How a 12-year-old demystified Tal

by Karsten Müller - 15/01/2025

It happened during a training session we arranged for three young talents in the ChessBase office. It was conducted by Dr. Karsten Müller, who is a leading endgame expert. Some time later, Karsten wrote an article in the (German language) Chess Calendar describing how the pre-teen Dommaraju Gukesh refuted a Tal brilliancy by the legendary Mikhail Tal. Here's an English translation of Karsten's article. Photo: ChessBase

In April 2019, at the invitation of Frederic Friedel, a number of young Indians such as Nihal Sarin (14) and Dommaraju Gukesh (12) came to Hamburg to ChessBase for some endgame training. This included my giving them sets of problems with tactical problems. Including one with twelve magical combinations of Tal, to be solved in a total of ten minutes.

That's me, working with Savitha Shri, Gukesh and Siddarth in the ChessBase office in Hamburg. Watching in the background is Gukesh's father Rajinikanth.

Tal - Carlton, 1974

White to play

Check out GM Dr. Karsten Mueller's detailed analysis

Incidentally, Gukesh got everything right on my task sheet with twelve combinations, requiring only a little more than half the time allocated. And here is a video with an impression of how our training sessions were conducted.

And this is me being challenged by a 12-year-old in an Endgame Magic recording

Second-youngest GM of all time

Dommaraju Gukesh, born on 29 May 2006 in Chennai, was awarded the title of FIDE Grandmaster in March 2019. This made him the second-youngest person to ever receive this title – after Sergei Karjakin, who became a grandmaster in 2002 at the age of twelve years and seven months. Gukesh met the required standards in April 2018 at the 18th Bangkok Open, in December 2018 at a GM tournament in Paracin, Serbia, and in January 2019 at the Delhi Open. He also won the 2018 World Youth Championship in the U12 age group in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

About the Author

Karsten Müller is considered to be one of the greatest endgame experts in the world. His books on the endgame - among them "Fundamentals of Chess Endings", co-authored with Frank Lamprecht, that helped to improve Magnus Carlsen's endgame knowledge - and his endgame columns for the ChessCafe website and the ChessBase Magazine helped to establish and to confirm this reputation. Karsten's Fritztrainer DVDs on the endgame are bestsellers. The mathematician with a PhD lives in Hamburg, and for more than 25 years he has been scoring points for the Hamburger Schachklub (HSK) in the Bundesliga.

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