Dennis
Monokroussos writes: In the mid-1920s, Mir Sultan Khan (1905-1966) started
to play chess as we know it. In 1929 his patron and master (these were the
days of British colonial rule in India) brought him to London, and he won the
British championship a few months later. From 1930-1933, he was an active participant
in the international tournament scene, and he didn’t just participate;
he was one of the best players in the world. According to Hooper and Whyld’s
The Oxford Companion to Chess, Sultan Khan was one of the world’s
ten best players at the time; according to Jose Capablanca, he was a genius.
Today we’ll look at a game by this genius, a win in the Hastings 1930/31
tournament against none other than Capablanca himself! In an impressive technical
display that evokes more recent legends like Tigran Petrosian and Anatoly Karpov,
Sultan Khan manages to keep Capa’s pieces either inactive or meaninglessly
active from the opening all the way through the end of the game. That’s
the sort of thing one expects in a master vs. amateur game, but to do so against
one of the all-time greats is remarkable, especially given his own relative
inexperience.
So join us as we take a look a game that’s historically interesting,
a model of excellent positional play, and one of the very first games in what
is now called the Petrosian Variation of the Queen’s Indian Defense –
an important line well-worth an overview. See you tonight!
Dennis Monokroussos'
Radio ChessBase
lectures begin on Mondays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 02:00h GMT,
03:00 Paris/Berlin, 13:00h Sydney (on Tuesday). Other time zones can
be found at the bottom of this page. You can use Fritz or any Fritz-compatible
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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