Bent Larsen

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Bent Larsen bigraphy, stories - Chess Grandmaster

Bent Larsen : biography

04 March 1935 – 09 September 2010

Jørgen Bent Larsen (4 March 19359 September 2010) was a Danish chess Grandmaster and author. Larsen was known for his imaginative and unorthodox style of play and he was the first western player to pose a serious challenge to the Soviet Union’s dominance of chess. He is considered to be the strongest chess player born in Denmark and the strongest from Scandinavia until the emergence of Magnus Carlsen.

Larsen was a six time Danish Champion and a candidate for the World Chess Championship on four occasions, reaching the semi final three times. He had multiple wins over all seven World Champions who held the title from 1948 to 1985: Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer, and Anatoly Karpov,http://www.chessgames.com, the Bent Larsen games file but lifetime minus scores against them. On a percentage basis, his best score against a World Champion was with Max Euwe. Larsen and Euwe met over the board only once, at the Munich Olympiad in 1958; the game ended in a draw. From the early 1970s, he divided his year between Las Palmas and Buenos Aires, with his Argentinian-born wife. He suffered from diabetes and died in 2010 from a cerebral haemorrhage.

Chess style and writings

Larsen was known as a deep thinking and highly imaginative player, more willing to try unorthodox ideas and to take more risks than most of his peers. This aspect of his play could even manifest itself in his choice of openings. "He is a firm believer in the value of surprise. Consequently, he often resorts to dubious variations in various openings. He also likes to complicate positions even though it may involve considerable risk. He has a great deal of confidence in his game and fears no one. His unique style has proven extremely effective against relatively weak opponents but has not been too successful against top-notchers."Great Chess Upsets, by Samuel Reshevsky, New York 1976, Arco Publishing, pp. 259–260.

He was one of the very few modern Grandmasters to have employed Bird’s Opening (1.f4) with any regularity, and had a long-term association with the move 1.b3, a system commonly known as Larsen’s Opening or the Nimzo-Larsen Attack in his (and Aron Nimzowitsch’s) honor. He played the Dutch Defence with success at a time when the opening was rarely seen at the top level. He revived the almost dormant Bishop’s Opening (1.e4 e5 2.Bc4) with success in 1964 and explored new ways for Black to seek activity in the Philidor Defence (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d6). Indeed, he wrote a short monograph on the Philidor by the title of Why Not The Philidor Defense? (1971). He was also the first top player to successfully use the Grand Prix Attack against the Sicilian Defence (1.e4 c5 2.f4), spurring a sudden and sustained gain in its popularity. In the mid-1960s, he showed surprising faith in Alekhine’s Defence (1.e4 Nf6) and even employed it on important occasions. He played the rare Scandinavian Defence 1.e4 d5 to defeat World Champion Anatoly Karpov in 1979, sparking renewed interest in that variation. A favorite line in the Caro-Kann Defence (1.e4 c6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 dxe4 4.Nxe4 Nf6 5.Nxf6+ gxf6) is co-named for him and David Bronstein; the idea is to accept a weakness to the Black pawn structure in exchange for an unbalancing of the position and retaining the bishop pair.

The Grünfeld Defence (1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 g6 3.Nc3 d5) was another opening that became a frequent choice of Larsen with the Black pieces and similarly, he placed considerable reliance on Grunfeld-Indian systems as White. This led him to co-author a groundbreaking 1979 book (with Steffen Zeuthen) on this opening and similar structures (ZOOM 001—Zero Hour for Operative Opening Models). His book of "Larsen’s selected games of chess, 1948-69" (1970) is renowned for its pithy annotations which delve into chess psychology and the effective use of rare openings.

Larsen was respected as an excellent writer who reached out to his readers; he was one of seven top Grandmasters who wrote chapters for the 1974 book How to Open a Chess Game. He edited the tournament book for San Antonio 1972. He contributed a chapter to the Raymond Keene edited Learn From The Grandmasters (1975). He also wrote the well-received Karpov Vs. Korchnoi: World Chess Championship, 1978, which was published within days of the match ending and was the first book in any language on the 1978 World Championship match.