Tal v Smyslov, Candidates 1959: Tal's attack, and the one defence

Mikhail Tal played this game against Vasily Smyslov on 18 September 1959, in round 8 of the Candidates Tournament, which was played in three Yugoslav cities: Bled, Zagreb and Belgrade. Tal, 22, won the tournament and took the world title from Mikhail Botvinnik the next year. According to one account, Smyslov felt Tal's play left too much to chance and told a reporter, days before the game, that he felt duty-bound to beat Tal properly.

The whole game

Smyslov played the Caro-Kann Defence, and Tal answered with 2.d3. By move 14 Tal had given up a bishop to attack Black's king.

What Stockfish makes of it

We had Stockfish check every move. Its verdict is unusual for a famous attacking game: Tal's attack was never winning, only enough for a draw, and it needed exact moves to stay that way.

Tal's choices: 9.O-O-O and 12.Bd2

The Lichess study we used calls 9.O-O-O imprecise, preferring 9.Nd6+; Stockfish agrees, by about half a pawn. At move 12 Stockfish slightly prefers 12.Bxf7+ to 12.Bd2. From there the position is level, and Tal's moves kept it so: 13.Nf5, 16.Nh6+, 17.Qxh5 and 18.Bc3 were each the only move that didn't leave White worse.

18...Nf6: the losing move

Annotators disagree on where Smyslov went wrong. The Lichess study says 18...Bc7 was necessary; a 1992 column in The Spectator named 18...Bf6. Stockfish sides with the study: 18...Bc7 keeps the game level, with White giving perpetual check; 18...Bf6 leaves Black nearly a pawn worse; and after the game move, 18...Nf6, White is about four pawns better. 19.Qxf7! and 21.Nxf7+ were the only moves that cashed in.

The end

After 22.Rxa1 Kxf7 White has a rook for a bishop, and Smyslov resigned after 26.Bd4.

How we checked

• The moves are from a Lichess study of the game and a chess column in The Spectator (4 July 1992), which agree. We replayed every move with python-chess: all are legal.
• The engine: Stockfish 16.1 checked every move at depth 22, and the key moments again at depth 26. "A pawn better" is Stockfish's measure of the position, not a count of material.
• The history: the tournament from FIDE, Smyslov's remark from a ChessBase article by Nagesh Havanur.

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