Dirty_Player

The situation with the 16 elves really affected me because I, when I wasn't very good at the game, tried to play with 16 elves (upgraded ones), and almost lost some of them (lost some along the way in battles) in TREASURE. And then they laughed at me for a long time for doing such a stupid thing! It was a game, not here on HW, but when I was still living in a dormitory.

Kyiv, the USSR championship, the distant year of 1964, a game between Tal and Evgeny Vasyukov. "A very complex position was being created," Mikhail later recalled, "in which I was going to sacrifice a knight... Thoughts are piling up on each other... The notorious 'tree of variations,' from which coaches recommend pruning branch by branch, is growing at an incredible rate for me. And suddenly... I remembered the lines of Korney Chukovsky: 'Oh, it's not an easy job - to pull a hippopotamus out of the swamp.'"

Tal seriously and for a long time thought not about the position on the board, but about Chukovsky's task, recalling everything he knew about jacks, levers, helicopters, and even a rope ladder for lifting two or three tons of living cargo. "And after much deliberation," he later laughed at himself, "I could not find a single way to pull the hippopotamus out of the swamp and angrily thought: 'Well, let it sink!'"

Only after that did Tal return to the board with his thoughts. He did not refrain from sacrificing the knight, which promised an interesting game. The next day, all the newspapers wrote that Mikhail Tal, after forty minutes of careful consideration of the position, made an elegant, precisely calculated sacrifice of a piece..