The Velimirovic Correspondence Chess Attack

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

It's time once more for a trip to the badly, wrongly neglected realm of correspondence chess. Of course, there are plenty of terrible correspondence games – as there are plenty of lousy OTB games – but the number of strong players (including OTB GMs) engaged in correspondence make it a treasure trove of great, theoretically significant games.

Naturally, this week's show features just such a game, and in one of my all-time favorite variations (as a fan, not a practitioner!): the Velimirovic Attack against the Classical Sicilian. White launches his pieces into the center and turns to a kingside attack, seemingly without caring how many of them are en prise at any given moment. White's characteristic setup makes a strong aesthetic impression, and often his concluding attack does as well, yet time after time Black has proven to have sufficient resources to hold the balance – even if they are found only after a painful loss.

And that's what happens in this game. Palciauskas, the 10th correspondence world champion and an American who emigrated from Lithuania to the United States as a child, introduced an important novelty on move 18 against his opponent in this USA-Lithuania correspondence match. Andriulaitis defended well through the initial firestorm, but on move 26 his one and only error cost him the game.

If you're a lover of sharp openings and wild tactics, this is the game for you. Just tune in this Monday night at 9 pm ET; you'll be glad you did!

PS: "OTB" = over the board, i.e. the regular chess played in tournaments or clubs, as opposed to correspondence chess.

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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