Boo! Terrifying blunders at Playchess.com

So bad it's scary

In honor of Halloween, it’s time to see something that’s scary…but in a way comforting, too. In short, it’s time to watch strong players blunder! We’ll take a look at opening catastrophes, middlegame oversights, time trouble horrors – the whole gamut of grandmasterly goofs. We all know it, of course, but it’s nice to be reminded every now and then that even the world’s best players are human, just like us…sometimes more so. See you Monday night!

Dennis Monokroussos is 38, lives in South Bend, IN (the site of the University of Notre Dame), and is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (in the philosophy of mind) while adjuncting at the University.

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.

* indicates that the place is currently observing daylight saving time (DST)