Mikhail Tal and Contemporary Chess

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Mikhail Tal and contemporary chessbyMISHANP on NOVEMBER 13, 2010

Moscows Tal Memorial honours Mikhail Tal, the Magician from Riga, who blazeda path to win the World Championship half a century ago this year. Recalling those days,

and how chess has changed since, has been a theme of Ilya Odesskys tournament reports.

The highlight was an interview with Genna Sosonko, one of the tournament commentators

and a near contemporary of Tal, who expressed the opinion that if Tal (1936-1992) had been

born 15 to 20 years ago he would never have become a professional chess player.

It would be wrong to skip the report before that, however, where some technical problems

were enough of a pretext for Odessky to transport us back to an earlier era in chess history

(GUM is the famous department store on Red Square where the tournament is taking

place):

On the remaining boards the struggle was in full swing, when suddenly the game broadcast

went down. Apparently the voltage in the whole of GUM jumped, we were told, and a stand-

alone circuit breaker couldnt be found. The press centre, figuratively speaking, was plunged

into darkness i.e. there was as much light as you needed, and electricity, and Zenit St.

Petersburg in far-away Siberia were beating their opponents with the hockey score 5:2,

which every journalist could find out from the screen of their laptop, but what was going onbehind the next door, of that we had no idea whatsoever. I left the press centre and took a

glance into the playing hall. The same story. The stage was high and far-away, you could

only see the most general outline of the pieces, but not the position at all; while the monitors

had frozen as in the fourth installment of Die Hard, which had, youll recall, the subtitle:

Meltdown.


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For the umpteenth time I was overcome by nostalgia: for large

demonstration boards, for pieces with magnets and hoops, do you remember that? so it was

easy for them to be picked up by the large sticks that the demonstrators handled no worse

than professional billiard players handle their cues. While the demonstrators themselves

were impassive and therefore seemed so important and, moreover they were terribly slow:

the grandmaster on stage had already long since made his move, while this man would at

first walk up unhurriedly, then write down the move in his special little folder and only then

take up his stick.

The stick catches hold of the c8 bishop and your heart immediately stops: where its

going? to b7 or g4? While the rook, that normal rook on f8, you know it like the back of your

hand, that rook from castling short, its now going to move into the centre, to e8 or d8, and

youre waiting for it there, but the demonstrator suddenly picks it up and drags it down,

down, still further down, where on earth is it going? And suddenly it takes the pawn on f2 ,

and you break out in a sweat: a combination! And the hall hums, hums, and one of the most

impatient fans jumps up, thrusts out his arm and shouts something, but not to the

grandmaster but again to the demonstrator, as if to say where are you putting it, do you

really not see its en prise! and that fans friends drag him down by the tails of his jacket: sit

down, chill out, its a combination, you fool and the whole company leans over smallportable magnetic chess sets, which, of course, they brought with them, and putting their

heads together they begin to go over the variations, occasionally throwing back their heads

and checking again, with the demonstration board.

But what can you say. Thats no longer just sailing off into the sunset, but long since sailed.

Perhaps thats why there are so few children in the hall as the magic has gone, and only

bare technology is left. And now technology itself is letting us down.


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Perhaps they're not quite gone - FIDE Grand Prix in Jermuk | photo: ChessPro

Odesskys next report was given over to an interview with Genna Sosonko, in Odesskys

words a grandmaster, and besides that the best author writing about chess in the Russian

language. The interview was edited into a monologue, and Sosonko, whose new book

apparently gives pride of place to an essay on Tal, talked about the Latvian:

The players in our tournament, almost all of them, didnt know him personally. But one ortwo of them saw him: Boris Gelfand played a tournament game against him, Volodya

Kramnik played him at blitz, Alyosha Shirov studied with him they remember the very old

Tal.

But in the beginning everything was completely different. Misha was twenty or twenty one

when he soared to the top. This was a man who, entering the playing area, would greet not

only the arbiters and the arbiters assistants, but also the demonstrators shaking their

hands. Imagine Federer and Nadal going onto court and shaking hands with the ball-boys,

the line judges and so on. This was a man from a different world, with different ideas. Hecame to each game as if it was a celebration. Chess for him was a celebration. His style, his

relation to the game, they made him what he became.

Yesterday I walked along the banks of the Moscow River. I saw, as before, the Variety

Theatre, and I recalled, of course, the events of half a century ago. Im not talking about the

bank having being packed, that goes without saying: enormous boards stood at the entrance

to the theatre, and cars would stop on the opposite bank. People got out of their cars, looked


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grandm aster, but its just that he had nothing whatsoever in comm on with the

first.

Tal (with cigarette) kibitzes in Brussels, 1987 | photo: Chessbase

* * *

Its absolutely clear to me that if Tal had been born fifteen years ago, or even twenty, he

would never have chosen to play chess. Its a completely different game from that game that

Misha played. Theres no need to add that it stopped being that game because ofcomputers.

Its no secret for anyone that grandmasters nowadays switch on very powerful computers

before each game and check lines that theyve already looked at before. They do it again, and

then again, and yet again. That process can last an hour, or two, or three. I dont think any

sort of exception will be made for the rest day.

The variations have a huge number of branches. They last heaven knows up to which move.

You need to remember it all: on that move I make that move, and on that move that move.Without cramming contemporary chess is impossible, and Im absolutely sure that such an

occupation would have been boring for Mikhail Nekhemevich. Simply boring, intolerably

boring in itself.

Im not saying that in order to warn young chess players off the profession. What Im saying

also isnt something positive or negative, theres no plus or minus. Its just reality. A good

memory, well-developed computer skills those are facets of contemporary chess. And they

lead to another problem.


