>> > Now of course the surrebutter (rebuttal to the rebuttal) will be
>> > that players like Tal will score poorly--and indeed they (he)
>> > did--but let's face it, Tal was more of a shock player that relied
>> > on playing the man rather than the board.

>> I'm not convinced by that assertion.  Tal played games that were sound
>> enough that they were very hard to defeat over the board.  I don't
>> think that counts as playing the man rather than the board.

> The whole idea of judging a player by his "error rate" presumes that the
> way to win at chess is to commit no errors.

> But a quick look at players like Lasker, Tal, and Bronstein shows that
> there's another way: make an error in order to induce your opponent to
> make a bigger error.

> Many of Tal's sacrifices would be considered errors by a chess program
> (and that's just counting the ones where you could expect a program to
> see it through to the end, in all variations, in however much time you
> gave it - and if you're only giving even a top program ten minutes a
> move, you're not getting there on a lot of sacrifices) but Tal wasn't
> trying to play perfect chess.