Mikhail Tal!

The goat Mikhail Tal the single reason I got back into chess after years of not playing, I watched one of his games on agadmators channel and was blown away by his style. I recently read something that could explain his development for such incredible sacrifices. supposedly he played a variant of chess as a child with one minor tweak, the knights couldn't move backwards. the more you think about it the more you realise how beneficial this variant could be for one's understanding of sacrificing to open lines and improve the position as you are literally forced to find a sac that works. anyway I found this very interesting and can anyone confirm this to be true or not? I myself can't see why it's not true and it would explain how he developed such keen senses for playing chess in a none traditional manner. RIP Tal The magician from Riga

I played him in 1988 in Saint John NB Canada.

 

That's dope

 

Yeah people love saying that about Tal but truth is that could be said about pretty much any game where there was a minor error "X player did an imprecision on move 38 but Y wasn't able to capitalize on that"

 

I know. I was just reinforcing it. You can find errors basically in most of every grandmasters games. People say stockfish refuted some of his sacrifices. But that's only a small percentage of his sacrifices, and while not technically precise, in practical terms, with the clock ticking and the magician staring at you across the board and you having to find all the correct moves to defend, avoid perpetuals and then grind an endgame it's a whole different story. 

I’ve got a game-collection book by Tal and I never get tired of playing over his games. He’s absolutely my favorite all-time chess player. And I’ve read multiple accounts of how he was a super nice guy too.