Fischer vs Karpov – the secret game

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

In 1987, when I was living in Las Vegas, Filipino GM Eugenio Torre came to town to visit some friends and give a simul. When the time came, Torre and friends came to the site in a van, a van I must have walked past several times. Guess who was in it? As I was to discover – several days later, unfortunately – a certain famous chess player now living in Iceland was hiding inside.

My local Filipino friends felt bad that they couldn't tell me that Fischer had been staying at their place, so to make up for it they shared another bombshell, albeit one which I was not to tell anyone else. I agreed, but it seems to me that 18 years is long enough.

Thus, for my ChessBase show for the week of March 28 – April 3, I will present a hitherto secret game played between Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. In 1976, a year after receiving the title by default, Karpov met with Fischer in the Philippines (see Russians vs. Fischer, compiled by Dmitry Plisetsky and Sergey Voronkov, Chess World Ltd. 1994 (366-367), hoping to arrange an unofficial world championship match. Fischer was interested, but the USSR Sports Committee would have none of it and the proposal came to nought.

In the wake of the failed negotiations, however, Fischer and Karpov played a number of informal games before returning to their respective countries, and my Filipino friends were kind enough to let me see one of them. And so 18 years after my discovery, and 29 years after the game itself, that game will become available to a wider audience – at least as long as ChessBase allows me to present it!

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.

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