Playchess lecture: Kasparov-Short revisited

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

The Kasparov-Short match was the most lopsided world championship match of the post-WW II era (12.5-7.5), but that score belies just how hard-fought it really was. Short had serious opening problems with Black, but with White he had Kasparov on the run in almost every game. With a small break or two for Short early in the match, it could have been a real battle.

The outcome notwithstanding, the match produced a large number of extraordinarily complicated games, and in this week's show we'll look at one of the craziest, the eighth game of the match. Short essayed 6.Bc4 against Kasparov's Najdorf, and mayhem ensued as short sacrificed first a piece and then a further exchange. The game wasn't perfect, but both sides performed brilliantly – Short in attack, Kasparov in defense – and it wound up a hard-fought, well-deserved draw.

It’s a very entertaining – if mind-blowing – game, and I hope you’ll join me this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET as we try to figure out what exactly was going on. 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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