5/4/2023 0 Comments Stockfish chess vs magnusThe match left the peak of the chess world undisturbed. He defended his title in 2014, again defeating Anand and then in 2016 against Sergey Karjakin, a Crimea-born Russian who performed above expectations but still fell to the inevitable and last year he saw off Fabiano Caruana to retain the title.īrin-Jonathan Butler’s The Grandmaster, which focuses on the Karjakin match, doesn’t provide any evidence that it ‘made chess great again’, despite the book’s subtitle. In the documentary Magnus, Jon Ludvig Hammer, who assisted Carlsen during the 2013 Anand match, suggests that his style depends on getting players away from prepared moves, ‘so that it’s a battle of the mind, rather than a battle of who can use the computer best’. He will sometimes pick unusual or apparently poor moves just to complicate the position or knock an opponent out of lines that have been prepared in advance with the assistance of a computer (these days, you can download a chess app on your phone that can handily defeat a grandmaster). The word most commonly associated with Carlsen’s play is ‘intuitive’, which I take to mean that he doesn’t rely on preparation, particularly computer preparation, as much as his rivals do. It is often compared to Anatoly Karpov’s ‘boa-constrictor’ technique as Kasparov described it to the New Yorker as ‘strangling pressure, not direct hits’. ‘It would be a bigger deal if I hadn’t won,’ he said.īy this time, Carlsen’s style had evolved into one favouring positional control over dramatic attacks. In 2013, he took the World Chess Championship from Viswanathan Anand. At 18, he became the youngest ever world number one. As a teenager, Carlsen developed an aggressive, sacrificial style, happy to give up pieces in exchange for retaining mobility and initiative. When he was 12, his father requested a year’s leave of absence to take him on a chess-playing tour of Europe, beginning a career as a kind of valet to his son (so far as I know, Magnus still lives with his parents – or the other way round). In a single year, his Elo rating rose from 904 – only slightly better than moving the pieces at random – to 1907, enough to be among Norway’s top four hundred or so players. In his early years, Carlsen didn’t have the grandmasterly assistance enjoyed by many chess prodigies. He developed a taste for breaking egos (‘I enjoy it when I see my opponent really suffering’) and, in a country not renowned for its chess players, he was quickly identified as having serious potential. He abandoned schoolwork so that he could study the game and prepare for tournaments. This time, his interest became all-encompassing. It was partly the desire to defeat his elder sister that enticed Magnus back to chess a few years later. At home, the sibling rivalries were intense. Accepting that his children were ‘definitely not geniuses’, he allowed Magnus to focus on football and skiing. Henrik calls himself an ‘ego dad’, but when Magnus at first failed to take to the game, Henrik didn’t force things. His soft-spoken father, Henrik, introduced him to chess when he was five, after noticing his powerful memory and capacity for concentration. The second of four children, Carlsen was born in Tønsberg, the oldest town in Norway, in 1990. ‘It’s curiosity as opposed to discipline.’ ‘He does what he likes,’ his father explained proudly to the New Yorker. He claims to lie in bed until just before lunch and fired his one-time coach Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest player of all time, for being too intense. He has no time for traditional education, which is understandable enough, but he also seems to take a relatively casual approach to chess. Inscrutable over the board, he has difficulty hiding his emotions the rest of the time: you will always know if Carlsen is bored, and he is easily bored. On a rest day, he went off to play football and reappeared the next day with a black eye. Before the 2018 World Chess Championship, he tweeted a video claiming that his preparation involved ‘the three Ps’: pizza, Premier League and poker. His cool sometimes seems of the high school jock variety. He is imposingly good-looking it’s impossible not to be impressed by his quiff, even if his face always looks slightly swollen, as if he’s coming off an especially bad night’s sleep or a mild allergic reaction. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film in the years since – he’s now 28 and the world’s best chess player – he has been one of Cosmopolitan’s sexiest men and one of Time’s hundred most influential. I f you know anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool.
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