Chess music video Tal-Botvinnik Moscow 1960 game 1

A barrymitchellmusic.com video based on the first game of the 1960 World Chess Championship between Mikhail Tal and Mikhail Botvinnik.

In his excellent book Mikhail Tal’s Best Games of Chess PH Clarke gives this introduction to the game.

The long-awaited first game was as dramatic as anyone could have wished. One of the most interesting things about it was that the accepted role of the contestants seemed to have been reversed: for here was the World Champion [Botvinnik] sacrificing pawns for the attack, while his young challenger pursued a more strategic line. Apparently, Botvinnik had decided to seize the initiative as soon as he could and give Tal a taste of his own medicine. Had his plan succeeded it would no doubt have been hailed as a brilliant psychological stroke, but when it failed it was equally vehemently censured. At all events Tal never seemed in any trouble and, playing in his usual confident style, rapidly consolidated his material advantage. His win gave him a wonderful start to the match.

Tal went on the win the match and to become the youngest ever World Champion, a distinction he held until Gary Kasparov won his first world title. This game maybe therefore be considered to one of the most important of Tal’s career.

1 thought on “Chess music video Tal-Botvinnik Moscow 1960 game 1

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s