Pinter's brilliance against Portisch

GM Jozsef Pinter in the 80s

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

In the mid-1980s, Hungarian grandmaster Lajos Portisch was in the world's super-elite, while his countryman Jozsef Pinter was "only" a strong GM. In this game from the 1984 Hungarian Championship, however, the expected roles are reversed: while Portisch certainly didn't play poorly, Pinter's chess was brilliant. In what looked like a position where Portisch would have all the fun, trying to milk a small edge in space and structure, Pinter proved that the dynamic factors had not yet been exhausted. The queens were off, but that didn't mean that it was an endgame or that Portisch's king was thereby immune to all danger. Pinter was able to whip up a dangerous attack, and ironically, the crucial piece in that attack – the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back – was his own king!

So I hope you'll tune in this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET: it's an inspiring effort by Pinter, and his strategy in the late opening/early middlegame, after the queen trade, offers a fine model for Semi-Tarrasch and Gruenfeld players alike, as we shall see. If you play either of these openings (or face them), then this game will very likely be of interest to you.

Note: you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos here:

Enter the above archive room and click on "Games" to see the lectures. The lectures, which can go for an hour or more, will cost you between one and two ducats. That is the equivalent of 10-20 Euro cents (14-28 US cents).

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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