The Best Game I've Ever Played - Fully Annotated!

Just read your last post grolich, we must have been cross posting...

very nice, very interesting.  and yes, I'd play this again .. Tal beat GM's with unsound sacrifices and I think this one is borderline sound :P.

Nxe5 is the ONLY thing that bothers me and I can't find any way out of saying advantage white.

the other sacrifices are too interesting and too complex (unclear if you like that word) to say for sure. 

edit- however I will say one thing, my original annotation is correct.. the trio has one dubious, one sound, and one sharp (unclear).

edit #2 - I've sent you a challenge, I think we could learn a lot from eachother.. we have very different approaches to this game :).  hope 3 days is alright?

 Tal actually made COMPLEX sacrifices.

The question I've asked you to ask yourself is, "can I beat stronger players with it?" (not, is it perfect. Yet).

Well, a slightly less than 2000 rated player (me) found the line which refutes the sacrifice (I've no doubt that after h3 black is toast) without much trouble.

So it seems that the right answer to this is: no, it can't beat much stronger players. It's just an approach that is useful for improving. If you play something that ~2000 rated players can refute because you think they are likely to miss the correct defense, you won't improve your chess.

Tal played immensely complex sacrifices, and always trusted tons of analysis. EVEN in ones that were called "intuitive", the term intuitive is used simply because no conclusion could be reached even after the analysis. Not because no analysis was made.

Our approaches are not so different. I play many sacrifices. Lots of them.

I just check if a sacrifice can be refuted before playing it (or when it is played against me). You seem to be overestimating the ability required to refute the sacrifice.

It's usually very easy: You systematically recognize the main threats and play to defuse them. Your sacrifice will be automatically refuted by strong players. ( I hope you realize that the first sacrifice simply leads to a forced loss). In this game, all white has to do is find the h3, h4 line. Not difficult at all. After that, it's an easy win. Building a sacrificial attack in the hopes that your opponent will not find a couple of good moves is just bad approach (and that's not the approach Tal used in his sacrifices at all)

That's okay hijacking is good... at this point my game has been pretty exhaustively analyzed and all we're left with is a difference of opinion regarding what level of risk becomes 'stupid'. 

Can't wait to play this guy though, we just started... I ended up as white.  He's gonna kill me :P.