Dennis Monokroussos: my favourite game of 2006

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

With an eventful 2006 behind us, we’ll take a look at my favourite game of the past year, the dazzling attacking masterpiece Peter Svidler vs Magnus Carlsen from their rapid match in (the aptly named) Longyearbyen this past September. In a sideline of the Rossolimo Sicilian, the players reached the following position after 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.Bb5 Qc7 5.O-O Nd4 6.Nxd4 cxd4 7.Nd5 Nxd5 8.exd5 a6 9.Ba4 g6 10.d3 h6

In his comments to the game in New in Chess (2006/7, p. 7), Svidler says that the “general rule for this position says that Black is fine if he manages to play …Kf8 and …d6”, and he found a remarkable way to prevent it. Just how he managed to do that, and the marvelous complications that ensued, will be the subject of our show this Thursday night (9 pm ET), and I hope to see you then!

You can find the exact times for different locations in the world at World Time and Date. Exact times for most larger cities are here. And you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos offline in the Chess Media System room of Playchess:

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 40, 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.