Mikhail Tal: ILE

"You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one." 

"As long as my opponent has not yet castled, on each move I seek a pretext for an offensive. Even when I realize that the king is not in danger." 

This is my 64th typing on this blog, and it's fitting to use it to type a chess champion.

Most great chess champions win by being more correct than their opponents — by calculating more deeply, evaluating more soundly. Mikhail Tal (1936-1992), on the contrary, would generate complications so wild that the position stopped being a problem anyone could solve and became a thicket that only he, who had grown it, could move through. Tal was an ILE — the intuition of pure possibility, multiplying live options faster than others could refute them. He was famous for his ability to create dazzling combinations that left opponents reeling. He didn't rely on slow, grinding calculation; he relied on a rapid, associative "fan" of thoughts that is so rare in anti-Ne types.

Deeper post-game analysis, and later computer engines, occasionally (somewhat less so than the common stereotype goes, as this intriguing analysis points out) found Tal's famous combinations to be unsound, refutable in principle by perfect defense. By his own admission the player who proves "2+2=5" knows perfectly well that it equals four. What Tal actually possessed was an intuition for generating possibility, for finding, in any position, the move that lead to an explosion of potential. A "flaw", if you can call it, of chess (not present in its Japanese cousin, Shogi), is that exchanges of equal material simplify the position. Tal refused to exchange pieces because he wanted more pieces to attack with — more agents of complication on the board. He took, as one writer put it, the ordinary master's willingness to speculate and pushed it to a place no one else would go. A young Tal so violated the principles of sound, structured play that the old master Romanovsky pronounced he had "no chess future." He had, instead, a future as the most dangerous attacking player who ever lived — feared for the possibility of ending up on the wrong side of a soon-to-be-immortal brilliancy. 

Tal did not dominate by force or by grinding positional pressure. The board never produced anyone who generated more sheer live possibility out of thin air. Against the great defensive and positional masters, the players of iron technique like Petrosian (the "great defender" of chess) or Smyslov, he struggled more. When the possibility was refuted, the attack was gone. 

Tal was also a decent piano player (despite having only three fingers on his right hand), a witty talker and a brilliant writer whose autobiography is one of the few chess books non-players read for pleasure. He loved literature and poetry and drew on them at the board. And he was almost cheerfully negligent of his own body: a chain-smoker and heavy drinker who treated his chronic ill-health as an inconvenience to be ignored until it did him in. Many Beta NF's also share these traits (some probably to a greater degree), but IEI's are more internally focused, prone to melancholy and passive reflection, and EIE's are more often driven by grand, moralistic visions and can be quite theatrical in a controlling way. Tal's persona was more playful and chaotic. He was not a prophet with a message, he simply wanted to unleash his ideas on the board. His energy was spontaneous and "wanton", not performative. And he was far too disorganized and lacked any notable above-average business sense to be an LIE.

One reflection of his is very characteristic of the type. He recalls:

I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov in a USSR Championship. We reached a very complicated position where I was intending to sacrifice a knight. The sacrifice was not obvious; there was a large number of possible variations; but when I began to study hard and work through them, I found to my horror that nothing would come of it... As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the infamous "tree of variations", from which the chess trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.

And then suddenly, for some reason, I remembered the classic couplet by Korney Chukovsky: 'Oh, it was a job quite harsh, To drag the hippo out of the marsh!'

I do not know how the hippo got into the chess board, but although the spectators were convinced that I was continuing to study the position, I, despite my humanitarian education, was trying at this time to work out: just how WOULD you drag a hippo out of the marsh? I remember how jacks figured in my thoughts, as well as levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder.

After a lengthy consideration I admitted defeat as an engineer, and thought spitefully to myself: "Well, just screw it!" And suddenly the hippo disappeared. Went right off the chessboard just as he had come on ... of his own accord! And straightaway the position did not appear to be so complicated. Now I somehow realized that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. And since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.

And the following day, it was with pleasure that I read in the paper how Mikhail Tal, after carefully thinking over the position for 40 minutes, made an accurately calculated piece sacrifice.

The trainers' advice — cut off the small branches, discipline the tree — was the structured-logical, "rational" method (the more LSI/LII way, the Botvinnik way), and it's the method that didn't work for Tal. The hippo was the base Ne breaking the logical impasse by lateral association.