Paying respect to the losers

It’s a rare chess fan who doesn’t know about Adolf Anderssen’s classic victories against Lionel Kieseritzky (the “Immortal Game”) and Jean Dufresne (the “Evergreen Game”), or Bobby Fischer’s “Game of the Century” win over Donald Byrne. These three – Kieseritzky, Dufresne and Donald Byrne – have gone down in chess history as famous losers.

Undeservedly!

While the trio weren’t up to the level of their conquerors, they were all fine players in their own right. Kieseritzky and Dufresne both beat Anderssen several times and were successful chess authors, while Byrne was a talented player who was considered for a time more talented than his older brother Robert. (And Robert Byrne even reached the Candidates matches in 1974!) So this week, we’ll give these men their due, and show some of their triumphs; moments that remind us that these were strong, imaginative players worthy of respect in their own right as well.

The games are a lot of fun, so I hope to see you all there – Thursday night at 9 pm ET!

Dennis Monokroussos' Radio ChessBase lectures begin on Thursdays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 01:00h GMT, 02:00 Paris/Berlin, 12:00h Sydney (on Friday). Other time zones can be found at the bottom of this page. You can use Fritz or any Fritz-compatible program (Shredder, Junior, Tiger, Hiarcs) to follow the lectures, or download a free trial client.

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.