McShane vs Kotronias – Chess for Zebras

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Under the influence of Jonathan Rowson's new book Chess for Zebras, this week's ChessBase show will feature the truly bizarre game between Luke McShane and Vasilios Kotronias from the 2003 Gibraltar Masters. It probably helps that the game is a Trompowsky, which lends itself to original positions, but McShane goes above and beyond the call to generate something new and peculiar – in a good way!

How peculiar, you ask? On move 20, he has a knight on b5, his king on e2, and his queen, both rooks, a bishop and a knight on their original squares. The center is open, material is equal, Black has four pieces out, and yet, somehow, White is better! Games like this don't make for very good models, but they are great for loosening up our ideas about what we think we know. (And as Rowson points out, such pseudo-knowledge is one of the major impediments to improvement in adults.)

So join me this Monday night at 9 pm ET, watch an amazing game, learn some "Tromp" theory, and loosen up your categories. It'll do you good!

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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