My Match against Westerinen

By Bent Larsen

As mentioned in the previous issue, the match was played in Helsinki from 8 to 16 February. I won 6–2. Westerinen won the third and eighth games, while I won all the others. There were no draws. The spectators were treated to eight lively, hard-fought games; in a training and promotional match of this kind, there is no need to take tactical match considerations into account.

Westerinen is undoubtedly first and foremost a dangerous tactician, while his positional judgment is often clouded by his optimism. With greater experience, particularly from playing in genuinely strong company, this will probably change. In a couple of the match games, I had the impression that he drifted into a positionally lost position because he did not recognize the danger in time.

After the match, Westerinen went on holiday. For five months he had played tournament chess almost without interruption and had been home only for a short Christmas break.

Several Finnish chess masters and organizers described their country as a kind of underdeveloped chess nation and were envious of Denmark. It was claimed, among other things, that too much blitz chess and too little “real” chess was played there. Membership fees in chess organizations were purely symbolic, and very little chess literature was available in Finnish. Yet amid all these complaints, it was also pointed out that the Swedes were no longer quite so interested in city matches and international team matches after the Finns had begun to beat them.