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Shelby Lyman on Chess: A Modern-Day Viking
Column c2222 for release March 2
Sunday, March 8, 2015
(Published in print: Sunday, March 8, 2015)
At its best, a chess game like other sports and play is a moment of exploration and adventure. Each game is unique, offering unexpected twists and turns.
No one personifies this kind of chess more than the modern-day Norwegian Viking, Magnus Carlsen.
The 24-year-old world champion thrives on dynamic, unbalanced positions that many other elite players would rather avoid.
The chessboard is his longboat and his double-edged intuitive thrusts are his sword.
His lust for battle and relentlessness in pursuing it are rarely, if at all, equaled in contemporary chess.
An example: a 122-move game he played with Viswanathan Anand during their November world championship match lasted 61/2 hours.
Continuously coming at his opponents, he creates new areas of tension and attack until they break under the pressure.
For Carlsen, each tournament is a world of discovery, each position a new battleground to explore and understand.
He explains: “There are constantly many things I see now that I didn’t see before.”
Source: http://www.vnews.com