At 15, he became the youngest Alberta chess champion on record. When he wasn’t playing against anonymous opponents online, he was defeating children and adults alike in an English pub in downtown Calgary. An only child, his computer soon became his closest friend, chess his favourite pastime. A math teacher at his prep school had used the game as a teaching tool Hansen was nine when he first looked his teacher in the eye and said “checkmate.” At 12, his parents switched him into a school for kids with learning disabilities. Chess seemed to help him focus better than any medication. The doctors had fed him Ritalin to help him concentrate, but he didn’t like the pills. Then again, his mind had been running away on him for as long as he could remember. Concentrating on games had become an issue because his mind would wander from the board and he’d start wondering what she was doing on the other side of the world. He’d recently split with his girlfriend, a 19-year-old American chess master living in San Francisco. He was drained and recovering from a recent string of defeats in Oslo, Munich and Barcelona. He’d been losing more games than usual and finding it difficult to sustain himself as a pro. Things hadn’t been going so well at the time. A Canadian and Pan American champion who’d been living in Europe, he was back in Canada on a quick trip, posing for publicity photos and trying to schedule meetings with potential sponsors. He was wearing a pair of white tennis shoes, tight chinos and an Irish fisherman’s sweater, looking like a guy who’d just gone out and bought everything he’d seen in the pages of Esquire. The sun was making its way across the Atlantic by the time he closed his eyes.įive months earlier, on a cold November day in Toronto, Hansen sat in a coffee shop, sipping tea and casting his eyes from one stranger to another. It was shortly after four o’clock in the morning when he went back to his hotel to lie awake in bed and strategize all the ways he might defeat the best German in the game. He’d slept less than 15 hours in the past four days and was beginning to feel like a walking pile of human garbage, yet he was hesitant to crawl home to bed because he was a superstitious man who’d been winning in spite of his extracurricular activities. But he was always aware of who he was: a college dropout who’d barely made it out of high school. He liked to maintain an image of cool, especially among those who’d been trained in well-established chess clubs in Moscow, Budapest and Mumbai, while he’d picked up the game in a smoky bar in downtown Calgary. He didn’t let on that he cared about much, really, even though he did care a great deal. But Hansen didn’t seem to care what they thought of him. Who’d heard how he’d gone out partying with the Arctic Monkeys while others sat in their hotel rooms preparing for the tournament. He was the 14th-best player on the island that week in March, and yet there were those around him who didn’t take him seriously. He was talented yet humble and had a way of making you forget that beneath his carefully coiffed hair there was a weapon tuned for intellectual combat. But he was also a 21-year-old party boy who listened to trance and ate nachos or Hawaiian pizzas for breakfast, lunch and supper, too. Hansen was a grandmaster, a kind of black belt in the hierarchy of chess masterdom. He’d spent the better part of the past two years criss-crossing Europe, living out of a knapsack, playing chess for money, earning barely enough to survive and wandering deeper into a world filled with child prodigies, aging geniuses and post-Soviet alcoholics. He’d come to Reykjavik, like 259 other players, in search of a modest fortune and a minute increase in fame. So he sprinkled salt on his hand, kicked back the tequila and went on rallying the party inside the liveliest pub on the entire volcanic afterthought known as Iceland. It was one o’clock on a Tuesday morning and Canada’s only professional chess player knew he should probably be in bed resting his brain, or preparing mentally and physically for what would be one of the toughest chess matches of his life.
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