Carlsen's chess victory a triumph for man over supercomputer Norway's Magnus Carlsen leaves the arena after his victory in 11th game over India's former World Champion Vishwanathan Anand in Sochi Magnus Carlsen's triumph over Viswanathan Anand on Sunday allowed the 23-year-old Norwegian to retain his crown as world chess champion. Yet it was the remarkable way in which Mr Carlsen defeated his Indian opponent that has reinforced the view in fiercely competitive, top-level chess that he is simply the best the game has ever seen. He won without a huge team of seconds, or assistants, to feed him new ideas and without a room stuffed with supercomputers to prepare game plans in advance. His victory was, as Frederic Friedel, co-founder of the Chessbase chess software company, put it, "like a tennis player turning up to Wimbledon with an ancient wooden racket - and winning." Computers and the number-crunching analysis they provide have become a regular feature of the highest levels of chess for more than a decade. Top players rely on them to generate the theoretical novelty that can provide a telling advantage in the opening. In 2010, as he prepared to fight for the world chess crown against Anand, the Bulgarian grandmaster Veselin Topalov revealed that he was using IBM's Blue Gene/P supercomputer, decked with 8,192-processors, to help prepare some tailor-made openings. Anand, meanwhile, admitted that the desktop of one of his main seconds looked "like a pilot's cockpit." Such an approach is logical in a game so complex that players arrive at one of 9m possible positions after just three moves each - and one in which there are more possible unique chess games than neutrons in the physical universe. As Mr Carlsen said with some understatement following one of last week's games, "chess, in general, is more difficult than other things." But the man who regularly plays in ripped jeans and has a reputation for slouching in his chair during matches does not rely on computer analysis nearly as much as his opponents and pays relatively little attention to opening theory. "With the modern computer age, there are some new ideas," he said a couple of years ago. But the principles are basically the same . . . I try not to over-focus on preparation. The result of this old-school approach has turned modern chess on its head. Whereas computer analysis has raised the relative importance of the opening for most players, Mr Carlsen has relegated it. He looks instead to win a game later on via the steady and patient accumulation of sometimes almost imperceptible advantages. "The space that chess occupies is so gigantic that in spite of all the computer work done today, you can get out of it," says Mr Friedel, who occasionally chaperoned Mr Carlsen at tournaments when he was a teenager. Magnus goes off into sidelines . . . then he just outplays people. It is extraordinary and amazing. That he is able to do so is evidence of his raw talent. A grandmaster at 13, he became the world's strongest player at just 19 and has remained there. In May, he reached an "Elo" rating of 2,882 - the highest a human being has ever achieved. Asked in 2012 how he played so well, he replied modestly, "I don't know . . . the game somehow comes naturally." Mr Carlsen's relentlessly accurate positional style means that his games are often longer than those of other players. During last week's match, he fought Mr Anand for six and a half hours during one, ultimately drawn encounter as he looked for tiny chances in a 122-move game - the second-longest ever played in a world championship. That relentless display led one member of the chess.com playing site to marvel after the game: "Carlsen is psycho." He also rarely offers otherwise frequent draws, preferring instead to play on and on as he grinds his opponents down mentally and physically. Among other things, Mr Carlsen specialises in turning a theoretically drawn position into a win, pressing his rival to make a mistake he can seize on. Just how long the Carlsen phenomenon will continue may depend as much as anything on how motivated he can remain at the top. For now, though, it seems he could be there for a while. As Christof Sielecki, a German international master whose Chessexplained YouTube channel has earned him a growing online following, says: "He will set his opponent 50 problems in a game. No sooner have you solved one of them, he presents you with another.