The New Fischer?

Brief article on the greatest chess champ in the world right now, Magnus Carslen from Norway:

Carlsen, 23 years old, is the highest-rated chess player ever and already in the conversation for greatest of all time.

 

Like any sport, modern high-level chess tends to enforce a certain orthodoxy of technique. In the same way you no longer see jump shots like Bill Cartwright's or windups like Juan Marichal's, the primacy of the computer in chess today has universalized a drab, uninflected style of play. Carlsen has spoken of "weird computer moves I can't understand." Playing against the machines, he told the New Yorker's D.T. Max, is "like playing someone who is extremely stupid but who beats you anyway," and because nearly all chess training nowadays is done on the computer, where every position yields an optimal line of play, that mechanical style has spread to the humans. It's a way of playing that encourages efficiency above all else. By contrast, Carlsen relies on his intuition, on what former champ Garry Kasparov describes as an almost musical sense of the board:

I coached Carlsen for a year, in 2009, and I was amazed at how quickly he could correctly evaluate a position "cold," seemingly without any calculation at all. My own style required tremendous energy and labor at the board, working through deep variations looking for the truth in each position. Carlsen comes from a different world champion lineage, that of Jose Capablanca and Anatoly Karpov, players who sense harmony on the board like virtuoso musicians with perfect pitch.