Fischer vs Spassky – the gripping 13th game

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Once upon a time, chess showed up on the world's radar. The year was 1972, and the occasion the World Championship match between the champion, the USSR's Boris Spassky, and his American challenger, Bobby Fischer. The match served as a convenient metaphor for writers looking to make geopolitical points, but it was first and foremost a chess match.

A great match, which can be viewed, informally, as a series of mini-matches. The first comprised games 1 and 2: Fischer's infamous 29...Bxh2? (and succeeding errors) in game 1 cost him a loss in what had been a normally dead drawn ending; then, in game 2, he simply no-showed.

Yet despite the favorable situation on the scoreboard, Spassky was rattled by Fischer's shenanigans and was obliterated over the next 8 games, getting outscored by a fearful 6.5-1.5 margin. If we take that to be the second mini-match, then the third began in game 11, when Spassky crushed Fischer's Poisoned Pawn variation and pulled to 4.5-6.5 overall. A draw ensued in game 12, and thus game 13 was a big moment for Spassky. He had stopped Fischer's momentum and had the chance to narrow his opponent's lead to a single point.

What happened? Come and see, this Monday night at 9 pm on ChessBase's playchess server – and perhaps the next Monday as well. The game was long, gripping affair with both players producing unusual and brilliant ideas throughout the course of the marathon's 74 moves. It's a game with more than a bit of everything, and one that shouldn't be missed!

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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