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BGonline.org Forums
A team
Posted By: Daniel Murphy In Response To: A team (Henrik Bukkjaer)
Date: Sunday, 15 April 2012, at 3:44 a.m.
Henrik wrote: I agree with your description of Bonding. It was so impressive how FAST he made it to the top level.
Reading some of the comments in this thread, I've been wanting to say something about natural talent and hard work. This seems like a good place. For it no less honors players with obvious natural talent to note how much time and effort most of the great players have spent in order to become great. Time spent playing, in discussion with experts, in study with books, reference positions, props, and bots. Lars is no exception.
Lars Bønding surely did move up quickly.
He joined DBgF in April of 1998, but I don't think he took backgammon too seriously until the summer of 2000. From then on his rise was meteoric. By November 2000 Lars raised his DBgF rating (which had been hovering around 1500) by 100 points. That month he was a finalist in the Danish "Under 21" championship and won his last prize in an intermediate flight. In the next 12 months, Lars rose quickly from competitive open player to world class expert, added another 100 points to his rating, and won the Danish Championship in November 2001 at age 21. In the next 12 months, Lars won four more Danish tournaments, was a semifinalist in the 2002 Nordic Open and the 2002 Danish Championship, and reached the top of the Danish rating list. In the following two years he won or placed in tournaments in France, Germany, Slovenia, Sweden and the USA. And then he found and quickly excelled in another game: professional poker.
A natural talent? Absolutely. But not only. Lars had excellent teachers way back when in Aarhus, and put in countless hours of play and study in the year and a half or so of his rise from intermediate to world class player.
In an interview in Gammon, February 2002, Lars mentioned two factors that contributed to his quick rise to the top [my translation]:
I've learned a lot from long chouette sessions with Lars Trabolt and Mogens Knudsen (the then reigning Nordic Open champion and the Danish rating list leader -- ed.). In particular, it is incredibly rewarding to play with the prop rule, if you want to understand other players' arguments for their take/drop decisions. There's a great tradition of discussing cube decisions in Aarhus. The second factor is the computer I bought....
The interviewer Rolf Nielsen added [my translation]: As with most of the other Danish top players, the computer is also an essential tool for Lars Bønding, who spends 4-5 hours daily with Snowie or on Games Grid. He has become known in Aarhus as the 3-point man, having come to know cube strategy at that match length very well after more than 1,000 three-point matches on Games Grid!
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