Seirawan and Beliavsky exchanging the Slav

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Chess fans periodically bemoan draws, especially short, lifeless non-efforts. And when grandmasters want to draw quickly, one of the standard weapons olive branches in their arsenal garden is the Exchange Slav. As a drawing “weapon”, it’s so potent it could almost be used as a soporific – but only almost. One of the beauties of chess is that when two players want to fight, they can overcome just about any opening, and that’s what we’ll see in this week’s game, between American Yasser Seirawan and then-Soviet (from the Ukraine; now Slovenian) Alexander Beliavsky, from the 1988 World Cup event in Brussels.

Still very strong grandmasters today, Seirawan and especially Beliavsky were then among the world elite and, most importantly for our show, real fighters. The Exchange Slav is a covert draw offer for many players, but not for Seirawan. The American employed a very logical novelty on move 12, one that fit in quite nicely with his general approach of first fixing Black’s potentially weak c-pawn and then laying siege to it. A good idea, but not all good ideas can be properly implemented in a given situation. So it was here, but finding the problem with White’s approach required a host of virtues on Beliavsky’s part: imagination, a willingness to depart from the Exchange Slav “script” to seek a dynamic solution, and the self-discipline to do so immediately after facing a novelty, rather than continuing indefinitely on auto-pilot. Lots of lessons for us, and we’ll try to show how they can be applied ahead of time and not just with 20-20 hindsight. And oh yes – the game itself isn’t bad, either!

Hope to see all of you there this Monday night at 9 p.m.!

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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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