Monokroussos lecture rescheduled

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

The now-15-year old Maxime Vachier Lagrave is the seventh-youngest GM of all time, yet while he represents (part of) the future of chess, fellow French GM Anatoli Vaisser demonstrated that at 56, he is still very much part of its present.

Our chief exhibit is their game from the 2005 French Championship. Vachier Lagrave opted for a risky pawn-grabbing line in the 8.Rb1 Gruenfeld. The players followed old theory for many moves before the youngster produced his novelty. Black enjoyed an extra piece, White a dangerous passer and active heavy pieces, but the result was in doubt until a Vachier Lagrave error permitted Vaisser to execute a brilliant zugzwang idea that won him both the game and the informal award for the best game in ChessBase Magazine 109.

A theoretically important game with rich tactics and a deep zugzwang idea: what more could one reasonably want from one game? Join me this Monday night at 9 pm ET, as we explore the ins and outs of this contemporary gem. You’ll be glad you did!

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.

Here are the exact times for different locations in the world. Since Europe has switched from Summer to Regular time please double-check at World Time and Date for your time zone.

If your own city or time zone is not listed you can find it at World Time and Date