Childhood
Born in Tønsberg, Vestfold, Carlsen currently lives in Haslum, Bærum, near Norway's capital, Oslo. He played his first chess tournament at the age of eight and was later coached at a Norwegian high school (for athletes) by the country's top player, Grandmaster (GM) Simen Agdestein. Agdestein introduced his civil worker Torbjørn Ringdal Hansen, currently an International Master, to Carlsen, and they had one training session every week, along with one of Carlsen's close friends. Becoming an International Master, Carlsen was given a year off from elementary school to participate in international chess tournaments during the fall season of 2003. In that same year, he finished third in the European Under-12 Boys Championship.
Read more about this topic: Magnus Carlsen
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children’s, and of what our children’s future will hold.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)