Magnus Carlsen is a Norwegian chess grandmaster and the current World Chess Champion. A chess prodigy, Carlsen earned his grandmaster title at the age of 13 years and 148 days.
Native to Tønsberg, Carlsen was introduced to chess at the age of 5 and played in his first tournament at the age of 8. He earned his grandmaster title in 2004 and was competing successfully against the world’s strongest grandmasters by 2007. He surpassed an Elo rating of 2800 in 2009 and reached No. 1 in the FIDE rankings in 2010, becoming the youngest person ever to achieve those feats.
Carlsen became World Champion in 2013 by defeating Viswanathan Anand. In the subsequent year, he retained his title against Anand, won both the 2014 World Rapid Championship and World Blitz Championship, thus becoming the first player to simultaneously hold all three titles, and reached a peak rating of 2882, the highest in history. In 2016, he defended his title against Sergey Karjakin.
Known for his attacking style as a teenager, Carlsen has since developed into a universal player. He uses a variety of openings to make it more difficult for opponents to prepare against him and reduce the effect of computer analysis. He has stated the middlegame is his favourite part of the game as it “comes down to pure chess.” His positional mastery and endgame prowess have drawn comparisons to those of former World Champions Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, Vasily Smyslov, and José Raúl Capablanca.
Rating achievements
In the January 2006 FIDE rankings, at the age of 15 years and 32 days, Carlsen attained a 2625 Elo rating, which made him the youngest person to surpass 2600 Elo (the record has since been broken by Wesley So, Wei Yi and John M. Burke). In the July 2007 FIDE rankings, at the age of 16 years and 213 days, Carlsen attained a 2710 Elo rating, which made him the youngest person to surpass 2700 Elo (the record has since been broken by Wei Yi).
On 5 September 2008, after winning in round 4 of the Bilbao Masters, Carlsen, aged 17 years and 280 days old, briefly became No. 1 on the unofficial live ratings list. Carlsen’s victory in the 2009 Nanjing Pearl tournament raised his FIDE rating to 2801, making him, aged 18 years and 336 days, the youngest player ever to surpass 2800 Elo. The youngest before Carlsen to achieve this feat was Vladimir Kramnik at the age of 25, and up until this point only Kasparov, Topalov, Kramnik, and Anand had achieved a 2800+ rating.
The FIDE rankings in January 2010 recorded Carlsen’s rating at 2810, which made him No. 1 rated player in the world. This meant that Carlsen became, at the age of 19 years and 32 days, the youngest ever world No. 1, as well as the first player from a Western nation to reach the top of the FIDE rankings since Bobby Fischer in 1971.
The March 2010 FIDE rankings showed Carlsen with a new peak rating of 2813, a figure that only Kasparov had bettered at that time. On the January 2013 FIDE rankings, Carlsen reached 2861, thus surpassing Garry Kasparov’s 2851 record from July 1999. In the May 2014 rankings, Carlsen achieved an all-time high record of 2882.
An artificial intelligence approach, designed by Jean-Marc Alliot of the Institut de recherche en informatique de Toulouse (“Toulouse Computer Science Research Institute”), which compares chess grandmaster moves against that of Stockfish—a chess engine which outperforms all human opponents—rated Carlsen as the best player of all time as he had the highest probability of all World Chess Champions to play the moves which Stockfish suggested.
