Final Chess Masters Bilbao 2008

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Participants

MAGNUS CARLSEN (ELO 2787)
Tonsberg (Norway), 30.11.1990

The ‘Mozart of Chess’

His second places at the Wijk aan Zee Corus (Holland) 2008 and at the Ciudad de Linares 2008, where he repeated his 2007 achievement, are a sign that this 17 years old Norwegian is already mature for even greater achievements. Magnus Carlsen recommends parents of child prodigies: “to give them support but without putting pressure on them. My father taught me to play chess when I was 5, but I wasn’t interested at the time and he left me alone”. At the age of 2 he already solved difficult jigsaws; at 5 he remembered the capitals, flags, areas and inhabitants of every country.

At 8, Magnus felt jealous one of his sisters played chess and that is where a career only comparable in precociousness with the ones of the sacred manes began. At 13 Carlsen became the youngest chess grandmaster in the world; and today, at the age of 17, he is among the world’s top five players in the rankings. He sleeps up to eleven hours, is a passionate fan of the Real Madrid and Spain is the country he knows best. When he is not travelling he attends a special school for sports talents. He has his particular opinion about money: “I don’t really know what to do with it”. I spend much less than I earn”.

Contrary to what happened to other chess wonders, Magnus went to school until he suddenly became a star of the chessboard and began to travel a lot. Besides, he practised ski jumps (21 meters when he was 10), played football and went frequently to the mountains with his parents, a part from following debate programmes and the Vikings series on TV. He hardly has time for all this now, though he always asks for hotels with a swimming pool, a table tennis and the Eurosport Channel.

2004 was his first excellent year. To earn the grandmaster title three very brilliant results have to be accumulated, but Carlsen got four in four months, at the Wijk aan Zee (Holland), Moscow, Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and Copenhagen tournaments. Further more, he gave a blindfold simultaneous exhibition (memorising the positions of all chess pieces) against five of the best junior chess players in Norway (four wins and one draw) and played in Iceland, where he defeated former world champion Kárpov and drew with Kaspárov after wasting a winning position.

At his arrival in Calviá at the end of October 2004 to play the last rounds in the Chess Olympics, it took some people sometime to understand that this kid was not a precocious amateur but the best player in Norway. However, his great outburst came in 2007 and 2008 with amazing second places in the Grand Slam tournaments, what made him deserve a special invitation for the Bilbao Grand Slam Chess Final Masters.

As it is usually the case at his age, Magnus talks only the indispensable to strangers, but sometimes he surprises the journalists with his statements. For instance, after the two games played against Kaspárov in Iceland when he was 13: “I am happy about the first one, despite I could have won it. But in the second one (he lost) I played like a child”.