Winter article on Larsen

Edward Winter has published a new feature article about Bent Larsen, Bent Larsen (1935-2010), which has a lot of interesting quotes from him.

I once met Larsen. I was attending Columbia Law School in New York, and went to see the end of New York 1984. I saw Larsen, introduced myself, and thanked him for ranking my game against Sprenkle the most theoretically important in Informant 32. (Byrne ranked it second, Razuvaev ranked it tenth, and the other judges were underwhelmed. Overall it ranked 8th-9th, tying with Fedorowicz-Plaskett. See Informant 33, p. 9.) He kindly remarked that some of my moves in that game had been hard to find. A very nice man. How often does an ordinary master get such a compliment from a living legend?

The Rubinstein Trap

The Rubinstein Trap is a frequently seen trap in the Queen's Gambit Declined. It occurs in various different settings, and is characterized by White's Nxd5!, a pseudo-sacrifice of the knight that wins at least a pawn, since if Black plays ...cxd5, Bc7 will trap Black's queen. The trap is so named because the great Akiba Rubinstein, arguably the strongest player who never got a shot at the world championship, managed to fall into it twice - against Euwe at Bad Kissingen 1928 and against Alekhine at San Remo 1930. According to Edward Winter, the following game, predating Rubinstein's misadventures with the trap by over 20 years, is the earliest known example: