Tournament Players PROTIP: Mikhail Tal edition

Given that the Tal Memorial Tournament is currently going on in Moscow, it seems fitting to dedicate an edition of Tournament Players PROTIPS to The Great One hisownself. With no further ado, here's a collection of Tal's best PROTIPS:

1. 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.
2. In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively, simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language.
3. If you wait for luck to turn up, life becomes very boring.
4. Of course, errors are not good for a chess game, but errors are unavoidable and in any case, a game without any errors, or as they say a 'flawless game', is colorless.
5. Quiet moves often make a stronger impression than a wild combination with heavy sacrifices.
6. Fischer is Fischer, but a knight is a knight!*
7. If (Black) is going for victory, he is practically forced to allow his opponent to get some kind of well-known positional advantage.
8. I go over many games collections and pick up something from the style of each player.
9. For pleasure you can read the games collections of Andersson and Chigorin, but for benefit you should study Tarrasch, Keres and Bronstein.
10. I like to grasp the initiative and not give my opponent peace of mind.
11. Drink your coffee only when it is your opponent's move!

And finally, this gem:

Journalist:   It might be inconvenient to interrupt our profound discussion and change the subject slightly, but I would like to know whether extraneous, abstract thoughts ever enter your head while playing a game?

Tal:   Yes. For example, I will never forget my game with GM Vasiukov on 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. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. 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 Ivanović Chukovsky: "Oh, what a difficult job it was. To drag out of the marsh the hippopotamus".

I do not know from what associations the hippopotamus 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 hippopotamus 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 let it drown!" And suddenly the hippopotamus 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.

— Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal.

 * Decades later Peter Svidler would add to this, "A pawn is a pawn." Later still, either Svidler or Jan Gustaffson extended this to, "Two pawns are two pawns." Chess wisdom is extended a little further each year!