This week's ChessBase Show: Porper-Lock

by ChessBase
10/23/2006 – It is not always old games and famous players from whom you can learn. This week on Playchess Dennis Monokroussos shows us a super-sharp game between two non-grandmasters, Eduard Porper and Gavin Lock – the kind that amateurs should study. Don't miss it.

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Dennis Monokroussos writes:

One doesn’t have to be famous to make the show, and the game need not even be especially old. (Though in both cases, it helps.) The game between Eduard Porper and Gavin Lock was played just this Saturday, and stars two non-grandmasters. Nevertheless, it caught my eye! Black essayed one of the sharpest systems in all of chess, the Botvinnik Variation of the Semi-Slav Defense, and it all went uphill from there. Porper produced a novelty on move 19, and to Black’s misfortune, he handled the position as if White had played the usual move. In this particular position his good, logical idea turned out quite poorly, thanks to Porper’s purposeful play.

There’s a lot to learn from the game as it was, but the sidelines are something special – Porper could have won an “immortal” game! I think you’ll enjoy the game and the analysis a great deal, and even our theoretical overview of the opening will dazzle all but the most grizzled Botvinnik System specialists. Hope to see all of you this Monday night at 9 pm ET!

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 program (Shredder, Junior, Tiger, Hiarcs) to follow the lectures, or download a free trial client.

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).


Dennis Monokroussos is 40, 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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