His soft-spoken father, Henrik, introduced him to chess when he was five, after noticing his powerful memory and capacity for concentration. The second of four children, Carlsen was born in Tønsberg, the oldest town in Norway, in 1990. ‘It’s curiosity as opposed to discipline.’ ‘He does what he likes,’ his father explained proudly to the New Yorker. He claims to lie in bed until just before lunch and fired his one-time coach Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest player of all time, for being too intense. He has no time for traditional education, which is understandable enough, but he also seems to take a relatively casual approach to chess. Inscrutable over the board, he has difficulty hiding his emotions the rest of the time: you will always know if Carlsen is bored, and he is easily bored. On a rest day, he went off to play football and reappeared the next day with a black eye. Before the 2018 World Chess Championship, he tweeted a video claiming that his preparation involved ‘the three Ps’: pizza, Premier League and poker. His cool sometimes seems of the high school jock variety.
He is imposingly good-looking it’s impossible not to be impressed by his quiff, even if his face always looks slightly swollen, as if he’s coming off an especially bad night’s sleep or a mild allergic reaction. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film in the years since – he’s now 28 and the world’s best chess player – he has been one of Cosmopolitan’s sexiest men and one of Time’s hundred most influential.
I f you know anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool.
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