[myownpetard]

This reminds me of my favorite chess quote, "You must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one.” - Tal.

He was notorious for doing just this. He would make what have now been engine analyzed as sub-optimal moves but which lead to such complex and dynamic positions that his opponent would eventually slip and he would exploit their error in dramatic fashion. This is one reason why he is considered one of the most creative attacking players ever.

[cowmoo728]

It's also widely known that if a modern super GM were to play against Tal, they would outright refute the vast majority of his play. It's hard to find a super GM that has not analyzed Tal games as part of their training, and therefore already know the answer, but many of them instantly notice Tal's blunders when presented with his games. So the Tal approach gets harder and harder every year - finding a line that is sub-optimal and therefore not analyzed to death, but also solid enough to maintain winning chances against top players.

[icelancer]

Tal's games haven't aged very well unfortunately. In today's era, someone playing like Tal would get crushed at the highest levels pretty regularly due to much better knowledge of the game.

You still see the general creative spirit in certain top players like Rapport, Mamedyarov, Firouzja, though. Magnus is particularly boring to watch, but it's what makes him great. Fischer was not so different, and felt that Tal was overly creative for the sake of being creative, rather than good.

IM Marc Esserman is probably one of the more exciting players to watch, but he's not a GM, though he arguably plays at GM strength often. He's the author of Mayhem in the Morra, well worth reading if you like Tal's spirit. Esserman is inactive OTB unfortunately, but he does stream chess online.

[CobrastanJorji]

Well sure, they lit up the forest and put in roads and signs and invented GPS. That obsoleted his plan, but it was a great plan at the time.

[I_complete_me]

I totally agree. He was doing it in plain sight, everyone who witnessed his games had equal opportunity to use his approach but they didn't until he was leaving them for dust. The same will be true for current great players (incl. Magnus Carlsen and others) and chess knowledge is bound to evolve. Eventually, perhaps, our chess knowledge will be indistinguishable from that of computers and the game will lose all it's interest to us. But so far this has not happened and we have a great theatre for one tiny aspect of the human intellect to play out on. Let's enjoy it while we can.

[omegaham]

There's always rapid and blitz time controls, where you can't prepare and calculate like that. I know that to a lot of people it's just worse chess, but I think that it's the future of chess as classical OTB becomes more and more ossified from engine analysis.

I don't like bullet, but 15-minute and 3-5 minute chess is wonderful to watch.

[alexvoda]

A different approach is playing the many many variants like Chess960, Crazyhouse, etc.

[icelancer]

I love Tal's games, and you can learn a ton from them - but it's undeniable that he played pretty inaccurately even for his era. Most experts understand it, respect Tal for who he was and what he brought to the field, but caution younger players from emulating him too much and instead to study players way ahead of their time - especially players like Paul Morphy.

[drusepth]

This reminds me of a strategy I used to play with when I was coding bots for chess in college. Rather than searching for the best play per move, I optimized for the move that resulted in states with the largest search space for my opponent (and/or the largest differential in search spaces for me versus my opponent), _then_ searched the upper percentile for the best play.

This strategy worked really well against other students' bots, but not terribly well against the students themselves. I'd be interested to see if it worked better/worse against pro players who think more algorithmically/analytically.