The four-year career of Rudolf Charousek

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

Paul Morphy is known as the “pride and sorrow” of chess; the pride, because of his then-peerless excellence; the sorrow, both because he was lost to the game at such an early age and because of the tragic turn his life took. But Morphy is not the only great chess player lost to Caissa as a young man, and this week we’ll remember one of the others, the Hungarian talent Rudolf Charousek. Charousek (1873-1900) died of tuberculosis at the age of 26, only four years after starting his international career. (Think of a contemporary 18-19 year old.) Yet in the brief span of his career, he beat the world champion, Emanuel Lasker, in his debut and (as far as I can tell) came in no worse than second place in all his subsequent tournaments.

Sadly, this player is almost completely unknown nowadays, but we’ll take a small step towards rehabilitating his once lofty reputation. First, we’ll take a very quick look at his overpowering victory against Lasker in Nuremberg 1896, and then we’ll more carefully examine his victory over Hugo Suechting in the Berlin 1897 event, which he won. The Suechting game wasn’t perfectly played, but it’s a rich game, allowing us to investigate the Colle System, the Greek Gift sacrifice and opposite-colored bishop endings. Join us this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET: it’s must-see chess for the club player, and stronger players may learn something too, if they’re not careful!

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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