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The majority of players at the Tal Memorial have brains that are so clouded (clouded by

their preparation work with computers), that the learning process backfires on them. Where

does knowledge end and your own play begin? The answer to that question brings us to theconclusion that the difference in the quality of moves made when knowledgeable and those

made when ignorant is colossal. Thats the problem of contemporary chess, the problem of

chess players at the very highest level.

Gelfand and Aronian in round 3 | photo: russiachess.org

The Aronian Gelfand game. White unleashed the novelty: 12. Nh4. Does it win? No, of

course not. But within ten moves, perhaps slightly less, we saw that as excellent, subtle and

pure a chess player as Boris Gelfand had a lost position with a knight on a8 and pieces

that you simply couldnt look at. Within ten moves he had a lost position: how on earth did

that happen?

Its the effect of the novelty. I remember Tals commentaries and the chess of that time. Of

course back then grandmasters also came up against novelties. However, they realised: yes,

my opponent could have looked at the position himself or with his second, but that doesnt

yet mean anything. He might have miscalculated, this opponent. Very often in Tals games

as well meeting a novelty hed think for forty minutes, an hour, as long as necessary and

then either neutralise the novelty, or totally refute it.

In other words when you faced a novelty it was unpleasant, but not fatal. Now though, when

you come up against the move Nf3-h4, and its played very quickly, you realise that its not

some sort of improvisation, its not something that hes had a hasty look at you realise that

youre up against some computer work. Youre competing with a computer. And the effect of

that painful awareness is four times, five times, or ten times what it was in Tals time.

The Aronian Kramnik game. We all understand what happened. And after all its not the

first time for Volodya. In Dortmund he also lost to Ponomariov in the same way. He made

moves, he didnt like something, but as he explained himself, he knew for certain that he


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was following his analysis. And he believed that at the end of the line hed find a move after

which White had nothing. Thats how it panned out, but when they got to the crucial

position he realised: its bad, really bad! And after the game he discovered that the positionwasnt quite the one he thought, one piece was standing on the wrong spot.

I remember when I played at the professional level myself, at tournaments of the rank of

Interpolis and Wijk-aan-Zee. You told yourself: thats it, now any definite knowledge is

over, the positions no longer familiar play! But in my time there werent yet computers,

and analysing everything was simply impossible by definition. Now though, when theres

both the temptation and the possibility of analysing everything completely, of going as far

and as deep as possible it can play a negative role on the practical strength of a chess

player.

In Odesskys next report at the Russian Chess Federation website, he asked Alexander

Grischuk what he thought about Sosonkos opinion on novelties:

Ill answer in two ways: in those days people didnt always refute novelties, and now they

dont always collapse. Its true, however, that nowadays the novelty is objectively the

strongest stage of the game as a whole, if accurately checked by a computer, of course.

Its not totally clear if the next quote is from Grischuk or Odessky, but its worth adding:

Something else is interesting here. Vaganian said that when he was young it wasnt

considered the done thing to win a game according to your home analysis. Even if it did

happen the players would try to hide it, to pretend to think, camouflage the analysis and so

on. While people now, for the most part, are proud: yes, I had it all written down to the 33rd

move. I played according to the first line!

In his latest report Odessky found more people to ask similar questions. The first was

Ruslan Ponomariov, whos going to be playing in the World Blitz Championship that follows

the main tournament:


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Visiting the Tal Memorial | photo: Chess-News

The computer, of course, has emasculated chess. The second fetish is rating. Everyone keeps

babbling on about it: rating, rating, but rating of what, its not clear at all. Chess has become

more professional, its hard to argue with that. Preparation, again. In Tals time people

played differently, of course. There was a different attitude both in chess and to chess as a

whole. I was recently re-watching the old Soviet film Beware of the Car. The lead characterthere is returning from a trip and his mother tells him the latest news. She says: theyre

going to start delivering milk, something else, and then amongst other things: You know,

Korchnoi won the tournament. I was really rooting for Tal! But he finished half a point

back. That stunned me. What I mean is that the times now are a little different. Now its

unlikely that in a film youll hear: she was rooting, say, for Voldya Kramnik, but Aronian

won. Although if Kramnik had remembered everything that hed written down the table

would be different. Kramnik would be in Aronians place and Aronian in Kramniks place.

Odessky also talked to another legendary chess figure of an older generation, AlexanderNikitin, who was Garry Kasparovs trainer when he became World Champion. Nikitin refers

to the Sosonko interview, including a section I didnt translate where he talked about the

future of chess:

Genka was right about everything! The moves that todays supers bring with them from

home, based on analysis, and the moves theyre forced to make themselves when the

analysis ends are like night and day!


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But what did Sosonko say after that? That grandmasters in 2020 will play better than

today. Nothing of the sort: theyll play worse! Whos going to teach them? Todays chess

players have been raised by computers. What can they teach? Which button its best to pressfirst and which you should hold down longer. Thats all they could teach.

Then Alexander Sergeyevich redirected his arrows to the evil emanating from the internet.

The organisation, they say, is brilliant. The rooms: the playing hall and the press centre are

brilliant. The commentators are excellent. But people just dont come! Theyre all sitting at

home. The internet has killed spectator interest. Everyone wants to brew some coffee with

brandy, to switch on a computer, listen to the commentators, have a look at what Rybka says

why should they leave their homes?

The saddest thing, said Alexander Sergeyevich, is that the children dont come.

And Im entirely in agreement with him on that.

Is it as bad as Nikitin thinks? Perhaps not. In round 7 all five games stretched far beyond

any computer analysis, and the playing hall was standing room only, though its true you

might struggle to find any children:

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Mikhail Tal and Contemporary Chess