The joyous aggression of Misha Tal

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

My favorite player of all time, bar none, is the Latvian great Mikhail Tal. To my mind, there neither was nor is another player more in love with the game than he, and it showed. There is a joy to his chess that is evident to even the casual fan, manifested in an almost feral aggression at the chess board.

This joyous aggression was particularly pronounced in the first part of his career, when he was racing to the top of the chess Olympus, and we'll take a look at a typical game from this period. Playing against Ukranian great Efim Geller in the 1958 USSR Championship, Tal continually increased the tension: first by "normal" means, then with the sacrifice of the exchange and then an entire rook. Geller, as befits one of the greatest players never to become world champion, went blow for blow with Tal until the end was just about in sight. Unfortunately for Geller - and this happened to many of Tal's opponents - a sort of punch-drunkness set in and he finally fell for one of the simpler traps in the position.

Nevertheless, the game is one of the masterpieces of Tal's early career, and I think you'll be very glad you tuned in this Monday night at 9 pm ET, as I do my best to share some of the ins and outs of this magnificent tactical struggle. Nothing restores my pleasure in chess more than spending time with Tal's games, and even if - somehow! - he isn't your favorite player, I hope you will experience at least a taste of the beauty and exuberance I find there. See you then!

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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