THE KING'S ENDGAME ( Chess)

 Magnus Carlsen

A new king has arrived in the world of chess, and it's a 22-year-old who is as much at home posing for fashion shoots as he is pushing pawns. Magnus Carlsen of Norway won the chess world championship on November 22, 2013, becoming the first Westerner since Bobby Fischer to hold the title. Carlsen, a former child prodigy who has been on a list of the world's sexiest men and has moonlighted as a model, defeated defending champion Viswanathan Anand of India in a title match that was the game's most highly anticipated in decades. Without losing a game in the best-of-12 series, held in Anand's hometown, Chennai, Carlsen so dominated the match that it lasted only 10 games, with Carlsen winning three and the others ending in draws with the score 6,5-3,5. Carlsen had taken an overwhelming lead, 4 points to 2, by winning Games 5 and 6. Then, with Games 7 and 8 ending in quick and uneventful draws, it appeared as if Anand was ceding the title to Carlsen. But Anand did not become world champion and hold on to the title for six years by playing timidly. So in Game 9, he came out swinging, and nearly succeeded in breaking Carlsen's momentum. Carlsen expanded on the queenside, while Anand prepared to attack Carlsen's king on the other side of the board. Anand said that he had gone for an all-out attack because “the match situation didn't leave me much choice.” In the end it was Carlsen who triumphed.

The match broke all records of the most seen event on TV, printed media, or the internet. Millions of fans followed the championship daily, while the match was trending on social media to top positions in several countries. British Fashion and Style magazine GQ ran a story about the match in the same issue containing a photo feature, billed as the sexiest catwalk show on earth, on the Victoria's Secret lingerie show in New York. The surprised editors posted on Twitter, “So this story about #chess is currently more popular on the site than our 100 shots of Victoria's Secret models.”

Carlsen (right) beats defending champion Viswanathan Anand.

For his victory, Carlsen will receive 60 percent of the roughly $2.5 million prize.
The last chess match to get as much publicity as this was the 1996 contest between then-champion Garry Kasparov, considered by many the greatest chess player of all time, and IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in New York City. Some saw that battle as a historic test for human intelligence. The outcome could be seen as an "early indication of how well our species might maintain its identity, let alone its superiority, in the years and centuries to come," wrote Steven Levy in a Newsweek cover story titled "The Brain's Last Stand." Kasparov won 4-2 in the six-game human-computer chess match while a team of IBM programmers, engineers and chess experts directed and reprogrammed the machine between games.
Many years later, Carlsen, then only 13, drew the game with Kasparov in their first ever encounter. Kasparov arrived late for the game, trying to intimidate Carlsen. After the draw, shaking hands with Carlsen, he left in a hurry, embarrassed. Since then Carlsen has turned into a rock star of chess. With his smouldering good looks and six-pack abs he has been featured in ad campaigns alongside the likes of Liv Tyler, and turned down a small role in the most recent Star Trek movie. He models for the clothing company G-Star Raw and has appeared on “Charlie Rose,” “The Colbert Report” and “60 minutes” which has called him the 'Mozart of Chess.” Even in Anand's backyard, Carlsen was a celebrity. When he went to Chennai in August to check out the location of the match, he was greeted by hundreds of screaming young women in a mall. His Elo rating, 2872, is the highest ever recorded, as opposed to Anand's 2817. Elo rating system is a complex formula to measure chess skills and only six players in history have topped 2800.
Viswanathan Anand, on the other hand, is the 43-year-old titleholder since 2007 who first won the title in 2000. He is responsible for the revival of the game in his native India that claims to have invented the sport. Millions of Indian kids forced by their parents to take chess lessons have Anand to blame.

Taking on another master: Carlsen (left) and Kasparov.

In a game against Vladimir Kramnik, title holder from 2006-2007, Carlsen once recovered from a situation that Kasparov called “impossible” to force a draw. Carlsen is largely self-taught, and can play various styles of chess. He has been a full-time chess player since he was fifteen, and spends more than a hundred and sixty days a year on the road. When he is not travelling, he lives in a house with his family in an affluent suburb of Oslo. He left school two years ago without formally graduating. Though he had shown unusual mathematical aptitude as a little boy, he was more engaged by soccer and skiing. When Magnus was eight, his father made an attempt to engage him in chess and, he found it “just a richer and more complicated game than any other.” He has a prodigious memory for board positions and moves. He has studied with Simen Agdestein, a top Norwegian grandmaster at the time, and later with Kasparov.
After the match against Anand, Carlsen said he realized he had a chance to grab the title from Anand during Game 3 on November 12. Anand had built up a considerable advantage, but Carlsen fought his way back, and the game ended in a draw.
“What I realized during the game was that he was also nervous and vulnerable,” Carlsen said in a press conference after he won the title. “He was no Superman.”

