Learn chess and meet woman!
Magnus Carlsen, age 13 of Norway, would rather be a famous footballer, but the youngest Grandmaster of Chess, and the ranking #1 in the world will have to do..
As for Carlsen’s genius – and one can hardly avoid the word – there were clues long before he started showing his paces at chess. Before he was two, he could solve jigsaw puzzles with more than 50 pieces. From jigsaws he graduated to Lego, constructing models that would have challenged teenagers. Feats of memory came easily to him. By the age of five, scarily, he knew the area, population, flag and capital of every country in the world.
And this is cool… they took off from school and toured Europe for a year:
Instead he has enjoyed a normal, even outgoing, childhood. In 2003, when he was still 12, his parents took him and his sisters out of school for a year, packed them into a minibus and, in the adventure of a lifetime, embarked on a tour of Europe.
That sounds familiar…
I like his attitude – when it stops being fun he will stop doing it. I wonder, though, if that will modify if chess becomes his job. I hope not, I make money doing what I like to do, and I encourage everybody to do so!
Meanwhile, Marginal Revolution wonders, in context of this article, if the world’s best chess player has never played the game. He thinks it above 10% but under 50%. I think it higher than that.