Like a fine wine

Who’s the greatest baseball player of all time: Babe Ruth? Barry Bonds? Wilt Chamberlain or Shaq in basketball? Pele or Maradona in soccer/football? We chess players ask the same questions, too, but we at least have an advantage: chess careers can be quite long! We have recently taken a look at one of the all-time exemplars of a long and fruitful career (Korchnoi); today, we’ll look at another player who showed that although his heyday had passed, he still has it in him to show young whippersnappers a thing or two about the game.

In particular, we’ll look at the 2002 game between the then-69 year old Evgeni Vasiukov and the then-30 year old, 2697-rated Loek van Wely. One would expect a rout in such a case, and that’s just what happened: Vasiukov crushed his young opponent with a beautiful and forceful sacrificial attack. It’s a great game on several levels: as a display of attacking chess, as a hopeful occasion for the more “seasoned” among us, and also as a chance to learn a very nice anti-Sicilian idea which is enormously effective on a practical level. See you all on Monday night – enjoy!

Dennis Monokroussos is 38, lives in South Bend, IN (the site of the University of Notre Dame), and is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (in the philosophy of mind) while adjuncting at the University.

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.

Here are the exact times for different locations in the world

* indicates that the place is currently observing daylight saving time (DST)