The greatest endgame player of them all

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

After all the slam-bang games of the past few weeks, it's time to recall that the endgame exists, too. Our hero this week, therefore, is none other than the great Akiba Rubinstein, quite possibly the strongest endgame player of his day – over Lasker, Capablanca, and Alekhine!

We'll look at his famous game with the aforementioned Emanuel Lasker, from the St. Petersburg tournament of 1909. The two players obliterated the field, tying for first 3.5 points ahead of the third place finisher, but in their head-to-head game, it was Rubinstein who came out on top. Playing White, he won a complete game: a better opening, a brilliant middlegame, and fine technique in the ensuing rook endgame, where we'll focus our attention. (Time permitting, we'll also take a look at his instructive pawn ending with Cohn.)

Rubinstein could play all parts of the game well, as one would expect from a player of his stature, but it is as an endgame maven that his play is of special value to us today. Watch and see!

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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