In the Jaws of the Tiger – part two point five

by ChessBase
8/9/2007 – Last week our Playchess trainer Dennis Monokroussos presented a game by Tiger Hillarp Persson, the second by this wildly imaginative player. The game was so rich that he only made it halfway through. So this week Dennis continues with his analysis, starting from move 17. Don't miss it!

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Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Last week, we started examining the fantastic battle between Peter Heine Nielsen and Tiger Hillarp Persson from the 1998 Politiken Cup, and it turned out that the game was so rich we only made it halfway through! Have a look at the first 17 moves for yourself:

1.c4 g6 2.d4 Bg7 3.e4 d6 4.Nc3 Nf6 5.Be2 O-O 6.Nf3 e5 7.O-O Nc6 8.d5 Ne7 9.b4 a5 10.Ba3 Nh5 11.c5 axb4 12.Bxb4 Nf4 13.Nb5 c6 14.Nc7 Nexd5 15.Nxa8 Nxb4 16.cxd6 Bf5 17.a3 Nbd5

Crazy enough for you? After all the sacs, White is the exchange ahead but material is hanging all over the place, and Black enjoys a serious initiative. Nevertheless, the remainder of the game, while less flashy than the first part (but not by much, especially when you see the variations I’ve unearthed!), is full of content as well. We’ll start with a brief recap of the first part of the game for the benefit of those who might have missed part 1 (but it won’t be any substitute for checking it out in the archives – there’s just so much to see there) and to limber us up mentally for part 2, and then turn to the second half of this struggle. Hillarp Persson plays some of the wildest chess on the planet, and if this game doesn’t make you a fan of his, you might want to check your pulse. It’s that good.

Remember, the show is free and starts at 9 p.m. ET. See you then!

Dennis Monokroussos' Radio ChessBase lectures begin on Thursdays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 01:00h GMT, 02:00 Paris/Berlin, 11:00h Sydney (on Friday). Other time zones can be found at the bottom of this page. You can use Fritz or any Fritz-compatible program (Shredder, Junior, Tiger, Hiarcs) to follow the lectures, or download a free trial client.

You can find the exact times for different locations in the world at World Time and Date. Exact times for most larger cities are here. And you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos offline in the Chess Media System room of Playchess:

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 40, 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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