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Magnus Carlsen

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Magnus Øen Carlsen (born November 30, 1990) is a Norwegian chess player who came to international attention after winning the C group of the Corus Chess Tournament in January 2004 at the age of thirteen. In the April 2004 FIDE list, he has an Elo rating of 2552, making him Norway's number two.

Carlsen lives in Lommedalen, Bærum, near Norway's capital, Oslo. He played in his first tournament at the age of eight and was coached by Norway's top player, Grandmaster Simen Agdestein. The young International Master was given a year off from elementary school to be able to participate in international chess tournaments during the fall season of 2003. In that year, he finished third in the European Under-14 Boys Championship.

The result which really brought him to the attention to the international chess world, however, was his victory in the C group at the Corus chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee with 10.5/13, losing just one game (against the highest rated player of the C group, Dusko Pavasovic), taking his first Grandmaster norm, and achieving an Elo tournament performance rating of 2702. Particularly notable was his win in the penultimate round over Sipke Ernst in which Carlsen sacrificed material to mate Ernst in just 29 moves. This game won Carlsen the Audience Prize for best game of the round (including all the games played in the B and A groups), though the first 23 moves had already been seen in the game Almagro Llanas-Gustafsson, Madrid 2003 (which, however, was a draw).

Carlsen's tournament victory in the C group qualified him to play in the B group in 2005, and led to Lubomir Kavalek, writing in the Washington Post, to describe him as the "Mozart of chess". According to an interview with mentor Agdestein, himself once the world's youngest GM at 18, Carlsen is a significantly better player than he was himself at the same age.

In a blitz chess tournament (where players have much less time for their moves than in normal chess) in Reykjavik, Iceland, on 17 March 2004, Magnus Carlsen defeated former world champion Anatoly Karpov. The blitz tournament was a preliminary event leading up to a rapid chess knock out tournament beginning the next day, where Carlsen achieved one draw against the current top-rated player in the world, Garry Kasparov, before losing to Kasparov after 32 moves of the second game, thus being knocked out of the tournament.

In the 6th Dubai Open Chess Champonship, held in late April 2004, Carlsen obtained his second Grandmaster norm, and will hence become the second youngest person ever to be hold GM status, after getting four wins and four draws before the last game was to be played.

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