Magnus playing against Viswanathan Anand, in the final game on November 22, 2013, which ended in remis, and making Magnus world champion, 6.5-3.5
Magnus, at 12, in 2003, beating 18 out of 19 opponents in Tønsberg
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Like me, Magnus Carlsen was born in Tønsberg, Norway, and grew up in the surrounding region. Yesterday, not only did he become the firsst Norwegian to become world champion in regular chess, but also the first in the Nordic countries to do so. In 2009 he became the youngest champion ever in speed chess, only 19 years old. He will turn 23 on November 30, a week from today.
Both his parents are engineers. His father was engineer at the Esso refinery, close to the area marked A in the map above, where the family lived till Magnus was six years and a half, when they moved to Bærum, a suburb to Oslo, the national capital.
A chess prodigy, in 2004 Carlsen became a grandmaster at the age of 13 years, 148 days, making him, at that time, the second youngest grandmaster in history, although he has since become the third youngest.
Carlsen defeated former World Champion Anatoly Karpov on 17 March, 2004. The blitz tournament was a preliminary event leading up to a rapid knockout tournament beginning the next day. In that event, Carlsen was paired with Garry Kasparov, then the top-rated player in the world. Carlsen achieved a draw in their first game and lost the second one, and was thus knocked out of the tournament. As a 16 year-old, in 2007, he beat Veselin Topalov, the top-ranked player. In 2009 he became world champion in rapid chess, the youngest of all time.
As you can readily see from his history and record, he is not a "flash in the pants" kind of guy: In 2006 he was ranked among the world's top 100 players. As 19 year-old, in 2010, he was ranked as the top world player himself. On the January 2013 FIDE rating list, Carlsen reached 2861, thus surpassing Garry Kasparov's 2851 record from July 1999, more than 13 years earlier.
In 2008 he was interviewed by Tønsbergs Blad, a local newspaper, in which he said that he had enjoyed a great adolescence in his hometown, as did I. Like him I played a lot of soccer, and swam in the sea, with many good friends. These things make for an important building block in life. He characterized his hometown as a pleasant city, and so would I. I will always cherish the first 20 years of my life that I spent there, and it was nice to see it again last summer, during a one-day visit, which you can view in this YouTube video, if you have not already done so: my hometown. Toward the end of that video you will see tankers at the refinery, where Magnus' father used to work.
