Svetozar Gligoric and the Botvinnik Plan

Dennis Monokroussos writes: One of the world's strongest players when I was a kid – one of the very few not from the Soviet Union – was Yugoslav great Svetozar Gligoric. Grandmaster, many-time candidate for the world championship, theoretician and all-around good guy, Gligoric was a very important figure on the world chess scene from the early 1950s through the 1980s.

Svetozar Gligoric (left) in 1978 at the Olympiad in Buenos Aires, together with Fridrik Olafsson and Prof. Arpad Elo. [Photo by Susan Grumer]

It is thus long overdue that I present a Gligoric victory, and so this week we'll take a look at a power performance in one of his opening specialties, the White side of the Nimzo-Indian Defense. In fact, we'll kill two birds with one stone by presenting an old (Budapest 1948) game against the then Hungarian, now American GM Pal Benko, featuring a plan Botvinnik developed and made famous in what I think is the most overrated game in chess history, Botvinnik's 1938 win over Capablanca at the AVRO tournament.

The Gligoric win is a great game (as is the Botvinnik-Capa game, despite its excessive fame), and the plan is an extremely important one that can be easily learned and utilized in a wide array of situations. So tune in this Monday night – it's an enjoyable game, but better still, your rating may well thank you!

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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