Kasparov vs Korchnoi: the 'shameful' game

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

With rare exceptions, this show is dedicated to presenting great games, generally from one or more generations past. This week’s game isn’t particularly recent, so the second part of my mandate is intact, but the first part is taking a holiday. Instead, this week I proudly present a game dubbed “shameful” by both its protagonists, two rather well-known individuals by the names of Kasparov and Korchnoi.

Why would I do such a thing? The answer will be clear when you watch: despite the errors, it’s a riveting battle. Quickly achieving a lost position with the White pieces, Kasparov throws everything at Korchnoi’s king, including the kitchen sink, in a truly desperate attack. It shouldn’t have worked at all, but exploiting Korchnoi’s time trouble, he was able to generate enough confusion to pull out a draw. There are plenty of mistakes, but there are also plenty of good moves, too, not to mention instructional moments and staggering variations. All in all, a very entertaining game for a Monday night (9 pm ET), so I’ll hope to see you then!

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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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