World Chess Champion On the Verge of Topping Fantasy Football Table

Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player for the last decade, is on the brink of reaching the top in another game -- fantasy football. From a report: The grandmaster is enjoying his best season ever in the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game and after Sunday's results he climbed to the sixth position in a table of more than 7 million players worldwide. Carlsen, who is currently competing at the London Chess Classic at Olympia, puts his fantasy football success down to luck. But his FPL team, Kjell Ankedal, has consistently scored high in the overall rankings for the past four years, finishing among the top 3,000 players in the 2017-2018 league. This season, it took Carlsen just six weeks to make it into the top 1,000 and he has been climbing up the table ever since. It will not comfort anyone languishing in the FPL's lower millions to learn that Carlsen is also an occasional model. Like many Norwegians, Carlsen is obsessed with both the Premier League and its fantasy league spin-off. In 2017, eight players from Norway were in the top 50 FPL players in the world. Norway has an advantage for FPL obsessives because of the relatively free availability of live matches on the country's TV channels, compared to broadcast restrictions in other countries.