{"id":1148,"date":"2023-11-01T18:10:31","date_gmt":"2023-11-01T17:10:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skolasachu.com\/?p=1148"},"modified":"2026-07-07T18:53:21","modified_gmt":"2026-07-07T16:53:21","slug":"how-i-drew-with-tal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skolasachu.com\/en\/jak-jsem-remizoval-s-talem\/","title":{"rendered":"How I drew with Tal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fifty years ago, on 2 November 1973, I apparently stood at the threshold of my chess journey. I had only really known how to play proper chess for about two years (before that, my sister and I had been playing with somewhat modified rules), but like many other young chess players, I was literally kicked into action by the match for the chess crown that the whole world \u2013 not just the chess world \u2013 was watching with bated breath. In the summer of 1972, the defending champion Boris Spassky met challenger Robert Fischer in Reykjavik...<\/p>\n

After that, I just devoured chess! Before the summer of 1972, the head of the school chess club, Mr Ing. Ad\u00e1mek, \u201aforced\u2018 me to join Pion\u00fdr so that he could register me in the autumn and I could play competitively.<\/p>\n

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Today, when twelve-year-olds earn grandmaster titles and ten-year-olds become masters, it may seem almost amusing to include a reproduction of my registration card, from which it is clear that at the time of this game I held (as it was then called) 2nd performance class<\/strong>. To such sceptics, I would like to remind them of the situation back then. There were no national ratings yet, Czechoslovakia could boast only four or five grandmasters at the time, and in the entire West Bohemian region there were only slightly more candidate masters. It was then a title that, in my opinion, had roughly the same weight as the international master title has today in the Czech chess environment.<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

A year passed like water, and I had learned almost by heart the 3\u20134 books I owned at the time. One of them will be mentioned below, but my favourite was Keres\u2019s 1971 monograph Dreispringerspiel bis K\u00f6nigsgambit, which was most often found in bed under my pillow.<\/p>\n

Simultaneous exhibition with Tal<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

I do not know exactly which officials came up with the idea to organise international blitz tournaments every year in Pilsen during the celebrations of the Great October Socialist Revolution, but it was a brilliant initiative! They were called The Red Flag Tournament<\/em> and the inaugural edition was held precisely on 3\u20134 November 1973.<\/p>\n

As was customary, a day or two before the tournament, the most famous participants travelled around the West Bohemian region to play a number of simultaneous exhibitions. Fortunately for us young Pilsen hopefuls, we got the most famous and significant of them \u2013 former world champion and then world number two Michail Tal!<\/p>\n

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Note: 1\/ The attentive reader will notice that the rating list is dated January 1973. This is because in the early years when the brilliant invention (the scoring system was devised by Professor Arp\u00e1d Elo, a Hungarian-American statistician) saw the light of day, the ELO list was published only once or twice a year! 2\/ Many attentive readers will be surprised by Robert Fischer\u2019s overwhelming lead, which is still ranked 21st in historical lists even after more than 50 years. This is because in the fight for the world crown Fischer achieved results that few will ever repeat. He won an incredible 20 games in a row! 3\/ The intelligent reader will also surely know or guess that over the years ratings have suffered significant inflation comparable to the fall of the dollar. This continues to this day. More and more points enter the system nowadays, for example due to various development coefficients (youth 40, world elite 10, and so on). <\/em><\/p>\n

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I learned that I had been selected among 30 participants in the simultaneous exhibition against the 8th world champion about 14 days before the event. By that time, Keres\u2019s book had been slid back from under the pillow into my bookshelf. Next up<\/em> was Suetin\u2019s monumental work Lehrbuch der Schachtheorie, which I got my hands on sometime in September 1973. The book had over 500 pages (it contained all openings), so even with my \u201aquite decent\u2018 eidetic memory, I obviously could not absorb all the opening pages that interested me.<\/p>\n

Sometime in mid-October, my choice in the book fell on the Spanish Game with Black, specifically the Marshall Attack. I replayed some variations, but mostly just read them. The exception was a sub-variation marked in the image below.<\/p>\n

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Note: unfortunately, the scanned page does not come from the original book but from the so-called \u201astark bearbeitete Auflage\u2018 published in 1975. The original had been too much affected by the ravages of time.<\/em><\/p>\n

Fate or luck?<\/span><\/strong><\/h4>\n

The simultaneous was about to start soon! Michail Nechemjevich expressed the wish that the strongest, older players on paper should sit at the head of the rectangle<\/em>. Of course, he wanted to focus more on those. The labels of all the others were \u2013 I believe \u2013 placed more or less randomly.<\/p>\n

Well, the reader probably guesses, what appeared on my chessboard!<\/strong><\/p>\n