The outrageous king walk

Dennis Monokroussos writes:

This year, we won’t exactly have an April Fool’s show, but we’ll look at some examples one of the most outrageous themes in chess: the successful king walk. One of the most fundamental of all chess lessons is that prior to the endgame, the king should be squirreled away in a safe, castled position; bringing the king out into the open is foolhardy and a sure path to a quick loss. And that’s true – usually. But not always! Sometimes the king’s natural home is in such danger that a trip to other parts is an exodus to safety. Sometimes a player will want to open lines for attack on one side of the board, and so he preemptively relocates his king in advance of commencing the aggressive operation. And sometimes, the king has a job of its own to do, and it becomes a full participant in the offense.

The latter is the rarest case, and we’ll take a look at what must be the most famous example in at least recent chess history, Short’s famous king walk game against Jan Timman. But in the interest of putting this unusual theme on full display, we’ll take a quick look at a variety of king walks before turning to our featured game. It’s not exactly an April Fool’s show, but the games are in the spirit of that tradition: you see it, but you’re not sure if you should believe it!

Hope to see everyone this Monday night at 9 p.m. ET – don’t forget to set your clocks forward, if you haven’t already.

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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