in Russia a close second to soccer as the national game.
Top Soviet chess masters have seconds to help them plan their tournaments plans and tactics. They go in for physical training before their contests.
In preparation for his two-month-long match for the world championship, Botvinnik took special paid leave from his scientific bench to get ready.
Their prestige
Ten million Russians are registered members of chess clubs; 2,000,000 participate each year in the national championships. The Russians would certainly win a chess-team contest against the rest of the world.
Why are they so good? One reason is the social and financial prestige. When the two contenders in the title match, Botvinnik and the 24-year-old Latvian defending champion, Mikhail Tal, appeared in the streets of Moscow, they were mobbed by excited fans.
When Tal captured the title from Botvinnik last year, a special train took him home to Riga, with crowds lining the route; a film was made of the match, and he was elected a member of the Riga Soviet.
Chess in Russia has always been a national game, even before the revolution. It boomed when it became known that Lenin was a keen player and when card clubs were eliminated by the Communists.
Top Russian masters earn the equivalent of around £4000 a year (that is, $4964.90USD in 1960, adjusted inflation for 2023 is $49,283.19) by playing and writing, and the best players—some 30 of them—have a state pension of £25 a month.
His pension
When Tal first won the Soviet championship at the age of 21, he became entitled to this pension for life. Although few Russians are full-time professionals (even Botvinnik spends most of his time helping to design power stations) they can always get leave for preparing for and competing in tournaments.
Botvinnik's easy win over Tal will disappoint most of the ordinary Russian chess fans. Tal's defeat was totally unexpected; pre-match betting quoted him as a 4-1 on favourite. With his non-stop attacks, brilliant sacrifices and quick checkmates, he had swept aside all the world's top players, including Botvinnik, in last year's match.
Tal's gifts include a fantastic memory. When he was a child of five, his father, a surgeon, took him along to a medical lecture he was giving. When they returned home, Tal's mother asked him what his father had said. Unconcernedly the boy repeated the entire lecture word for word. Now Tal can quote the moves of hundreds of chess games.
Tal has also built up a reputation as the fastest mover in master chess. On his way to the title he often defeated his opponents after only 20 minutes' thought.
In all important chess events there is a limit of 40 moves in 2½ hours for each side, making a five-hour session in all. Special clocks with two faces enable each master's time to be individually checked.
Before chess clocks were invented, around 1860, one leading British player specialized in very dull positions, over which he would ponder for hours. More than once his opponents fell asleep. Now, failure to make your moves in time involves automatic loss of the game.
Big change
Tal's normal custom is to move quickly, glare briefly at his opponent, and then pace the room like a caged tiger.
Botvinnik usually sits at the board for the full five hours, occasionally sipping cranberry juice. But in this match the Russian spectators were astonished to see the roles reversed. Botvinnik's deep strategy baffled Tal time after time. While Tal sat, head buried in hands, Botvinnik confidently walked up and down.
Now the grand masters look forward to the next challenge match in 1963 when, after eliminating contests arranged by the International Chess Federation, Botvinnik must defend his title.
Who will be his next opponent? It might be Tal again, but two other Russians are fancied: Paul Keres, a handsome, 45-year-old Estonian who is a tennis player of national standing as well as a chess expert, and Tigran Petrosian, a 32-year-old Armenian.
Contemptuous
It might also be the new 17-year-old American star, Bobby Fischer. Bobby has been United States senior champion four years running and is the greatest player of his age in the history of chess.
Bobby is contemptuous of the Russians. Tal, he says, is a weak defensive player and Botvinnik is an old man. He has announced that he intends to be world champion in 1963 and might do it.
What about Britain's part in world chess? Our champion is Jonathan Penrose, a 26-year-old psychology research student at London University. He defeated Tal brilliantly in last year's world team contest but was eliminated in the West Europe zonal stage of the individual championship.
Opportunities
The nearest Englishman to the world title is 49-year-old Harry Golombek, who was one of the two judges of the match in Moscow.
England's main hopes for the future rest on the efforts now being made by the British Chess Federation to give opportunities to talented juniors. Already two youngsters have appeared who may hit the international headlines in a few years: Andrew Whitely, the 13-year-old son of an Oxford college chaplain, and Jimmy Adams, also 13, of Holloway, who performed brilliantly against older opponents at the London Junior congress at Christmas.
But despite big efforts by other countries, experts reckon that Russia will stay the top chess nation until at least 1970.
Leonard Barden
October 05 1961
The Miami Herald, Miami, Florida, Thursday, October 05, 1961
Tal Chess Master
Bled, Yugoslavia — (AP) — Mikhail Tal Soviet chess grand master and former world champion captured first place Wednesday in an international tournament played here. Bobby Fisher of Brooklyn finished second.
December 11 1961
