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:
““O what unlucky streak
Twisting inside me, made me break the line?
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck,
And what bright unreal path has led me here?””
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple, has of those particular relishes.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)