AThe Guardian London, Greater London, England Friday, March 17, 1961 - Page 8
Master Meets Master
If the world champion does have something of the air of the genius liable to burn himself out, at the present time his chess stamina is practically inexhaustible. After the final round at Leipzig, in which he lost to Penrose, Tal went to the American players' rooms in the hotel and offered to play five-minute games with Fischer. The world champion had been celebrating the Russian team's victory with wine, and this made his play fuller than ever of daring attacks and speculative sacrifices of material. He was so light-hearted that Fischer, who was usually beaten by Tal during their Leipzig blitz sessions, defeated him in most of the games.
About five in the morning, the Americans were exhausted and wanted to sleep. Tal, however, was still full of energy and insisted on playing for a while longer. By this time, too, the effect of the win had worn off and it was Fischer's turn to lose several games in succession. Hardly had Tal stopped playing with Fischer than he returned to the tournament room to take part in a great five-minute contest open to all the competitors in the team event. Some spectators considered that he was not in his best form: but nevertheless he reached the final and won it.
Tal's year as world champion has clearly increased his general confidence and maturity. He has taken on new responsibilities, as a father, as editor of the Latvian chess magazine, and as a deputy in the Riga Soviet. At Leipzig I asked this youngest champion in the history of the game what he would do if he successfully defended his title both against Botvinnik and against the next challenger in 1963. He had considered, he replied, returning to his research work on an obscure Russian novelist. (He was a brilliant student and was given a special dispensation to enter Riga University at 15, a year younger than the customary minimum.) But he was sure that some new young and powerful challenger would appear in the meantime. In an age when chess prodigies are becoming younger, this is an apposite comment: for even 17-year-old Bobby Fischer, who has just retained the United States championship for the fourth year running is a graybeard compared with a child called Ernest Kim. Kim has already beaten many of the best players of his native town of Tashkent in Central Asia at the ripe old age of 6.
At 21, Tal was already in receipt of a State pension for life of around £3 a week. This was a reward for winning the grandmaster title which he earned after his first success in the Soviet championship. Incidentally, the rewards for the highest success in chess are, as you might think, chickenfeed by the standards of that other contest in Miami. The prizes for the world championship eliminating contests are fixed by the International Chess Federation at a level well below those of other big international tournaments; resentment by masters and grandmasters at what they consider exploitation of the fact that they are virtually obliged to enter the prestige world title contests led, in Leipzig, to the formation of an “International Association of Chessmasters.”.
It might happen that one day we shall hear talk of a chessmasters' strike. If so, it won't be the first time, for in the darkest days of the Russian Revolution, the participants in the 1919 Leningrad championship successfully threatened to stop their tournament unless their butter ration was doubled.
If he retains his title, Tal will earn about £2,000 directly, but much more indirectly. It is normal for international chess tournament organizers to give appearance money to leading masters, and in the Soviet Union simultaneous exhibitions and technical articles for chess magazines are highly rewarding.
Tal's obvious genius for chess is matched by his love for the game. In spite of his other interests, he is probably, along with his American rival Bobby Fischer, the most fanatical chess enthusiast in the world. When he was preparing for the series of eliminating tournaments which made him the official challenger to Botvinnik, he and his trainer would often study around one hundred master games a day. Now he does not train so strenuously. But on the day he arrived in Leipzig I was in the hotel barber's waiting for a haircut when Tal came in, bringing with him the bulletins containing all the games played so far in the tournament. As the scissors and razor went to work on his hair, the champion's eyes ranged along column after column of chess moves—he was playing through every game in the tournament blindfold.
