Putting all your eggs into one basket

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

This is not to say that there are no risks In the Grünfeld Defense, of course. White typically enjoys a big center, and one of the main ways in which he can use it is to provide cover for his pieces as he builds up a kingside attack. Black will often gain counterplay on the queenside and against his opponent's center, and then the race is on. On this occasion, in our game for this week, it's the attacker who wins the race.

More specifically, we'll examine the game Alexander Riazantsev-Valeri Yandemirov, played in an open tournament in Moscow last year. Yandemirov chose a sideline he had used before, with success, but Riazantsev found a different way to pursue the attack. With the committal move 15.e5, White put all his eggs in one basket: mate or else be positionally lost. After Black's reply, White was desperately weak on the queenside and on the light squares, but none of that would matter if he could deliver mate. You already know what happened, of course, but seeing the "how" of it is well worth watching – especially because it's an attacking idea you can use in your own games.

So: To watch the show live, log on to the Playchess.com server at 9 p.m. ET tonight (Wednesday night)/3 a.m. CET Thursday morning, go to the Broadcast room and click on Riazantsev-Yandemirov in the Games tab. It's free to watch, and a good time will be had by all.

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).

Monokroussos in Mexico: World Championship 2007

Dennis Monokroussos is 41, lives in South Bend, IN, where he teaches chess and occasionally works as an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and Indiana University-South Bend.

At one time he was one of the strongest juniors in the U.S. and has reached a peak rating of 2434 USCF, but several long breaks from tournament play have made him rusty. He is now resuming tournament chess in earnest, hoping to reach new heights.

Dennis has been working as a chess teacher for ten 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.