What does a hippopotamus, a Soviet poem, and a chess sacrifice have in common? Mikhail Tal’s imagination leaps beyond the board—offering insight not just into chess mastery, but how humans (and AI) come to know.
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Mikhail Tal and the Hippopotamus in the Middle of a Chess Tournament
It’s 1964. The 32nd Soviet Chess Championship is underway in Kyiv. On one board, the Caro-Kann Defense has just been played, and with the white pieces sits the legendary “Magician of Riga,” Mikhail Tal. Across from him, playing with black pieces: Evgeny Vasiukov.
Eighteen moves in, the position on the board is dense, tangled, hard to parse. Tal considers sacrificing a knight, but the lines don’t quite add up. The variations multiply. The ideas clash.
In his own words:
“The sacrifice was not altogether obvious, and there were a large number of possible variations, but when I conscientiously began to work through them, I found, to my horror, that nothing would come of it. Ideas piled up one after another. I would transport a subtle reply by my opponent, which worked in one case, to another situation where it would naturally prove to be quite useless. As a result my head became filled with a completely chaotic pile of all sorts of moves, and the famous ‘tree of variations’, from which the trainers recommend that you cut off the small branches, in this case spread with unbelievable rapidity.” (Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal)
Caught in this thicket of analysis, Tal’s thoughts drifted—unexpectedly—to poetry.
He remembered the final lines of The Telephone, a beloved children’s poem by Kornei Chukovsky, one of the Soviet Union’s most cherished authors. Known for his playful language and rhythmic verse, Chukovsky ends the poem with this couplet:
“Oh, what a difficult task it is / to get the hippopotamus out of the swamp!”
And just like that, Tal found himself imagining the dilemma. How would one rescue a hippopotamus from a swamp? He considered a rope ladder. Hydraulic jacks. Helicopters. Levers.
Then, with a sudden flash of humor—or clarity—he gave up:
“‘Well, let it drown!’ Suddenly the hippopotamus disappeared, went from the chessboard just as he had come on – of his own accord! Straight away the position did not appear to be so complicated. I somehow realised that it was not possible to calculate all the variations, and that the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. Since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.” (Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal)
So, after forty minutes—not of precise calculation, but of chaotic thought and poetic detour—Tal made the sacrifice. And he went on to win.
The next day, a journalist wrote that Tal had delivered a “well-calculated” knight sacrifice. The writer, of course, had no idea about the hippopotamus.
In Tal, traces of creativity, imagination, love for chess, the humanities, and artistic expression, sacrifices on the board, wit, humor, etc., come together.
The hippopotamus moment reveals not only Tal’s literary soul, but the strange ways in which intuition surfaces in the mind of a genius.
Let us remember that he studied and taught literature, and his thesis was titled Satire in the novel‘The Twelve Chairs’by Ilf and Petrov.
The anecdote is collected in The Magic Tactics of Mikhail Tal, by Karsten Müller and Raymund Stolze; in The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal, by Mikhail Tal; and in How Life Imitates Chess, by Garry Kasparov.
This anecdote by Tal is a creative work similar, in a sense, to what we find in the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez or in one of the mosaics at the entrance of Hagia Sophia.
Just like in those works, Tal employs a rhetorical figure called mise en abyme (construction in abyss), which can be used in other spheres such as painting, cinema, literature, etc.
According to the Dictionary of Rhetoric and Poetics by Helena Beristáin, the construction in abyss is:
“The development of an action within the limits of another action… This occurs when a character of the narrated story takes charge of narrating another story, occurring in another space, in another time… thus becoming a narrator character.”
In the poem The Telephone by Chukovsky, the main character—whose identity is unknown—receives call after call from different characters: a polar bear, a crocodile, chimpanzees, a grizzly bear, flamingos, a pig, a polar bear, a seal, a gazelle, a deer, a kangaroo, and a rhinoceros—the latter is the one who calls to ask for help getting the hippopotamus out of the swamp.
All these animals present situations or problems that require the main character’s intervention, which leaves him without sleep for three days in a row.
The last two lines of the poem (“Oh, what a difficult task it is / to get the hippopotamus out of the swamp!”) are the synthesis of this entire lyrical fable.
Getting the hippopotamus out of the swamp represents solving the problems posed in each phone call—problems that, when accumulated, are like the great weight of the hippopotamus and like the possible variations in the 18th position on the Tal vs. Vasiukov board.
