Remembering Lembit Oll

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

The late Lembit Oll (1966-1999) was a very talented and strong Estonian GM. Like any strong grandmaster, he could play to the needs of the position, but he seemed especially at home in extremely sharp opening variations. That makes his games a real pleasure for fans to play through, and the game we’ll look at this week is no exception.

Playing in the 1989 USSR Championship against Mikhail Ulibin, Oll, with White, went into a sharp line of the Winawer French, going into a subvariation that had recently become popular at GM level. Thanks in part to a brilliant idea of Oll’s first demonstrated in this game (subsequently refined), it went out business in a hurry. The concept is a beautiful one and it still sometimes catches amateurs by surprise, so it’s worth your time both as an aesthetic experience and as something you should know if you play or face the Winawer French.

It’ll make for a great show, and all you need to do is show in the Broadcast Room at 9 p.m. ET and find “Oll-Ulibin” under the Games Tab. It’s free to watch for registered Playchess.com members. Hope to see you then!

You can find the exact times for different locations in the world at World Time and Date. Exact times for most larger cities are here. And you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos offline in the Chess Media System room of Playchess:

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).

Monokroussos in Mexico: World Championship 2007

Dennis Monokroussos is 41, lives in South Bend, IN, where he teaches chess and occasionally works as an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University-South Bend.

At one time he was one of the strongest juniors in the U.S. and has reached a peak rating of 2434 USCF, but several long breaks from tournament play have made him rusty. He is now resuming tournament chess in earnest, hoping to reach new heights.

Dennis has been working as a chess teacher for ten 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.