News

Chess champ 'just average'

December 31, 2009 Edition 1

OSLO: The chess world's new No 1, 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 pretty much an average teenager.

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

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

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

"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," said Carlsen.

"I try not to mix chess with life. When I don't play I more or less do normal things for a teenager."

Carlsen finished high school this year and has become a household name in Norway, where he has won a number of person of the year honours.

He began playing at the age eight, mainly to beat his older sister, which took him "a few weeks". Within a year he was regularly defeating his father, who plays club-level chess, and at 13 he had a shock speed chess win against world champion Anatoly Karpov, and a draw against Kasparov.

Carlsen believes his fluid style is well suited to speed, or blitz, chess.

His early coach, Simen Agdestein, successfully juggled being Norway's chess No 1 and a national soccer player. He instilled in Carlsen that the world did not have to revolve around 64 black and white squares.

"Playing tournaments was probably my main source of training because it was so much fun and I love competing," Carlsen said.

That changed last year when Carlsen realised he could become the best in the world. He hired Kasparov as coach.

"Magnus possesses what we call a strong positional sense, an intuitive feel for where to put the pieces," Kasparov said.

He was a "once-in-a-generation talent". If he developed great rivalries with opponents, he could become one of the "greatest" grandmasters yet.

Carlsen says he owes much to Kasparov, who polishes his opening gambits and offers "lots of psychological advice", detailing the weaker sides of the teenager's leading opponents, many of whom Kasparov played before retiring in 2005. - Reuters