Alekhine's fanciful fabrications

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Alexander Alekhine is, of course, one of the all-time greats of the game. A feared attacker, a great annotator, and a deep researcher of openings and a very hard worker at the game in general, Alekhine was a key figure in the transition to the game as we know it today. Many of his games were works of art – sometimes literally! I don’t mean by this that he played chess on a canvas, but that on more than one occasion, games he presented as his own were simply made up, in part or even in toto.

In this week’s show, we’ll take a look at one such game, and throw in a fragment of dubious provenance as well. First up is Alekhine-Gregoriev, a casual game allegedly played in 1915. The game’s authenticity has long been doubted, as is nowadays almost universally recognized as a fake. We’ll discuss it, as well as the real game on which it was based, and then we’ll turn to the equally famous Alekhine-Gofmeister fragment, from an odds game played in 1917. As far as I know, the authenticity of this fragment has not been challenged – but it is at least as fantastic as the Gregoriev game!

Whatever the truth about these two games, what is clear is that they are both brilliant and beautiful productions of a great mind, and comprise a marvelous chess feast for us to enjoy this next Monday night at 9 p.m. ET. 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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