Mozart chess became king

22-year-old Norwegian Wunderkind Magnus Karlsen-16th world chess champion

Chennai, India, November 22, 2013: Magnus Carlsen during the ceremony of his coronation

In the third week of November, a new era began in chess. Magnus Karlsen, a 22-year-old chess player from Norway, easily overthrew the 43-year-old Vishvanatan Ananda from India from the chess throne. Three victories, seven draws and not a single defeat - Carlsen won ahead of schedule in the match in which 12 games were planned.

The victory of the young Norwegian was predictable: for the past two years he dominates world chess, while the results of Ananda were systematically going down. But the point is not only in the ratings. Although the truth is that Anand made quite a few optional mistakes in this match. But Anand fought not just with a stronger rival - he fought with the forces of time and history. The era of Carlsen came, and Anand could not do anything about it. Carlsen is inevitability.

I trained the Norwegian during the year, in 2009. And even then he was amazed at how accurately - at the level of intuition, without any additional miscalculations - he is able to evaluate the position on the chessboard and act further as accurately as possible.

My style is completely different: he demanded a tremendous concentration of energy and labor behind the board, demanded a deep pattern of many options to find the only correct move in each this position on the board. Carlsen belongs to another champion school, the one that Jose Kapablanka and Anatoly Karpov represented: by the ability to feel harmony on the chessboard, they resemble virtuoso musicians with absolute hearing.

I am very sorry for Ananda - I know what a defeat is, and I understand the pain of the Indians who adore their sports heroes: Glory Ananda turned India into a world chess center.

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I trained the Norwegian during the year, in 2009. And he was already amazed at that time, how accurately - at the level of intuition, without any additional miscalculations - he is able to evaluate the position on the chessboard

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But the fact that Carlsen was replaced for a long time: the Norwegian began to collect prizes and titles like “Mozart Chess”, even when he was a teenager. He needed to go through only 22 matches to become the world champion - this is a record. His rating is today 2872 points: he went around my record - 2851 points in 1999, when I was still an absolute world champion. (I note in brackets that when I first became the world champion in 1985, I was a few months younger than Carlsen now - this record was still behind me.)

Carlsen is a parish to the Higher Chess League of a completely new generation. Generations - and he is the first champion from this generation - which has grown in the age of super -minute computer chess. When I played, my permanent companions were paper cards for notes and stacks of old books. And I needed to learn how to use the databases and the help of chess computers: the cars in my eyes at first became powerful enough to help, and then win chess masters. Computers to a certain extent turned the chess players of the Carlsen generation into a little robot. And of course, the irony is that the irony is pleasant for me - that the new champion of the world in chess was a player who is primarily guided by his intuition. Carlsen is not a car at all - it is very, very human, if I may say so, the champion.

Moscow, USSR, 1985: Harry Kasparov becomes the youngest world chess champion in history.

When I became the world chess champion in 1985, there was still a Soviet Union, and the Soviet chess school, especially after leaving Bobby Fisher, seemed invincible. Few could then imagine that after 30 years, players from India and Norway would fight for a chess crown. Karlsen became the first world champion from Western Europe for 76 years. Chess is an amazingly universal language that easily overcomes cultural, age, economic, educational, gender barriers. It is possible that the heir to Karlsen is already growing up somewhere in Southeast Asia, or in Africa, or on Caribbean. And if this happens, it will be the tremendous success of the new world champion.

Photos: AFP/East News, Dmitry Donskoy/RIA Novosti