Preparing for the Kramnik-Topalov showdown

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

By way of preview for the Vladimir Kramnik-Veselin Topalov match (coming soon to a chess server near you – the first game takes place September 23), we’ll take the next two shows to revisit some of their classic past battles. (That would be easier than looking at their future battles, after all.) This week’s show will feature Topalov in the winner’s circle, from his first glory year of 1996. The great Bulgarian was an almost unstoppable force that year, winning five major tournaments and skyrocketing from 2670 in July of 1995 to 2750 by the middle of 1996.

The tournament in Novgorod was among those successes, a double round-robin with Topalov outperforming not only Kramnik, but Ivanchuk, Short, Gelfand and J. Polgar as well. In their game from the first cycle, Kramnik pushed Topalov for a while before the latter fought to a draw, but their second game was a completely different story. Topalov seized the advantage from the opening (a Sozin Sicilian), and did a marvelous job of alternating between tactical and strategic themes. Repeatedly we find the following pattern: Topalov poses a concrete tactical threat, eliciting a slight positional concession from Kramnik. Topalov consolidates the positional gain, then builds a new threat, eliciting a further concession – and so on. Eventually – and it doesn’t take all that long – Topalov is able to conclude the game with a quick but lethal kingside attack.

A model game, and an impressive demonstration that although Topalov is renowned for his love of complications, he can defeat a player of the highest caliber by positionally outplaying him, too. For proof and a close look at how he did it, I hope you’ll all join me this week at our usual time – Monday night at 9 pm ET. See you then!

Note: you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos here:

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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