Dragging the hippopotamus from the Marshall

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Frank Marshall was the strongest American player the first third of the 20th century, and one of the world’s best players for a good chunk of that time. He was a great opening innovator (as we’ll detail during the show, his famous gambit against the Ruy Lopez was just one of many significant contributions to theory), and the swashbuckling play of his youth and lifelong penchant for swindles made him a legendary figure in the history of the game. Another contribution, less glamorous but possibly even more important, was his – and his wife, Caroline’s – cultivation of sponsors for American chess.

We’ll do a two-fer this week – to be frank, marshalling multiple games seems a fitting tribute to a player who once held the record for the largest simul: we’ll look at his game against Salwe from Vienna 1908 and the third game of his third match (of four!) with Janowsky. Both games demonstrate his gift for the attack, his magnificent tactical eye, and his prowess as an opening innovator. Come, watch, learn and be entertained! The show starts Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET (= 3 a.m. in Germany – delightful!).

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.