Anand played well throughout, but he could not match Carlsen, whose specialty is to relentlessly pressure opponents and create problems for them. Kenneth Rogoff, a former grandmaster and Professor of Economics at Harvard writes in a blog, “Magnus plays at a level of tactical brilliance and sublime endgame technique that I could not even have imagined, even from people like Petrosian, Tal and Larsen whom I played in the 1976 Interzonal in Biel. ” In 2012 Rogoff drew a blitz game (15 minutes or less per side) with Carlsen who does not like drawn games and tries to avoid giving his opponents that opportunity. Even in the last game of the match, when he needed only a draw to clinch the championship, he pressed on until, after five hours and 65 moves, there were only kings left on the board. “Carlsen's mastery lies in his endgame. He starts casually, plays competitively in the middle, but brings out his secret weapons in the end game, completely taking his opponents by surprise,” says Enamul Hossain Razib, one of the five grandmasters (GM) of Bangladesh.
There is hope in the chess world that with Carlsen as the game's official standard-bearer, it will regain the cachet it briefly enjoyed when Bobby Fischer, the eccentric American, defeated Boris Spassky, a Russian, to claim the world championship title in the international sensation known as the Match of the Century in 1972. Chess enthusiasts say the game needs another big personality to energize the cerebral game, played by around 600 million people worldwide. And they are pinning their hopes on Carlsen.
Carlsen seems to be aware of that pressure. "I really hope that this can have some positive effect for chess, both in Norway and worldwide," Carlsen said after clinching the title. "The match was shown on television, and I know a lot of people who don't play chess found it very interesting to follow. And that's absolutely wonderful."

The world's 'poorest' president

It's a common grumble that politicians' lifestyles are far removed from those of their electorate. Not so in Uruguay. Meet the president - who lives on a ramshackle farm and gives away most of his pay.
Laundry is strung outside the house. The water comes from a well in a yard, overgrown with weeds. Only two police officers and Manuela, a three-legged dog, keep watch outside.
This is the residence of the president of Uruguay, Jose Mujica, whose lifestyle clearly differs sharply from that of most otherworld leaders.
President Mujica has shunned the luxurious house that the Uruguayan state provides for its leaders and opted to stay at his wife's farmhouse, off a dirt road outside the capital, Montevideo.
The president and his wife work the land themselves, growing flowers.
This austere lifestyle - and the fact that Mujica donates about 90 percent of his monthly salary, equivalent to $12,000, to charity - has led him to be labelled the poorest president in the world.
"I've lived like this most of my life," he says, sitting on an old chair in his garden, using a cushion favoured by Manuela the dog.
"I can live well with what I have."
His charitable donations - which benefit poor people and small entrepreneurs - mean his salary is roughly in line with the average Uruguayan income of $775 a month.
In 2010, his annual personal wealth declaration - mandatory for officials in Uruguay - was $1,800, the value of his 1987 Volkswagen Beetle.
This year, he added half of his wife's assets - land, tractors and a house - reaching $215,000.
That's still only about two-thirds of Vice-President Danilo Astori's declared wealth, and a third of the figure declared by Mujica's predecessor as president, Tabare Vasquez.
Elected in 2009, Mujica spent the 1960s and 1970s as part of the Uruguayan guerrilla Tupamaros, a leftist armed group inspired by the Cuban revolution.
He was shot six times and spent 14 years in jail. Most of his detention was spent in harsh conditions and isolation, until he was freed in 1985 when Uruguay returned to democracy.
Those years in jail, Mujica says, helped shape his outlook on life.
"I'm called 'the poorest president', but I don't feel poor. Poor people are those who only work to try to keep an expensive lifestyle, and always want more and more," he says.
"This is a matter of freedom. If you don't have many possessions then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself," he says.
"I may appear to be an eccentric old man... But this is a free choice."
The Uruguayan leader made a similar point when he addressed the Rio+20 summit in June this year: "We've been talking all afternoon about sustainable development. To get the masses out of poverty.
"But what are we thinking? Do we want the model of development and consumption of the rich countries? I ask you now: what would happen to this planet if Indians would have the same proportion of cars per household than Germans? How much oxygen would we have left?
"Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies? It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet."
Mujica accuses most world leaders of having a "blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption, as if the contrary would mean the end of the world".
But however large the gulf between the vegetarian Mujica and these other leaders, he is no more immune than they are to the ups and downs of political life.
"Many sympathise with President Mujica because of how he lives. But this does not stop him for being criticised for how the government is doing," says Ignacio Zuasnabar, a Uruguayan pollster.
The Uruguayan opposition says the country's recent economic prosperity has not resulted in better public services in health and education, and for the first time since Mujica's election in 2009 his popularity has fallen below 50%.
This year he has also been under fire because of two controversial moves. Uruguay's Congress recently passed a bill which legalised abortions for pregnancies up to 12 weeks. Unlike his predecessor, Mujica did not veto it.
He is also supporting a debate on the legalisation of the consumption of cannabis, in a bill that would also give the state the monopoly over its trade.
"Consumption of cannabis is not the most worrying thing, drug-dealing is the real problem," he says.
However, he doesn't have to worry too much about his popularity rating - Uruguayan law means he is not allowed to seek re-election in 2014. Also, at 77, he is likely to retire from politics altogether before long.

When he does, he will be eligible for a state pension - and unlike some other former presidents, he may not find the drop in income too hard to get used to.