Playchess lecture: Gelfand's tactical feast

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Among those players narrowly missing out on the FIDE World Championships was Israeli grandmaster Boris Gelfand. He isn't as prominent as he was in the mid-90s, but he's still near the top (number 13 in the world; number 12 if one excludes Kasparov) and a very attractive player. He works hard, plays sharp openings and loves complicated positions – what more could a fan want?

So I'll assume his relative lack of prominence as a fan favorite is an exposure problem, and will strive to remedy the problem with this week's game, from the 1995 Dos Hermanas tournament. Gelfand essayed the Najdorf against Alexei Shirov, who utilized the old main line with 6.Bg5 and followed it up with a quick Nd5 piece sacrifice. A razor-sharp middlegame turned into a razor-sharp endgame, but Gelfand's (more) accurate play, culminating in study-like finish, eventually brought him the full point.

It's an amazing game – a tactical feast – one so rich we could easily take two shows to cover it properly (and depending on how things pace, we just might take that second show)! The game has something for every chess fan, so I hope you’ll all join me this Monday night (9 p.m. ET) – see you then!

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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