Larry Christiansen

◇A prodigy out of California

Larry Mark Christiansen was born in Riverside, California, on 27 June 1956, the descendant of Danish stock. He took to chess young and rose with startling speed. In 1971, still a junior-high-school student, he won the National High School Championship — by his own account the first junior-high pupil ever to do so, beating boys years his senior.

What followed was a clean sweep of American junior chess: he won the U.S. Junior Championship three years running, in 1973, 1974 and 1975. The trajectory pointed in only one direction, and Christiansen was already a name to fear in his teens.

◇Grandmaster at twenty-one

In 1977, at the age of twenty-one, Christiansen was awarded the grandmaster title by FIDE — and he did it the hard way, vaulting straight to the highest rank without ever holding the international master title in between. It is a leap few players in history have managed.

At Linares in 1981 he shared first place with Anatoly Karpov, the reigning World Champion, scoring eight points from eleven games. Kasparov records that Christiansen also shared third to fifth place with Kavalek and Reshevsky in that year's U.S. zonal championship. Their subsequent double-cycle playoff produced only draws; Christiansen finished ahead of Reshevsky on tiebreak.

In June 1984 he played an eight-game match against Reshevsky in the Los Angeles area. Christiansen won two games and lost one, with five draws, for a 4½–3½ victory. Both of his wins are preserved in this archive. Kasparov places the match in Hollywood in his account of Reshevsky's later career.

◇Three crowns at home

Christiansen won the U.S. Championship three times across three different decades. He shared the 1980 title with Walter Browne and Larry Evans, shared it again in 1983 with Browne and Roman Dzindzichashvili, and then, nineteen years later, took the 2002 championship outright — a span of dominance that bracketed an entire generation of American chess.

He carried the flag abroad as well, representing the United States at nine Chess Olympiads between 1980 and 2002. The American team took silver in 1990, with team bronze medals in 1982, 1984, 1986 and 1996. By July 1992 his FIDE rating had reached 2625, placing him 21st in the world.

◇The American master of attack

Christiansen described his own play as aggressive-tactical, and the description scarcely does justice to it. Where many grandmasters seek the safe square, he hunted the king. He favored sharp systems — the Sämisch against the King's Indian among them — and a sudden, violent initiative that left opponents reeling. He poured that philosophy into two widely praised books on the craft, Storming the Barricades (2000) and Rocking the Ramparts (2004).

At Wijk aan Zee in January 1993, Karpov played 11...Bd6 in a Queen's Indian position, leaving both that bishop and his knight on h5 undefended. Christiansen's 12.Qd1 attacked both pieces at once. Karpov could not save both and resigned rather than play on a piece down. The archive preserves the game through that final queen move. Kasparov adds that Karpov also defeated Christiansen twice at the event and went on to win the knockout tournament.

◇Boston, the board, and the booth

Christiansen made his home in the Boston area, and when the U.S. Chess League formed he became one of the first elite American grandmasters to join it, leading the Boston Blitz. As his tournament appearances thinned, his voice grew familiar to a new generation: a frequent commentator on chess.fm and a sought-after writer and coach, he proved as engaging in analysis as he had been deadly over the board.

Friends describe a man with a wry sense of humor, able, it is said, to complain about and enjoy any activity at the same time, who spends his time exploring cities with his wife Natasha, looking for a good steak and playing blitz online. He never lost the urge to attack.