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| Title: Mikhail Tal, 8th World Champion |
Author: Sergei Soloviov |
Language: 
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Published: 1999 |
| Publisher: Convekta Ltd. |
Homepage: http://www.chessassistant.com |
| Price: £ 21 |
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| System
requirements:
Pentium 75 Mhz, 16 MB RAM, Windows 95/98/2000/NT |
| Test Computer:
Pentium III 450 Mhz, 384 MB RAM and Windows 98 |
| Reviewed by: Søren
Søgaard |
Date: 13/08 2001 |
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This review about the games of the 8th World Champion Mikhail Tal
is the first from the publisher Convekta Ltd. Maybe the publisher Convekta Ltd. is
unknown to most people, but the company also publish
the Chess Database "ChessAssistant" which is known
by most people. This product about Mikhail Tal was published in 1999 and contains
2592 games Tal played from 1949 to his death in 1992. Besides
the games this CD-ROM also contains an tutorial called "Play as
Tal" that includes 260 "quiz positions" in which you
can try to find strong and beautiful moves played by Tal in his
games. The Interface is "Chess Assistant Light" that is
included on the CD-ROM, and it is installed together with the games
and the tutorial. Also installed is the Chessengine "Crafty"
that can help you to analyze a position or a game.
Mikhail Tal - Game collection
 All
games are annotated in Informant-style, and was done by the same
team that wrote the book about "Mikhail Tal - Games" a
4-volume series from the Publisher Chess Stars. In the manual you
can read that "All the games are deeply annotated by GMs
Kochiev, Makarichev, Sveshnikov, Yudasin and Petersburg IMs."
As in the books you can't determine who annotated which game. It
is a bad habit from the team behind Chess Stars,
but all the same the annotations are in fact very instructive.
Another thing I noticed playing through the games was that the
annotations is exactly the same as in the books from Chess Stars(!!) -
just in case you own the books and thought about buying this product
;-)
As you can see from the screen dump the CD-ROM also contains 45
photos of Mikhail Tal (most of the pictures of course shows Tal with
a cigarette in his hand!). If you click on the year you get a picture
from that year, and looking through the pictures you want to know more about this man! Again I'm amazed about how he changed from
1960
when he won the World Championship, to his early death in 1992.
Besides this you can see Tal's result from the tournaments if you click on the tournament
name.
For every tournament there
is a tactical blow from one of the games, and as you  can see from
the screen dump the result is listed below.
Playing through the games and variations is easy, but I don't
want to go further into this subject as every ChessDatabase on the
market are products of high standard!!
Play as Tal
As already mentioned there is another program on the CD called
"Play as Tal". This program contains tactical problems to
solve from positions arising from Tal's games. The problems are categorized by theme:
- Attack on the King
- Attack on the uncastled king
- Both opponents castled to the same side
- Positions with opposite side castling
- Correct Intuitive Sacrifices
- Tactical Blows
- Strategical methods
- Endgame Technique
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If you like it the program will determine your ELO after each
Practice or Test. If you are more lazy like myself, you just play
through the games for fun and practice your tactical ability. If you are
serious about this it is a really good tool to practice just that!
And what could be better than practicing your tactical ability than
using Tal's games?
I must confess that I like the idea, and I had a
great time trying to solve the problems although I don't think that
all problems was of the same high standard. Sometimes there was just
not enough explanation about why one move was better than the
other - sometimes all that was announced was that it was a "bad
move". The program isn't perfect, but everybody with an ELO
above 1900 can benefit from it.
Final remarks
I can only recommend this product, although there are some points
that I missed in this product:
- An Biography telling the highlights of Tal's life and
Chesscareer.
- A complete list of tournament and matchresults
- The best games annotated with text and explanations instead of
Informator-style. Personally I still prefer the good old way of
annotating a game!!
Conclusion:
If you like the games of the great Mikhail Tal this product
gives you all his games annotated in Informant-style!! Besides
this you also get an extra program "Play like Tal",
photos and his results in all tournaments. The annotations are
the same as in the collection by the Publisher Chess-Stars,
and this CD is not an biography but merely a game collection. The product is from 1999, but all the
same I think it is a great product.
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