Wojo's well-calculated play

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Aleksander ("Wojo") Wojtkiewicz passed away a couple of weeks ago, and while he's a pretty well-known figure in U.S. chess, his games haven't received as much exposure as one might expect from a grandmaster of his strength. We'll thus take a very small step towards rectifying this, by presenting his beautiful attacking win over Greek GM (then IM) Spyridon Skembris, from the 1990 Olympiad in Novi Sad.

The game gets high marks on aesthetics, but it's also logical and instructive, too: Wojtkiewicz doesn't go after Black, guns blazing, from the sheer joy of the attack. Instead, he has been accumulating small advantages: a little extra space, slightly more mobility, superior coordination, and so on. One such advantage by itself might not translate into much, but their combined weight spelled Black's doom – but only thanks to Wojtkiewicz's beautiful and well-calculated play!

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.

Here are the exact times for different locations in the world. Since Europe has switched from Summer to Regular time please double-check at World Time and Date for your time zone.

If your own city or time zone is not listed you can find it at World Time and Date