Alexander Morozevich’s coming-out party

Dennis Monokroussos writes: "Last week, we looked at one candidate for the world’s strongest active player – Anand – and we’ll see him in action this week, too, against the other leading contender for that title. No, it’s not Kasparov: one has to play! Rather, it is the extremely gifted and idiosyncratic Alexander Morozevich whose play will be spotlighted this week while Anand, who almost never loses anymore, shows up this time as the victim. Our game features a very young Morozevich in the 1995 PCA/Intel World Cup in the first of what was scheduled to be a two-game mini-match with Anand. Morozevich was 17 and essentially a neophyte to top-level chess, while Anand was just a few months away from his PCA World Championship match with Kasparov. No contest, right? Anand did eventually win the match – in a tiebreaker – but you’d never know it to see the featured game!

Morozevich essays the rare 3.Bc4 in the King’s Gambit but achieves nothing: Anand is adequately prepared and achieves a good position with his extra pawn. However, despite Anand’s fine position and possibly unsurpassed calculating skills, Morozevich not only manages to keep the game quite complicated, but even succeeds in befuddling his poor opponent, ultimately crashing through with a series of powerful sacrifices. An impressive game (after the opening, at least) for anyone, but especially so under the circumstances! So join us this Monday as we dive into a treacherous backwater of opening theory, deepen our tactical mastery and revisit Morozevich’s original coming-out party in the chess world. See you then!"

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Dennis Monokroussos is 38, lives in South Bend, IN (the site of the University of Notre Dame), and is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (in the philosophy of mind) while adjuncting at the University.

He is fairly inactive as a player right now, spending most of his non-philosophy time being a husband and teaching chess. At one time he was one of the strongest juniors in the U.S., but quit for about eight years starting in his early 20s. His highest rating was 2434 USCF, but he has now fallen to the low-mid 2300s – "too much blitz, too little tournament chess", he says.

Dennis has been working as a chess teacher for seven years now, giving lessons to adults and kids both in person and on the internet, worked for a number of years for New York’s Chess In The Schools program, where he was one of the coaches of the 1997-8 US K-8 championship team from the Bronx, and was very active in working with many of CITS’s most talented juniors.

When Dennis Monokroussos presents a game, there are usually two main areas of focus: the opening-to-middlegame transition and the key moments of the middlegame (or endgame, when applicable). With respect to the latter, he attempts to present some serious analysis culled from his best sources (both text and database), which he has checked with his own efforts and then double-checked with his chess software.