Technique and psychology with Ulf Andersson

Dennis Monokroussos writes: In an effort to keep my ChessBase viewers on a healthy, balanced diet, we'll take a look this week at a typical technical masterpiece by Swedish great Ulf Andersson. For most of us, if we're playing a peer and major exchanges occur, a quick draw is the likely result.

Not so for Andersson. Even against the world's super-elite (a group in which he was included from the late 70s through the early 90s), exchanges were often not the prelude to a quick draw but the signal that it was time for his opponent to start suffering.

Case in point: his game with the late, great Lev Polugaevsky from 1990 event in Haninge. Andersson, with White, willingly trades off pieces – lots of pieces – and Black has no trouble equalizing. Nevertheless, "equal" does not mean "drawn", and Andersson was able, in his inimitable way, to keep making good moves while Polu drifted a little at a time until finally losing the ending.

So this Monday, we'll take a look and admire Andersson's work, but more than that we'll learn a number of important lessons both about proper technique and the psychology of the game as well!

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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