Book Reviews

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Bent Larsen’s Best Games

by Bent Larsen

Hello, I’m back after missing a couple of issues! This time I’ve chosen another “Best Games” book of yet another of my chess heroes, Bent Larsen. The book is actually titled “Bent Larsen’s Best Games – Fighting Chess with the Great Dane” and, asides from a few brief editorial chapters, consists of a small selection of Larsen’s own writings over the years in numerous newspapers and chess magazines (although he was a prolific writer, he wrote very few books).

Much of the material appeared originally in Spanish, one of Larsen’s numerous languages (he was a renowned polyglot, reportedly fully fluent in 6 languages), which was then edited and reproduced by the Spanish GM Alfonso Romero Holmes in a 2 volume set published in Spanish "Todas Las Piezas Atacan" (All the Pieces Attack, a title favoured by Larsen), the first covering his career up to 1973 and the second his subsequent career.

The book itself which features numerous photographs, another excellent New in Chess production, is presented in English but curiously ends in 1977 with no indication whether there will be a second English volume.

Aside from a few editorial sections, the book consists of a total of 39 chapters, all but the last 2 of which are written by Larsen himself, giving an account of his career from its early days, commencing with the 1951 World Junior Championship (where the 16 year old Larsen finished 4th) and his first victory in the Danish Championship in 1954, and continuing throughout his career until the account ends abruptly in 1977.

It is self-evident from the text that Larsen was a very gifted and original writer with a lucid and humorous style. The 124 annotated games provided in the book, highly instructive and enjoyable to play through – and one of these is actually a correspondence game featured in the magazine article.

Larsen’s selected games fully reflect his style of play, combative and totally uncompromising yet highly original and entertaining, almost a throw-back to the 19th century Romantics and reflected in his enormously wide opening repertoire including the ancient Vienna, the disused Bird’s and the opening which bears his name as well as that of one of illustrious countrymen, Nimzovich, 1.b3

Whilst his aggressive and uncompromising approach enabled him to achieve a great many glittering successes throughout his long career, it also led to several catastrophic reverses, notably his 6-0 loss to Fischer in 1971 (curiously scarcely mentioned) and a similar heavy defeat to Spassky in the following World Championship cycle.

Such crushing losses would doubtless have destroyed weaker and less resilient characters but he continued scoring glittering successes as before. Curiously the last chapter written by Larsen is an account of his time serving as the 16 year old Fischer’s second at the 1959 Candidates Tournament where his duties included reading "Tarzan’s New Adventures" to his "employer"!

For me, the only disappointing feature of this book is that the account of Larsen’s career ends in 1977 as he continued to play amongst the world’s elite until the late 80’s, notably winning elite events in 1979 (with an astonishing score of 11/13, 3 points clear of a stellar field which included Spassky and Petrosian) and 1980 (2 points ahead of Karpov in his pomp) in Buenos Aires (where he lived from 1982), and 2 wins with Black against Karpov in other events, Montreal 1979 and Tilburg 1980.

Despite this fairly obvious shortcoming, I strongly recommend this book to everyone!