In this case, Tal is the character of the first narrated story: the chess player who, playing the Caro-Kann Defense with white, has the problem of calculating and evaluating lines or variations endlessly in a complex position.
And Tal is also, by similarity of the situation in which he finds himself, the character in The Telephone, even though they may seem dissociated or even if Tal doesn’t give us further explanation.
But what is the richness and the teaching of Mikhail Tal with this lyrical fable?
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Tal: knowledge through intuition in the age of AI
As a rhetorical figure, the construction in abyss has been used for various purposes, among them:
Fulfilling a playful intention
Blurring the relationship between reality and fiction, between life and literature
Creating self-reflection in a narrative
Representing the creative process in the work itself
But the function that interests us is the one that serves the narrator as a heuristic strategy, that is, of making a problem understandable through shortcuts or simplified mental methods.
In this case, it is to make understandable the recursiveness of the problems of calculation on the board, as well as the problems that arise after each phone call in the poem.
And yet, it’s not the only heuristic used by Mikhail Tal. There is another element he relies on, which has sometimes been considered a heuristic: intuition.
Regarding this, let’s remember that Tal gives a different ending to the poem The Telephone:
“Let the hippopotamus drown!”
The original poem ends with the repetition of one problem after another. But the Magician of Riga decides that the hippopotamus, as a representation of the great problem, must die.
And at the same time, on the chessboard, the knight must be sacrificed.
Tal’s intuition is that under the given circumstances (the infinite recursion of calculation and the emergence of new problems), it is better that the hippopotamus die and that the knight be sacrificed.
Don’t forget the following words by Tal:
“…the knight sacrifice was, by its very nature, purely intuitive. Since it promised an interesting game, I could not refrain from making it.”
In Spanish, at least three meanings of the word “intuition” are distinguished: 1) as a hunch, premonition, or clairvoyance; 2) as the faculty of understanding things instantly, without the need for reasoning; and 3) as the intimate and instantaneous perception of an idea or truth that appears evident to the one who has it.
The last of these definitions is philosophical. And we know that the history of this word originates in medieval Latin.
Centuries later, Kant will say: “All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from them to concepts, and ends in ideas.”
The fact that hunch, premonition, and the instantaneous perception of an idea or truth all converge in the word “intuition” speaks to how powerful this concept is for our knowledge.
In fact, in the famous book Game Changer, Garry Kasparov says, “AlphaZero’s evaluations were closer to my intuitive feeling about a given position.”
What caught the attention of elite chess players about AlphaZero’s victories over Stockfish was how they happened: surprise flank attacks, sacrifices of pawns or major pieces to gain more activity with the remaining ones; in general, an intuitive attack and defense, unlike Stockfish’s calculating approach.
According to Howard Gardner, in The Mind’s New Science, early computer programs failed to represent the human cognitive process because human beings “employ heuristics, strategies, biases, images, and other vague and approximate procedures.”
To overcome this problem, specialists had to devise programs that could learn, and they relied primarily on studies from psychology, linguistics, anthropology, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience.
With the new learning system approach, AlphaZero:
“…works more like the brain, by learning knowledge implicitly through experience – it actually mirrors what we think of as our intuitive processes more closely. This makes these systems more suitable for dealing with messy real-world tasks because they are trained in the same way our brains are, namely through experience.” (Game Changer, Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan)
The anecdote of Mikhail Tal, from a field as narrow as the game of chess, reminds us today—within a context of advancing AI—that the overwhelming calculation of variations (and the consequent terror it may cause us) is just one among other branches in which human knowledge can develop.
Another branch is intuition, as well as the other heuristics we find in such diverse areas as literature.
For those who teach chess to children and young people, a crucial issue is to solve how to help them develop better intuitions, how to make their learning richer and more useful for solving problems, what strategies are most useful for each one, etc.
Mikhail Tal was not just a chess player; he had a complex and interesting personality that he expressed on the board. His anecdote is a vindication of intuition over calculation.
Judit Polgar’s story
is also key in the context of AI, education, and creativity, so we recommend that you read more about her.
Reading recommendations
Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science.
Beristaín, Helena, Diccionario de Retórica y Poética.
Peter Hühn, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid, Handbook of Diachronic Narratology.
Mikhail Tal, The Life and Games of Mikhail Tal.
Karsten, Mueller y Raymund Stolze, The Magic Tactics of Mikhail Tal.
Diagonales Abiertas
