The Norwegian King

Norwegian teenager to be crowned new chess king
Wed Dec 30, 2009 11:25am GMT

By Wojciech Moskwa

OSLO (Reuters Life!) – The chess world’s new number one 19-year-old Magnus Carlsen plots 20 moves ahead and can remember matches he played six years ago move-for-move, but insists he is still pretty much your average teenager.

The brightest talent in a generation according to his Russian coach and chess great Garry Kasparov, Norway’s Carlsen will officially become the world’s youngest ever top ranked player when new rankings come out at the start of 2010.

Dubbed the “Mozart of chess,” Carlsen plays with a healthy dose of natural intuition on top of deep analysis and pursues other interests that he believes help his game.

He brushes aside comparisons with the world’s troubled chess geniuses such as Bobby Fisher, a prodigy and champion who became engulfed by chess and detached from the rest of the world.

“Bobby Fischer was obviously one of the greatest chess players of all time — one of the inventors,” Carlsen told Reuters in an interview.

“The difference between him and me, for example, is that he was obsessed with chess in a way that is not healthy and that’s a line I don’t intend to cross.”

“I try not to mix chess with life. When I don’t play I more or less do normal things for a teenager,” said Carlsen, who this year graduated from high school and become a household name in Norway, winning a number of person of the year honors.

Carlsen started playing chess as an 8-year-old mainly to beat his older sister, which he says took him “a few weeks.”

Within a year he regularly beat his father, who plays club-level chess in Norway, and at age 13 he had a shock win in a speed chess competition against world champion Anatoly Karpov and a draw against Kasparov.

Carlsen believes his fluid style is well suited to speed or blitz chess, shorter versions of the game played with a clock giving each player only a few minutes to complete their moves, rather than deliberating at length over a single movement.

Asked about a tournament match he played, as a 12-year-old, against a club player and Reuters correspondent Oskar von Bahr, Carlsen said he could probably replay that match move-for-move and admitted that at one point he was in trouble.

Here is the full article.