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The Most Famous

CHESS PLAYERS from Denmark

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This page contains a list of the greatest Danish Chess Players. The pantheon dataset contains 374 Chess Players, 2 of which were born in Denmark. This makes Denmark the birth place of the 35th most number of Chess Players behind Netherlands and Belgium.

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Danish Chess Players of all time. This list of famous Danish Chess Players is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Bent Larsen

1. Bent Larsen (1935 - 2010)

With an HPI of 58.32, Bent Larsen is the most famous Danish Chess Player.  His biography has been translated into 40 different languages on wikipedia.

Jørgen Bent Larsen (4 March 1935 – 9 September 2010) was a Danish chess grandmaster and author. Known for his imaginative and unorthodox style of play, he was the second-strongest non-Soviet player, behind only Bobby Fischer, for much of the 1960s and 1970s. He is considered to be the strongest player born in Denmark and the strongest from Scandinavia until the emergence of Magnus Carlsen. Larsen was a six-time Danish Champion and a Candidate for the World Chess Championship on four occasions, reaching the semifinal three times. He had multiple wins over all seven World Champions who held the title from 1948 to 1985: Mikhail Botvinnik, Vasily Smyslov, Mikhail Tal, Tigran Petrosian, Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer, and Anatoly Karpov, but lifetime negative scores against them.From the early 1970s onward, he divided his years between Las Palmas and Buenos Aires with his Argentinian-born wife. He suffered from diabetes, and he died in 2010 from a cerebral haemorrhage.

Photo of Jacob Aagaard

2. Jacob Aagaard (1973 - )

With an HPI of 31.75, Jacob Aagaard is the 2nd most famous Danish Chess Player.  His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Jacob Aagaard (born 31 July 1973) is a Danish-Scottish chess grandmaster and the 2007 British Chess Champion.

Pantheon has 2 people classified as chess players born between 1935 and 1973. Of these 2, 1 (50.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living chess players include Jacob Aagaard. The most famous deceased chess players include Bent Larsen.

Living Chess Players

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Deceased Chess Players

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