• Youngest World Champion until Kasparov.
• Played in 8 Olympiads, 5 Best board Results, 3 times absolute best score.
• 6 times USSR Champion.
• Lost only once to Kasparov & once to Karpov.
• A countback of ELO ratings revealed that Tal's rating during his peak around 1960 would be 7th in the all time rankings with 2700 behind Fischer, Kasparov, Capablanca, Botvinnik, Lasker, & Karpov. In fact in 1979 following his wins in Montreal & Riga he went up to 2710.
• 3rd in 1985 Interzonal thus qualifying for Candidates at 49
• Only 3 men played in both USSR-Rest of the World matches - Tal, Larsen, & Polugaevsky.

Quotes about Tal

• If Tal had really studied Chess in the late fifties and early sixties he would have been impossible to play against - Botvinnik
• How does Tal win? - He develops all his pieces in the centre and then sacrifices them somewhere - Bronstein
• If Tal has an open file it will be mate - an onlooker at a Tal post mortem analysis session.
• His games of course are the stuff of fairytales. Tal was variously described as a Sorcerer, a Calculating Machine, the Magician of Riga. He could conjure up fantastic combinations in the most placid of positions, find a sacrifice where none seemed possible, produce activity in the most threadbare collection of pieces. Give him a complex position, the initiative, and the attack would seemingly flow of its own accord, the pieces apparently endowed with extra capabilities.
• The story of Mikhail Tal is a one that would hardly be believed if it were written as a fictional tale. Too fanciful, couldn't happen in real life

Tal quotes

• "If you wait for luck to turn up, life becomes very boring."
• "There are two types of sacrifices - sound ones and mine."