Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Judit Polgar has just turned 30, so we’ll commemorate the occasion with a look at one of her characteristically tactical games. As all of you undoubtedly know, she is (by far) the strongest female player of all time, not to mention one of the strongest players on earth, period, several times breaking into the top 10 on the FIDE rating list. For nearly 20 years now, she has bludgeoned strong opponents into submission with her powerful attacking skills, but instead of one of her typical routs, we’ll look at a more meaty game.

In particular, we’ll look at a very hard-fought game with one of her sometime top-10 peers, Boris Gelfand, from their 2003 rapid match in Pacs, Hungary. Gelfand won the match by an unrepresentatively lopsided 6-2 score, but Polgar won this game, the match opener, in a see-saw battle that found both players repeatedly reject drawing lines. The play was rich if not perfect, and will give viewers opportunities to learn from all three phases in the game; in short, it’s time for another great Monday night battle!

Note: you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos here:

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 39, 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.

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