Klaus Darga

Grand Master (1964 )

Klaus Viktor Darga ( born February 24, 1934 in Berlin ) is a German chess grandmaster and former national coach of the German Chess Federation.

Klaus Darga learned the basic rules of chess at the age of barely over six years by watching his father. However, only 14 years old he began to seriously deal with chess.

His first tournament was the Berlin Youth Championship in 1949, in the Darga lost the playoff for the title against Paul Bares. 1951 Darga was at the age of seventeen West German youth champion. In 1953, he shared with Oscar Panno won first place at the Junior World Championships U20. 1954 and 1959 he won the West Berlin Championships, 1955 and 1961, the German championship.

In the 1960s, he was one of the strongest German chess player and participated successfully in international tournaments (eg Amsterdam Interzonal in 1964, Winnipeg, 1967). For the legendary 1970 discharged competition Soviet Union against the rest of the world Darga was appointed to the World XI, but did not play.

1957 Darga International Master, 1964 Great Master.

Finally Darga, who had once studied engineering in Berlin gave his professional career in favor of his profession as a programmer at IBM.

Between the years 1954 and 1978 he participated for Germany in a total of ten Chess Olympiads, and together with Wolfgang Unzicker and Lothar Schmid, the backbone of the successful Olympic team.

From 1989 to 1997 he acted - as the successor of Sergiu Samarian and predecessor of Uwe Bönsch - as national coach of the German national team. At the Chess World Championship for Seniors 1997, he was the best German.