Bent Larsen
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Bent Larsen (born March 4, 1935) is a Danish chess player. He lives in Argentina.
Larsen is considered to be the strongest chess player ever born in Denmark. He has won the Interzonal tournament on 3 occasions (1964 at Amsterdam, 1967 at Sousse in Tunisia, and 1976 at Biel in Switzerland). He became an International Master at the age of 19 in 1954 and two years later gained the rank of International Grandmaster.
In the 1965 Candidates matches he lost in the semi-final to Mikhail Tal, a former world champion. In 1968 he lost the semi-final to Boris Spassky, who went on to win the title, and in 1971 lost the semi-final 0-6 to Bobby Fischer, who also went on to win the title. Larsen later claimed in a Kasparov.com interview (1998) that his one-sided loss was due in part to his condition during the match: "The organizers chose the wrong time for this match. I was languid with the heat and Fischer was better prepared for such exceptional circumstances... I saw chess pieces through a mist and, thus, my level of playing was not good." In 1988 he lost a game to Deep Thought in the Software Toolworks Championship, becoming the first Grandmaster and the player with the highest ELO rating (by then 2560) to be defeated by a computer in tournament play.
Larsen has continued to play occasionally in tournaments to the present day. In 1999 he finished 7th of 10 in the Danish Championship, but in the 2000 event he was forced to withdraw when he became seriously ill with an edema, requiring brain surgery. He has played in only a few tournaments in Buenos Aries since then. He was 4th in the 2002 Najdorf Memorial knock-out. By July 2004 his ELO rating in the FIDE list was 2461.
Larsen is an imaginative player, more willing to try unorthodox ideas than most other top players and is noted for occasionally employing unusual openings. He is one of the very few modern grandmasters to have employed Bird's Opening (1. f4) with any regularity and has long been associated with the move 1. b3, a system commonly known as Larsen's Opening or the Nimzo-Larsen Attack in his (and Aron Nimzowitsch's) honour.
Although Larsen has a negative record against Bobby Fischer, he beat Fischer twice with the black pieces. Here's one of his wins from Santa Monica in 1966 (moves given in Algebraic chess notation):
- e4 e5
- Nf3 Nc6
- Bb5 a6
- Ba4 Nf6
- O-O Nxe4
- d4 b5
- Bb3 d5
- dxe5 Be6
- c3 Bc5
- Nbd2 O-O
- Bc2 Bf5
- Nb3 Bg4
- Nxc5 Nxc5
- Re1 Re8
- Be3 Ne6
- Qd3 g6
- Bh6 Ne7
- Nd4 Bf5
- Nxf5 Nxf5
- Bd2 Qh4
- Qf1 Nc5
- g3 Qc4
- Qg2 Nd3
- Bxd3 Qxd3
- Bg5 c6
- g4 Ng7
- Re3 Qd2
- b3 b4
- Qh3 bxc3
- Qh6 Ne6 0-1
[edit] External links
- FIDE rating card for Bent Larsen
- The chess games of Bent Larsen
- Bent Larsen download 1626 of his games in pgn format.
- 25 critical positions from his games
- Statistics at ChessWorld.net