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!

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.