The Hippopotamus in the Marsh

Mikhail Tal became world chess champion in 1960, at twenty-three, by sacrificing pieces with such cheerful recklessness that opponents borrowed sunglasses to avoid his stare. He played the way other people set fires. The Soviets called him the Magician from Riga.

In 1964, at the USSR Championship in Kyiv, he sat across from Vasiukov and considered a knight sacrifice.

He could not calculate it. For reasons he never fully understood, his mind had been seized by a children's poem by Korney Chukovsky about a hippopotamus stuck in a marsh, and he could not get the hippopotamus out. He tried levers. He tried ropes. He tried, at one point, a helicopter. Forty minutes passed at the board, his clock bleeding, the hippopotamus refusing to budge from a marsh that did not exist.

He sacrificed the knight on intuition and won.

The next morning's paper congratulated him on forty minutes of deep calculation producing an accurately judged combination. What he had actually been doing, he later wrote, was giving up. He had looked at the hippopotamus, the marsh, the levers, the helicopter, and thought, calmly, well, let it drown.

The hippopotamus, he reported, then disappeared from the chessboard of its own accord.