CHECK
M AT E S By Tara Ryazansky
Photos by Max Ryazansky
C
Carsten Hansen
46 • BLP ~ SPRING 2020
arsten Hansen has competed in professional chess tournaments all over the world, across Europe and the former Soviet Union as a World Chess Federation Master level player. Today he stares down a very different opponent. On the other side of the board is a kid from Bayonne. Hansen leads the Recreation Chess Club that meets every other Saturday at the Bayonne library. Hansen learned to play chess when he was five. His father was a highly skilled player who founded his local chess club in Denmark where Hansen grew up. Hansen was good, but it was sibling rivalry that inspired him to push himself further. “I started taking it seriously when my brother won a prize in a tournament, and I didn’t win a prize,” Hansen,
who was ten at the time, says. Once he devoted himself to chess he got very good very quickly. “When you can beat all the adults in the local chess club, and you go on to compete in all the tournaments, and you’re winning those as well, that’s motivation.” As he was finishing up business school he wanted to try to play professionally. “My parents were of the opinion that I should have a regular job, but I wanted to play first and see how far it would take me,” he says. Otherwise, I would regret it for the rest of my life.”
Back in Bayonne He enjoyed traveling, but eventually he burned out. “I nearly gave up playing chess altogether,” he says. “I’d had enough. I came home, and my dad convinced me that I still had some obligations to the local chess club. They had supported me, so I was like, ‘Ok I am going to show up for
