Come for Alekhine's masterpiece – or for a virtual pizza

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Alexander Alekhine, the fourth world champion, was a player so blessed with creativity, so richly endowed with fantasy, that even games played in simultaneous exhibitions were sometimes tactically deep and rich. And so it was in the game Alekhine-Mindeno (or possibly Alekhine-Hulscher), from a 1933 simul in Holland. Though just 17 moves long (and the first nine moves are simple theory), the heart of the game displays tactical complications it took generations of commentators to finally get right!

Lovers of attractive, complicated attacking games will want to tune in, but what about others? Here are some reasons to watch this Thursday at 9 pm ET:

1. An intro to the Philidor Defense, an opening that has been surprisingly popular of late
2. Discussion of and comparison with the tricky Chekover Variation against the Sicilian
3. Tips for h-file attacks, for both attackers and defenders
4. The opportunity to practice your tactical skills
5. Free virtual pizza, supplied by ChessBase

   
   Click to enlarge, smell and taste

Hope to see you there!

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.