Monokroussos on all-time favourite Paul Keres

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

The late Estonian GM Paul Keres, who died 30 years ago today, was my first idols, and to this day he remains one of my favorites. At one time the greatest player never to become world champion, and with Korchnoi the person who came the closest to becoming champion for the longest period without ever quite making it, Keres was arguably a top five player for a period of nearly 30 years and a world-class GM for about 40.

Among his many accomplishments are two first places in Candidates' events (Semmering 1937 and AVRO 1938), four seconds (1953, 1956, 1959 and 1962), third place in the 1948 World Championship, strong performances in two other Candidates' events, first place in three Soviet Championships (and second in two others), not to mention countless other match and tournament victories of lesser significance.

He was in addition an outstanding chess writer, an important theorist, a national hero and an all-around well-liked person. In short, a great player, and one worth emulating.

To commemorate this legend of the game, we'll take a look at his late-round victory over Mikhail Tal from the 1959 Candidates' Tournament. Tal won with an outstanding 20/28 (can you imagine some of today's GMs playing in such a monster event? It might take them years to recover!), but Keres' 18.5/28 score - which would have been good enough by percentage to win any other Candidates' tournament in the FIDE history of the game – kept things exciting. Further, in their mini-match, Keres beat Tal 3-1 (and only lost the one game on a blunder).

The game we'll look at in our show this week was a magnificent battle: Keres desperately needed to win, and despite having the Black pieces managed to outplay Tal in the opening and early middlegame. Tal defended extremely resourcefully, though, and it was only Keres' dogged and highly accurate technique that brought home the point.

It's a very well-played game and interesting from start to finish, and quite instructive, too: there are points of genuine interest in the opening, middlegame, endgame, and from the psychological side of things as well. So I hope you'll join me this week, and I think those of you who do will be glad you did!

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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