Dennis Monokroussos writes:
In 1987, when I was living in Las Vegas, Filipino GM Eugenio Torre came to
town to visit some friends and give a simul. When the time came, Torre and
friends came to the site in a van, a van I must have walked past several times.
Guess who was in it? As I was to discover – several days later, unfortunately
– a certain famous chess player now
living in Iceland was hiding inside.
My local Filipino friends felt bad that they couldn't tell me that Fischer
had been staying at their place, so to make up for it they shared another bombshell,
albeit one which I was not to tell anyone else. I agreed, but it seems to me
that 18 years is long enough.
Thus, for my ChessBase show for the week of March 28 – April 3, I will
present a hitherto secret game played between Fischer and Anatoly Karpov. In
1976, a year after receiving the title by default, Karpov met with Fischer
in the Philippines (see Russians vs. Fischer, compiled by Dmitry Plisetsky
and Sergey Voronkov, Chess World Ltd. 1994 (366-367), hoping to arrange an
unofficial world championship match. Fischer was interested, but the USSR Sports
Committee would have none of it and the proposal came to nought.
In the wake of the failed negotiations, however, Fischer and Karpov played
a number of informal games before returning to their respective countries,
and my Filipino friends were kind enough to let me see one of them. And so
18 years after my discovery, and 29 years after the game itself, that game
will become available to a wider audience – at least as long as ChessBase
allows me to present it!
Dennis Monokroussos'
Radio ChessBase
lectures begin on Mondays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 02:00h GMT,
03:00 Paris/Berlin, 13:00h Sydney (on Tuesday). Other time zones can
be found at the bottom of this page. You can use Fritz or any Fritz-compatible
program (Shredder, Junior, Tiger, Hiarcs) to follow the lectures, or
download a free trial client. |
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.
Here are the exact times for different locations in the world
* indicates that the place is currently observing daylight saving time
(DST)
