Chess career 2004

The result that brought him to the attention of the international chess world, however, was his victory in the C group at the Corus chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee with 10.5/13, losing just one game (against the highest rated player of the C group, Dusko Pavasovic), taking his first Grandmaster norm, and achieving an Elo tournament performance rating of 2702. Particularly notable was his win in the penultimate round over Sipke Ernst in which Carlsen sacrificed material to mate Ernst in just 29 moves. This game won Carlsen the Audience Prize for best game of the round (including all the games played in the B and A groups), though the first 23 moves had already been seen in the game Almagro Llanas-Gustafsson, Madrid 2003 (which, however, was a draw). Carlsen's tournament victory in the C group qualified him to play in the B group in 2005, and led to Lubomir Kavalek, writing in the Washington Post, to describe him as the "Mozart of chess". According to an interview with mentor Agdestein, himself once a young GM at 18, Carlsen is a significantly better player than he was himself at the same age. Carlsen is said to have an excellent memory and plays an unusually wide range of different openings Carlsen obtained his second GM norm in the Moscow Aeroflot Open in February 2004. In a blitz chess tournament (where players have much less time for their moves than in normal chess) in Reykjavík, Iceland, on 17 March 2004, Magnus Carlsen defeated former world champion Anatoly Karpov. The blitz tournament was a preliminary event leading up to a rapid chess knock out tournament beginning the next day, where Carlsen achieved one draw against Garry Kasparov, who was then the top-rated player in the world, before losing to Kasparov after 32 moves of the second game, thus being knocked out of the tournament. In the sixth Dubai Open Chess Championship, held 18 April to 28, 2004, Carlsen obtained his third Grandmaster norm (enough for getting the GM title), after getting four wins and four draws before the last game was to be played. Resulting from this he was at the time world's youngest GM and the second youngest person ever to hold GM status, after Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine who attained the feat at 12 years and 7 months of age in 2002. Carlsen was the youngest player to participate in the FIDE World Chess Championship 2004, but was knocked out in the first round on tie breaks by Levon Aronian. In July 2004, Carlsen finished second place behind Berge Østenstad in the Norwegian Chess Championship. Since the scores of these two players were equal (each got 7 points out of 9 but Østenstad had better tiebreaks) a two-game play-off match between the two players was arranged. Due to Østenstad's superior tiebreak score he would win the title should this match end with a 1-1 tie. The match did end with a 1-1 tie after two draws, so Østenstad retained his Norwegian championship title.