Wilhelm Steinitz, the trailblazer

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

The first official world champion, Wilhelm Steinitz, doesn’t receive the honor he’s due as a great player and a trailblazer. But this week we’ll do what we can to rectify this. We’ll focus on his game against world champion Emanuel Lasker from the 1895/96 St. Petersburg tournament, a remarkably energetic game won by Steinitz – at age 59 – over his 27-year-old rival.

The opening should be of great interest to club players, as Steinitz successfully uses a plan that has long disappeared from professional play but which still gives amateurs fits. We’ll discuss the proper solution here and in another, analogous and relevant case. Steinitz’s play in this game is a model: the opening succeeds, the middlegame finds him increasing his advantage by positional means, and then, once Lasker tries desperately to sharpen things up, Steinitz finishes him off with a sac and an attack.

It’s a game worth seeing and studying, so please join me this Monday night at 9 pm ET – hope to 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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