Outstanding play in Lesiege vs Gershon

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Both players in our game this week are good, solid GMs, but neither is especially famous. If they played more games like the one we'll look at this Thursday, however, both would have fans waiting in line to watch them play!

It always helps to start with a lively opening, and the Queen's Gambit Accepted often lends itself to exciting play in the isolated queen pawn lines. Still, the game was drifting towards a more technical position until Black's novelty on move 15. Lesiege's move had never been played before. It was known and thought to be refuted by Gershon's reply, but Lesiege had analyzed further. Much further.

And yet, amazingly, Lesiege played perfectly all the way from move 16 through move 28, through a crazy series of mutual sacrifices (nine sacs over eleven half-moves!) and past his opponent's preparation. Only then did he go wrong, and even after that both sides continued to play very well.

It took outstanding play by Gershon to finally win this dazzling game, one I'm sure you'll enjoy as much as I have. So please join me this Thursday night at 9 pm (ET); you'll be glad you did!

You can find the exact times for different locations in the world at World Time and Date. Exact times for most larger cities are here. And you can watch older lectures by Dennis Monokroussos offline in the Chess Media System room of Playchess:

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 40, 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.