Christiansen vs Wojtkeiewicz in Fischer's Variation

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Larry Christiansen didn’t win the U.S. Chess Championship this year, but he did win its most memorable game. His opponent, Aleksander Wojtkiewicz, is a real Najdorf specialist, but on this occasion it was Christiansen who was ready with some fantastic preparation in Fischer’s 6.Bc4 variation. It is often the case in the Najdorf that the long term factors favor Black, but first he has to survive the middlegame – and so it was here. In return for a piece, White achieved two major gains: serious attacking chances and incredible complexity. (The complexity affects both players, but at least part of that complexity Christiansen had worked at home. Unsurprisingly, Wojtkiewicz went astray and his opponent went on to win a brilliant miniature.)

Those factors, plus the game’s theoretical significance, make this a great game to study and analyze – and sure enough, strong players have been lining up to publish their thoughts on this game. We’ll take a look at what’s been said so far, as well as what we’re able to find in our analysis. All together it should make for a splendid Monday evening (9 p.m. ET) – I 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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