Chess Master Magnus Carlsen's Curious Decision Follows A Long Line Of Champions

Magnus Carlsen didn’t just appear out of nowhere in the chess world when he claimed the title of world champion in 2013. He’d been a child prodigy for 17 years by that point, having learned the game from his father at the age of 5 and, within a few years, was consistently beating his father, his older sisters, and other adults. When he took the title in 2013, he was 22, the second-youngest person to do so, according to Britannica.

However, he’s been at the top of the chess world for nine years now, and he’s decided that chess has nothing left to give him. “[I am] not motivated to play another match [at the World Chess Championship]. I simply feel that I don’t have a lot to gain,” Carlsen said, per the Washington Post.

Carlsen is not the first world chess champion to call it quits while on top. Famously, American Bobby Fischer refused to defend his title in 1975, and then disappeared into obscurity for the next two decades, according to the New York Times. Garry Kasparov, quite possibly the greatest player to ever play the game, and the last of the great chess players produced by the Soviet machine, also quit at the top of his game — in 2005, according to The Guardian, in order to concentrate on politics.

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