Kyiv, USSR Championship, way back in 1964, a game between Tal and Evgeny Vasyukov. "A very complex position was developing," Mikhail later recalled, "in which I was going to sacrifice a knight... Thoughts were piling up on each other... The infamous 'tree of variations,' from which coaches recommend pruning branch by branch, was growing at an incredible rate. 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 pondered not the position on the board, but the task of Chukovsky, 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 couldn't 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 didn't 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...