Dennis Monokroussos writes:
1.e4 players, are you tired of facing the stodgy Caro-Kann? And more generally,
chess fans, are you tired of GM computer preparation? To both groups I say,
fear not: the game Baadur Jobava vs Evgeny Bareev from the 2003 European Club
Cup is for you. In the Classical Main Line of the Caro-Kann, the players reached
this position after move 14:

It’s a typically dry, technical position (not that anything is wrong
with technical positions, but we’ll return to them another week), and
you can run your chess software until you turn deep blue in the face, but all
you’ll get are moves like 15.c4 and 15.dxc5. Jobava, a talented youngster
from Georgia, had a different idea: 15.d5!!? Don’t get the point? Don’t
worry, Bareev didn’t either (or more likely he did, but underestimated
the strength of White’s attack), and lost an inspired game. First Jobava
played for mate with queens off, then found a brilliant way to play for mate
with the queens off, and then tiptoed through some land mines to escape Bareev’s
desperate counterattack.
It’s a beautiful, complete game, and one I’m sure you’ll
enjoy when you tune in this Thursday night at 9 pm ET on the playchess server.
Hope to see you then!
Dennis Monokroussos'
Radio ChessBase
lectures begin on Thursdays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 02:00h
GMT, 03:00 Paris/Berlin, 13:00h 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).
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.