Monokroussos on the Great Dane Larsen

Dennis Monokroussos writes: "Before there was Morozevich, there was Bent Larsen. Now essentially retired, Larsen was one of the very best players in the world from the early 60s through the early 80s. How strong was he? In the late 60s, he won practically every tournament he entered, to the point where in the 1970 match between the Soviet team and a Rest-of-the-World team, Larsen was on board one, playing world champion Boris Spassky. Bobby Fischer was board two. Later that year, in the Interzonal, Fischer won, but Larsen defeated him in their individual game. Always confident, both in his playing strength and in his sometimes non-traditional understanding of the game, the Great Dane was one of the strongest and most colorful players of his era.

In Monday’s game, against Eleazar Jimenez from the Palma de Mallorca tournament of 1967, we are treated to typically dynamic and unusual Larsen chess: a provocative variation of a risky opening, a startling pair of decisions – trading the king’s sole defender, a fianchettoed bishop, for a knight that could be otherwise traded, followed by voluntarily allowing his pawns to be doubled and artificially isolated. Remarkably, the end result is a significant advantage, and Larsen finished the game with accuracy and power. Sometimes, we learn best by seeing model games showing the power of the rules in chess, but sometimes what we need is just the opposite – we need to see that the “rules” are just rules of thumb – we need our minds expanded! To that end, few players, certainly of that era, played more valuable games than the great Bent Larsen. Enjoy!"

Dennis Monokroussos is 37, lives in South Bend, IN (the site of the University of Notre Dame), and is writing a Ph.D. dissertation in philosophy (in the philosophy of mind) while adjuncting at the University.

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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