Magnus Carlsen

Magnus Carlsen, proclaimed world champion at 22 years of age in 2013, thus becoming the youngest champion in the history of chess. At the same time, he has become a very important image in his native Norway, where he is highly respected by the press.

This player has been trained by Garry Kásparov himself, which makes him a very skilled player. Here we see how his chess career has been at his young age.

Birth

Carlsen was born on November 30, 1990 in Tonsberg, Norway. From a very young age he was interested in chess like many other grandmasters, therefore, his future was going to be something good.

Before long, at the age of 13, he had already managed to become a Grandmaster. Thanks to his IQ and his great interest in chess, Magnus was bullied at school on several occasions.

When Carlsen was only 8 years old, he played his first game of chess, being trained by the Sports Gymnasium which was led by the best player in Norway, Simen Agdestein.

When the boy turned 12, one year before he became a chess Grandmaster, his family, especially his father Henrik, gave him all the support in the world. They sold some family cars, rented the house and all decided to accompany Carlsen around the world tournament after tournament. Thanks to this, his training lasted for years, the most beneficial years for his career.

Chess career

After being proclaimed Grandmaster at such a young age, the next thing that awaited him was to become world champion, something that happened when he turned 22 when he defeated Anand, becoming the second youngest champion in the world after Kasparov.

In 2010, he obtained the first place in the world rating of the International Chess Federation.

Magnus Carlsen’s style of play

His style was characterized by being somewhat more adolescent. Something like, a reckless willingness to offer material for activity. Some time later, as he matured, he realized that his techniques were not very adequate when facing the chess elite, so he developed a much more universal style.

He has even mentioned that his favorite part of each game is when the middlegame becomes “pure chess”. His coach was Kasparov for the year 2009 until 2010, from him he learned new techniques that, already for 2018 he changed radically.
Tournaments
By January 2004, Magnus got everyone’s attention after winning group C of the Corus Chess Tournament for January dates. After two years, he was selected in group B of the same tournament in 2006.

In the same year 2004, by June he also participated in the FIDE World Chess Championship, being the youngest player among the 128 participants. For 2005 he shared the first place in the Norwegian Championship with Simen Agdestein.

For the year 2008, there were many more triumphs. He was classified in the Morelia-Linares International Chess Tournament as he had been a year before. For the year 2009, he was proclaimed as blitz world champion after winning in the final held in Moscow from November 16-18.

During the following years until 2019, he came to have different achievements and defeats, leaving his name high in different parts of the world.

Curious facts about Carlsen’s life

Perhaps many do not know it, but Magnus Carlsen, apart from being one of the best chess players, has also become a celebrity who has taken advantage of his fame in chess to star in other very peculiar aspects and still remain somewhat of a mysterious person.

By 2002, he received support from a Norwegian computer company called Artic Securities as well as support from Microsoft.

He has also been a clothing model and has collaborated with more than half a dozen well-known brands, and has been one of the most photographed men in the world and among the sexiest. Here we already notice a quite drastic change.

Besides, he has made some appearances in magazines like “Time” where he was included among the most influential personalities, in the magazine “Cosmopolitan” as one of the sexiest men on the planet.

We can also mention that he has created a company called Play Magnus, which is valued at 15 million euros and, thanks to this, people like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, are happy to have met him.

It is also known that he enjoys playing soccer, in fact, he has declared to be a Real Madrid fan. In several websites he has been seen in pictures of him on the soccer field.

Talking now about his love life, this is where we could mention the real mystery, as Carlsen himself has admitted that he has no interest in having a serious relationship with anyone but, on several occasions news have come to light in which he has taken his “girlfriend” as a companion in some of his tournaments. Based on this issue, since we are talking about one of the sexiest men in the world, clearly this issue was a controversy, Carlsen has claimed that, if at some point in his career he stopped being the world champion, he could probably settle down formally with some girl.

One thing we can assure Carlsen’s girl fans is that they should never talk to him about chess if they were to go on a date with him, as it is a subject he really hates. Many times they have wondered, will Magnus’ girlfriend have to be a world chess champion anyway? The truth is that no, that topic seems to him something really boring at the time of a date.

Now, talking a bit about his chess winnings. At some point it was said that at the time of a chess tournament there was a reward, of which the winner took more money and the loser a small part, but how much does Magnus Carlsen earn? Leaving chess aside, we must take into account his income as a sportsman, his company and also his image as a model and influencer. For holding the World Championship title in New York he earned 550,000 euros.

The dirty work of distributing winnings is usually done by his father with the help of his representatives, while Carlsen only has to worry about doing what he knows best, which is to excel at the board and in the other aspects of his life.

This is probably why he doesn’t have any love interests – lots of interested girls? We won’t know yet…

(Also see The Battle Of Human Chess Players Against Chess Computers with a part on Magnus Carlsen.)

At the moment of me writing this blog post Magnus Carlsen is playing at the FIDE Chess World Championship in Dubai.