Tigran Petrosian – an acquired taste

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Tigran Petrosian (1929-1984, World Champion from 1963-1969) is one of my all-time favorite players, but for many chess fans he's an acquired taste. My suggestion: acquire it! He was a brilliant calculator with a tremendous imagination, but rather than displaying his skills a la Tal (another of my all-time favorites), Petrosian's gifts operated in the service of a prophylactic approach. If the typical Tal game comprised developing all his pieces in the center and then sacrificing something (as someone once said – I think it was Korchnoi), the typical Petrosian game found the opponent slowly strangled by a slow-motion, python-like squeeze. He would sniff out and snuff out his opponent's active ideas in advance, let the opponent damage his own position in a bid for active play, and then, in due course, reap the harvest of his opponent's self-inflicted weaknesses.

This preventive approach has become more widespread among professionals in our day - thanks to Petrosian's influence and, to a slightly lesser degree, Karpov's, but it's badly undervalued amongst the rank-and-file. In this Monday's show, therefore, we'll take a step towards rectifying the situation as we examine his game with Hungarian super-GM Lajos Portisch from the 1978 Lone Pine tournament. Portisch was a traditionally difficult opponent for Petrosian, but despite that history and the white pieces, Petrosian was able to work his magic just the same. In a Rubinstein Nimzo-Indian, White possessed a hanging central pawn duo on d4 and e4: Portisch thought the pawns were a strength, Petrosian deemed them potentially weak. Guess who was right!

To see the details - from a survey of their opening variation to a discussion of hanging pawns, from the tactics of the middle game to Petrosian's outstanding technique in finishing the job – you'll want to join me this Monday night at 9 pm ET. Hope to see you then!

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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