Monokroussos on Shirov vs Grischuk, Delhi 2000

Dennis Monokroussos writes: In the 2000 FIDE World Championships in New Delhi, India, Alexei Shirov and Alexander Grischuk played an extraordinary best-of-four semi-final match. The first game was won by Shirov in good style, and the 17-year-old Grischuk struck back in an excellent second game as well. Then came game three.

After 23 reasonably normal moves, the fun began, as Shirov opted to sacrifice a piece for two dangerous central passed pawns. Grischuk was on the run, but a truly amazing counterattack featuring first a rook sacrifice and then a repeated bishop offer kept the result of the game, and accordingly the match, very much in flux.

Though it was dramatic and often brilliant, the game was not perfectly clean; indeed, it finished shortly after a Grischuk blunder in a balanced position. Nevertheless, its overall richness makes it a game deserving a close look, and that's just what will happen as I present it on the Playchess server this Monday night (9 p.m. EST) – I hope you'll join me then!

Dennis Monokroussos is 38, lives in South Bend, IN (the site of the University of Notre Dame), and is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (in the philosophy of mind) while adjuncting at the University.

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