Surprising the stars

Dennis Monokroussos writes: "Rating systems aren’t infallible, but they’re certainly a good indicator of what’s likely to happen. Likely, but not guaranteed, especially when one’s opponent has prepared something special in the opening!

Take this week’s game, for example, between Hans-Joerg Cordes, rated 2290, and the late GM Anthony Miles, in 1985 in the world’s elite and towards the top of his career. Miles probably assumed he was going to have a relatively easy time of things, but Cordes had something special planned – a very interesting novelty followed by an amazing series of sacrifices. Miles withstood the initial wave of the attack, but Cordes kept up the pressure, achieving a beautiful win over one of the 1980’s true Goliaths.

Let this game give hope to all of us who are underdogs – which is all of us until we find a way to get Anand, Kasparov or Kramnik (in alphabetical order) to watch the show – upsets are always possible! Finally, our game also features a very interesting line in the Nimzo-Indian, so it’s worth tuning in for that as well. See you Monday! "

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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