Savielly Tartakower – the game's greatest aphorist

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Savielly Tartakower 1915 in his uniform as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian army.

Savielly Tartakower is rightly remembered as the game's greatest aphorist. Over the board he was also a real maverick in the opening, willing to essay romantic and especially hypermodern ideas against even the strongest of players.

Yet man does not live by opening innovation alone, and Tartakower, as befits a world-class player, excelled in all parts of the game. In this week's show, it is his prowess as an attacker that will be on display, as he defeats Hungarian great Geza Maroczy in style in their game from the 1922 Teplitz-Schonau tournament. The game is relatively famous for Tartakower's rook sacrifice, a sac made all the more impressive because the compensation was purely long-term. There was no immediate payoff and no perpetual check in hand, just an enduring but slow-motion attack.

To play in that way requires a great deal of confidence and an excellent feel for assessing compensation, traits Tartakower possessed in spades. We may not have his imagination, but as we can learn from him and this beautiful and instructive game, I hope you will all join me this Monday night at 9 pm ET as we take a closer look – 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 39, 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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