One chess champion per laptop
Search in YouTube for “too weak, too slow” and you will find a video of two young men sitting across from each other at a small table, frantically moving carved tokens on a wooden grid and slapping a clock mercilessly. They are fighting each other to the death, with bravado and gusto, in one of the oldest battlefields known to the human mind: the chessboard. The cocky guy in the green shirt, with the looks of a Viking and the nose of a boxer, is a 22-year-old chap named Magnus Carlsen, who happens to be the strongest chess player to ever walk the earth. The other guy, at the receiving end of Magnus’ Muhammad Ali-esque taunts (“Too weak, too slow! C’mon! What, you wanna play?”) is his close friend and sparring partner, Grandmaster Laurent Fressinet.