Bent Larsen

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Bent Larsen, 1998

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 the opening move 1. b3 is sometimes called 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 black pieces. Here's one of his wins in Santa Monica in 1966 (moves given in Algebraic chess notation):