Halloween special: the worst in chess

Though we’re missing Halloween (also Reformation Day!) by a day, it’s still close enough for us to enjoy our fourth Halloween show – we can now label it a tradition. Normally we celebrate the best in chess, but not now. Turning things upside down, we celebrate – or at least take a perverse pleasure – in the worst of chess, especially when it’s the world’s best who are the victims.

This week, it will be a special world champions edition; believe it or not, there are an awful lot of games to choose from. Think you messed up last week at the club? You’ve got nothing on these guys. We’ll watch Tal, Petrosian, Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, Kramnik and Anand all take their pratfalls, and often in the worst possible situations, too. Are these games instructive? Probably not. But it’s hard to beat this collection for entertainment, and as a reminder that for all their very real greatness at the chess board, they’re human too.

So join me this Thursday night at 9 p.m. ET, and BYOS (Bring Your Own Schadenfreude).

Dennis Monokroussos' Radio ChessBase lectures begin on Thursdays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 01:00h GMT, 02:00 Paris/Berlin, 11:00h Sydney (on Friday). 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.

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).

Monokroussos in Mexico: world championship 2007

Dennis Monokroussos is 41, lives in South Bend, IN, where he teaches chess and occasionally works as an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University-South Bend.

At one time he was one of the strongest juniors in the U.S. and has reached a peak rating of 2434 USCF, but several long breaks from tournament play have made him rusty. He is now resuming tournament chess in earnest, hoping to reach new heights.

Dennis has been working as a chess teacher for ten 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.