CHESS: FISCHER versus TAL

It was Bobby Fischer's birthday yesterday. He was born March 9th 1943 and would have been 75 now had he lived. However, he died in 2005 but Chess Base featured a wild game that he played with Tal back in 1960 in Leipzig. Black adopted the French Defence, Winawer Variation, and the game went like this (Fischer is White: there's still a glitch in the display below, the names show up in the preview but not in the final display):

[White "Fischer, Robert James"] [Black "Tal, Mikhail"] [Event "Leipzig ol (Men) fin-A"] [Site "Leipzig"] [Date "1960.??.??"] [Round "5"] [Result "1/2-1/2"] [WhiteElo "0"] [BlackElo "0"] [ECO "C18"] 1. e4 e6 2. d4 d5 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. e5 c5 5. a3 Ba5 6. b4 cxd4 7. Qg4 Ne7 8. bxa5 dxc3 9. Qxg7 Rg8 10. Qxh7 Nbc6 11. Nf3 Qc7 12. Bb5 Bd7 13. O-O O-O-O 14. Bg5 Nxe5 15. Nxe5 Bxb5 16. Nxf7 Bxf1 17. Nxd8 Rxg5 18. Nxe6 Rxg2+ 19. Kh1 Qe5 20. Rxf1 Qxe6 21. Kxg2 Qg4+ 1/2-1/2

Tal draws of course by perpetual check, his only recourse because of his material disadvantage but it is certainly a short and sharp game, very much in Tal's style. I retrieved the game from chess.com. According to that site's database, they played a total of 13 games, each of them winning four of apiece and drawing the remaining five. All Tal's wins date from 1958 to 1959 when Fischer was still quite young. From 1960 onwards, Tal never defeated Fischer. Tal was not that much older than Fischer at the time, being born in 1936 in Riga, Latvia. The table below summarises their rivalry:

Tal was world champion in 1960 after defeating Mikhail Botvinnik but the latter regained the title the following year. Tal won the strong Bled tournament in 1961, even though he lost his individual game with Fischer.

Getting back to the French Defence however, it's interesting to remember how Alpha Zero, playing White, recently crushed Stockfish when this engine replied 1...e6 against 1.e4. Here is an example of one such game:

As regards the Winawer Variation of the French Defence, it does tend to produce sharp games such as the one between Fischer and Tal shown above. After 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5, the four main variants are:

These statistics are taken from 365chess.com. Many other third moves for White are listed but the number of games played using them fall off sharply. For example, the analysis of the fifth most common move 3.Bd3 is based on only 997 games. However, several of these variants yield good results for both White and Black with the number of draws shrinking. Here are the next three most popular moves by White: