In article ,
David Richerby wrote:

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. He was trying to win games.

And judging by his results (a world championship; the longest undefeated
streak in tournament games) he did so incredibly well.

To say, therefore, that he was making errors strikes me as somewhat
absurd.

If the "error" was never intended to be an irrefutable move, and it
leads directly to victory against a top player, how can you call it an
error?

-Ron