Veteran vs upstart chess genius

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Nowadays, there's a tendency to think that any chess player over 30 is about to start his downhill slide, if he's not already skiing down the slope to senility. So if you match up a 67-year-old on the one hand and a 19-year-old genius on the other, the result will be perfectly clear: a rout.

And so it was in the game we'll cover this week, but it was the wizened elder administering the punishment, just as he had to several previous generations of whippersnappers. Vassily Ivanchuk was a great talent who has become one of the world's strongest and most creative players, but his opponent, Vasily Smyslov, was no less strong or creative in his own day. Further – and in this respect only Korchnoi and Lasker can compare – Smyslov's prime and near-prime extended for an absolutely insane 40-50 year period! Smyslov was among the world's very best players from the early 1940s, became World Champion in 1957, and remained among the elite through at least the mid 1980s, even making it to the finals of the Candidates' cycle in 1984 before losing to Kasparov.

In this week's game, Smyslov demonstrates the harmoniousness his play is known for. Early in the middlegame, Ivanchuk thinks he has reached a safe, solid position where his queenside play and the opposite-colored bishops will allow him to draw without difficulty, but he is mistaken. Brick by brick, Smyslov builds his position, keeping his opponent from penetrating while slowly improving his own attacking prospects, until a powerful exchange sacrifice allows him to reach a winning endgame.

It's a masterpiece by the former Champion, and, as with almost all his best games, extremely instructive. I hope, therefore, that the combination of aesthetic and educational benefits will encourage you to join me this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET – I think you'll be glad you did!

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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