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Radio ChessBase: Adams on the Attack
04.09.2005 – England's world championship candidate Michael Adams is generally regarded to be a positional player. But to reach 2700 one needs to possess a high degree of excellence in all aspects of the game. This is proven by Adams in an unusual game against Judit Polgar, which Dennis Monokroussos dissects on his Monday night Playchess lecture.

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Dennis Monokroussos writes:

In anticipation of the forthcoming FIDE World Championship in San Luis, Argentina, we continue our preview by presenting an unusual game between Judit Polgar and Michael Adams. Polgar is known for her prowess as an attacking player, while Adams is generally thought a positional player, but it's impossible for anyone to reach 2700 without possessing a high degree of excellence in all aspects of the game.

England's World Championship candidate Michael Adams

Thus, while we're used to seeing Polgar demolish opponents with aggressive attacking play, Adams is capable of doing the same – and in this week's game, he does. Essaying the Marshall Gambit against Polgar's Ruy Lopez in their game from Dos Hermanas 1999, Adams achieves the initiative characteristic of this variation. Black's kingside play is counterbalanced by White's extra pawn and potential queenside and central play, and indeed, the position remained in a razor-sharp balance for quite some time.

It often happens that even the sharpest positions can be resolved into "normal" positions, and at such moments accurate judgment is a must. Polgar could have neutralized Black's kingside play, albeit at the cost of her own counterattacking ambitions, but that was a price she was unwilling to pay. Against a lesser player that might well have succeeded, but on this occasion Adams's assessment, position, and subsequent play proved superior.

A fine, theoretically significant win by Adams, and worthy of your time. I hope therefore to see all of you this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET. (For European night owls, that’s 3 a.m. Tuesday, server time.) You’ll be glad you came!

Dennis Monokroussos is 39, lives in South Bend, IN, and is an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

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.

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