Dennis Monokroussos writes: A fascinating but surprisingly underplayed opening at the amateur level is the Budapest Gambit. Established theory only promises White a small advantage with correct play, and meanwhile, there are many plausible ways for White to go seriously wrong or at least give Black a very promising, tactically rich position. Ameng the recent GM victims who have lost to the Budapest are Glenn Flear, Victor Mikhalevski, Jozsef Pinter, Chris Ward, Mikhail Gurevich, and - in just 25 moves! - Alexander Beliavsky.
Today, however, we’ll look at an early Budapest game, between the great
Akiba Rubinstein and the very strong but largely forgotten Milan Vidmar. Rubinstein,
with the White pieces and at or near the height of his powers, accepted and
held the gambit pawn. Vidmar had some initiative, but Rubinstein seemed on
the verge of consolidating his position and the pawn. To find out what happened,
and to develop your own roadmap to this tricky opening, tune in tonight, learn,
and enjoy!
Dennis Monokroussos'
Radio ChessBase
lectures begin on Mondays at 9 p.m. EDT, which translates to 02:00h GMT,
03:00 Paris/Berlin, 13:00h Sydney (on Tuesday). Other time zones can
be found at the bottom of this page. You can use Fritz or any Fritz-compatible
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Dennis
Monokroussos is 38, lives in South Bend, IN (the site of the University
of Notre Dame), and is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (in the philosophy
of mind) while adjuncting at the University.
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.
Here are the exact times for different locations in the world
* indicates that the place is currently observing daylight saving time
(DST)
