The story of mikhail tal

Dramatis personae:
A CHESS PLAYER. Mikhail Tal
A JOURNALIST. Who knows, perhaps alias ...
JOURNALIST. Well now, ‘Shall we begin?’. Did you think, on first sitting
down at the chessboard, that you would at some time play a match for the
World Championship? Incidentally, what do you recall of your first game?
CHESS PLAYER. Did I think ... Probably not. Matches for the World
Championship are fairly rare events, and from the physical point of view it is
simply not possible for many chess fans to take part in them. I say fans,
because, after all, even professionals are chess fans.
But about my first game. When one of us first plays chess, he is like a man
who has already caught a dose of microbes of, say, Hong Kong ‘flu. Such a
man walks along the street, and he does not yet know that he is ill. He is
healthy, he feels fine, but the microbes are doing their work.
Something similar, though less harmful, occurs in chess. You have just
been shown that the knight moves like the Russian letter Γ, the bishop
diagonally, the castle (note, the castle, not the rook) in a straight line, while
the queen (once again not the fyerz
1
, but the queen!) – likes her own colour.
You lose the first game. But at some time, if your father or elder brother or
simply an old friend wants to be kind to you, then you win, and as a result
feel very proud of yourself. A few days pass, and suddenly you involuntarily
begin to sense that, without chess, there is something missing in your life.
Then you may rejoice: you belong to that group of people without a natural
immunity to the chess disease ...
This is the way we all begin. And then – the same road; for some it is
smooth, for others less so. But when you sit down to play a match for the
World Championship, then sometimes you recall that first game.
I lost my first serious game. To my cousin. And when, for the first time inmy life, I fell into ‘scholar’s mate’, it was a real tragedy, because at that time
I considered myself to be an experienced player. The fact is that my elders
were extremely kind, and while learning I had many more ‘victories’ to my
credit than defeats.
And then this tragedy. The first in the whole of my 10 years...
Then, for some completely different reason – it seems that I wanted to join
a drama group – I entered the Riga Palace of Pioneers. In the corridor I
suddenly noticed a sign on one of the doors: ‘Chess Section’. Excellent!, I
thought. I’ll go in and say to the man who is helping the others that my
feelings have been hurt, and he will teach me and show me how to win.
I went in. I wasn’t shown anything straight away, but I stayed. I stayed,
and became fascinated, perhaps because I was very fortunate with my first
chess teacher. His name, Yanis Kruzkop, will not be familiar to many chess
players. But he has done a great deal for chess, since in all his pupils he has
implanted, to put it stylistically, a whole-hearted love for the game.
After a few months of lessons I began winning against my elder brother.
But – what a terrible thing – in doing so I did not feel any particular
satisfaction, for I saw that he was not playing well. The time had come to
seek stronger opponents ...
JOURNALIST. Would you recall for us, please, all your first games; the
first in a tournament, the first against a master, the first to appear in print.
CHESS PLAYER. Of course I first played against a master in a
simultaneous display. The young master Ratmir Kholmov, who had just
made a very successful appearance in the 1947 International Chigorin
Memorial Tournament, came to Riga, and therefore we were all highly
intrigued. I won in, as it then seemed to me, combinative style.My first serious tournament was the Riga Youth Championship. At that
time I had a fourth category rating, obtained at the Pioneers’ Palace. It was a
pretty low rating, but according to some unofficial data I was considered to
be a promising player, and was allowed into the Championship.
I started very well: three out of three. But then for the first, and,
unfortunately, not the last time, I had to go directly from the tournament to
hospital on account of scarlet fever. And on the same day that this occurred, a
mass match over 100 boards was held in Riga between adults and young
players. I played somewhere around board 45, and an indication of the way I
was feeling can be gained from the fact that I was mated as White in about 8
moves. Incidentally, it was one of my three starting wins which first appeared
in print, in the All-Union youth magazine Zatyeynik