2009
Playing in Group A of the Corus chess tournament, Carlsen tied for fifth with a 2739 performance. In the Linares chess tournament, Carlsen finished third with a 2777 performance. Carlsen tied for second place with Veselin Topalov at the M-Tel Masters (category 21) tournament in Sofia, Bulgaria. He lost to eventual winner Alexei Shirov in their final game, dropping him from first.
Carlsen won the category 21 Nanjing Pearl Spring tournament, 2½ points ahead of second-place finisher Topalov, the world's highest-rated player at the time. He scored an undefeated 8/10, winning every game as White (against Topalov, Wang Yue, Leko, Radjabov, and Jakovenko), and also winning as Black against Jakovenko. By rating performance, this was one of the greatest results in history, with a performance rating of 3002. Chess statistician Jeff Sonas has declared it one of the 20 best tournament performances of all time, and the best chess performance of all time by a teenager.
In the Tal Memorial, played from 5 to 14 November, Carlsen started with seven straight draws, but finished with wins over Ruslan Ponomariov and Peter Leko. This result put Carlsen in shared second place behind Kramnik and equal with Ivanchuk. After the Tal Memorial, Carlsen won the World Blitz Championship, played from 16 to 18 November in Moscow, Russia. His score of 28 wins, 6 draws and 8 losses left him three points ahead of Anand, who finished in second place.
Carlsen entered the London Chess Classic as the top seed in a field including Kramnik, Hikaru Nakamura, Michael Adams, Nigel Short, Ni Hua, Luke McShane and David Howell. He defeated Kramnik in round one and went on to win the tournament with 13/21 (three points were awarded for a win, and one for a draw; using classical scoring he finished with 5/7) and a performance rating of 2844, one point ahead of Kramnik. This victory propelled him to the top of the FIDE rating list, surpassing Veselin Topalov.
Based on his average ranking from the July 2009 and January 2010 FIDE lists, Carlsen qualified for the Candidates Tournament that would determine the challenger to World Champion Viswanathan Anand in the World Chess Championship 2012. In November 2010, however, Carlsen announced he was withdrawing from the Candidates tournament. Carlsen described the 2008–12 cycle as " sufficiently modern and fair", and wrote that "Reigning champion privileges, the long (five year) span of the cycle, changes made during the cycle resulting in a new format (Candidates) that no World Champion has had to go through since Kasparov, puzzling ranking criteria as well as the shallow ceaseless match-after-match concept are all less than satisfactory in my opinion."
In early 2009 Carlsen engaged former World Champion Garry Kasparov as a personal trainer. In September their partnership was confirmed in Norwegian newspapers.
In an interview with Time magazine in December 2009, responding to a question whether he used computers when studying chess, Carlsen explained that he does not use a chess set when studying on his own.
Read more about this topic: Carlsen, Chess Career