Mir Sultan Khan vs José Raul Capablanca

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 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.

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