Magnus Carlsen: Greatest Chess Player of All Time | Lex Fridman Podcast #315
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Magnus Carlsen is the highest-rated chess player in history and widely considered to be the greatest chess player of all time. Quick note from Lex: The camera on Magnus died 20 minutes in. Most folks still just listen to audio-only version, but here on YouTube, we did our best to still make it interesting to watch & listen by adding image overlays. I mess things up sometimes, like in this case, and it hits me hard when I do. But I'm always working hard to improve. I hope you understand. Thank you for your patience and support along the way. I love you all.

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EPISODE LINKS:
Magnus's Twitter: https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen
Magnus's Instagram: https://instagram.com/magnus_carlsen
Magnus's YouTube: https://youtube.com/c/themagnuscarlsen
Magnus's Website: https://magnuscarlsen.com

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
0:51 - Greatest soccer player of all time
7:57 - Magnus's approach to chess
17:10 - Game 6 of the 2021 World Chess Championship
21:12 - Chess openings
33:35 - Chess960: Fischer random chess
38:37 - Chess variants
41:22 - Elo Rating
49:48 - World Chess Championship
1:14:00 - Losing
1:21:22 - Day in the life
1:28:12 - Drunk chess
1:32:43 - Chess training
1:40:37 - Garry Kasparov
1:49:54 - Greatest chess player of all time
2:03:06 - Advice for chess players
2:04:49 - Chess YouTubers
2:08:20 - Henrik Carlsen
2:13:55 - Lessons for life
2:17:19 - Queen's Gambit
2:19:10 - Poker
2:25:24 - Loneliness
2:28:45 - How does the knight move?

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 The following is a conversation with Magnus Carlsen, the number one ranked chess player in the world and widely considered to be one of, if not the greatest chess player of all time. The camera on Magnus died 20 minutes into the conversation. Most folks still just listen to the audio through a podcast player anyway, but if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, we did our best to still make it interesting by adding relevant image overlays. I mess things up sometimes, like in this case, but I'm always working hard to improve. I hope you understand. Thank you for your patience and support along the way. I love you all. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Magnus Carlsen. You're considered by many to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest chess players of all time, but you're also one of the best fantasy football, AKA soccer competitors in the world, plus recently picking up poker and competing at a world-class level. So before chess, let's talk football and greatness. You're a Real Madrid fan, so let me ask you the ridiculous big question. Who do you think is the greatest football, AKA soccer player of all time? Can you make the case for Messi? Can you make the case for Cristiano Ronaldo, Pele, Maradona, does anybody jump to mind? I think it's pretty hard to make a case for anybody else than Messi for his all-around game. And frankly, like my Real Madrid fandom sort of predates the Ronaldo era, the second Ronaldo, not the first one. So I always liked Ronaldo, but I always kind of thought that Messi was better. And I went to quite a number of Madrid games and they've always been super helpful to me down there. The only thing is that, like they asked me, they were gonna do an interview and they were gonna ask me who my favorite player was. And I said somebody else, I think I said Isco at that point, and I was like, okay, take two, now you say Ronaldo. So for them, it was very important, but it wasn't that huge to me. So Messi over Maradona. Yeah, but I think just like with chess, it's hard to compare eras. Obviously the improvements in football have been, like in technique and such have been even greater than they have been in chess, but it's always a weird discussion to have. But just as a fan, what do you think is beautiful about the game? What defines greatness? Is it, you know, with Messi, one, he's really good at finishing, two, very good at assist, like three, there's just magic, it's just beautiful to see the play. So it's not just about the finishing. There's some, it's like Maradona's hand of God. There's some creativity on the pitch. Is that important or is it very important to get the World Cups and the big championships and that kind of stuff? I think the World Cup is pretty overrated seeing as it's such a small sample size. So it sort of annoys me always when, you know, titles are always appreciated so much, even though that particular title can be a lot of luck or at least some luck. So I do appreciate statistics a bit and all the statistics say that Messi's the best finisher of all time, which I think helps a lot. And then there's the intangibles as well. The flip side of that is the small sample size is what really creates the magic. It's so, it's just like the Olympics. You basically train your whole life for this. You live your whole life for this and it's a rare moment. One mistake and it's all over. That's for some reason a lot of people either break under that pressure or rise up under that pressure. You don't admire the magic of that? No, I do. I just think that like rising and pressure and breaking under the pressure is often a really oversimplified take on what's happening. Yeah, we do romanticize the game. Well, let me ask you another ridiculous question. You're also a fan of basketball. Yes. Let me ask the goat question. I'm biased because I went to high school in Chicago, Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era. Let me ask the Jordan versus LeBron James question. Let's continue on this thread of greatness. Which one do you pick or somebody else? So I'll give you a completely different answer. Depending on my mood and depending on who I talk to, I pick one of the two and then I try to argue for that. The quantum mechanical thing. Well, can you, what, again, what would, if you were to argue for either one, statistically, I think LeBron James is going to surpass Jordan. Yeah, no doubt. And so again, there's a debate between. Unquantifiable greatness. Know that, I mean, that's the whole debate. Yes, so it's, well, it's quantifiable versus unquantifiable. What's more important. And you're depending on mood all over the place. Yeah. But what do you lean in general with these folks, with soccer, with anything in life towards the unquantifiable more? No, definitely towards the quantifiable. So when you're unsure, lean towards the numbers. But see like it's later generations. There's something, that's what people say about Maradona is, you know, he took a arguably somewhat mediocre team to a World Cup. So there's that also uplifting nature of the player to be able to rise up the whole, it is a team sport. So are you gonna like, are you gonna punish Messi for taking a mediocre Argentine squad to the final in 2014 and punish him because they lost to a great team very narrowly after they missed. The internet does. He set up like a great chance for Iguayan in the first half, which he fluffed. And then, yeah, eventually they lost the game. Yeah, they do criticize Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi for being on really strong squads in terms of the club teams and saying, yeah, okay, it's easy when you have like Ronaldinho or whoever on your team. It would be very interesting. Just if the league could make a decision. Yeah, just random, random allocation. Yeah. And just every single game, just keep reallocating or maybe once a season or every season you get random. Let's say every player, if let's say they sign a five-year contract for a team, like one of them you're gonna get randomly allocated to, to let's say a bottom half team. I bet you there's gonna be so much corruption around that. It'll be random. No, obviously it wouldn't ever happen or work, but I think it's interesting to think about. So on chess, let's zoom out. If you break down your approach to chess, when you're at your best, what do you think contributes to that approach? Is it memory recall, specific lines and positions? Is it intuition? How much of it is intuition? How much of it is pure calculation? How much of it is messing with the strategy of the opponent? So the game theory aspect in terms of what contributes to the highest level of play that you do. I think the answer differs a little bit now from what it did eight years ago. For instance, I feel like I've had two peaks in my career in 2014, well, 2013, 2014, and also in 2019. And in those years, I was very different in terms of my strengths. Specifically in 2019, I benefited a lot from opening preparation. While in 2013, 2014, I mostly tried to avoid my opponent's preparation rather than that being a strength. So I'm mentioning that also because it's something you didn't mention. I think my intuitive understanding of chess has over those years always been a little bit better than the others, even though it has evolved as well. Certainly there are things that I understand now that I didn't understand back then, but that's not only for me, that's for others as well. I was younger back then, so I played with more energy, which meant that I could play better in long drawn out games, which was also a necessity for me because I couldn't beat people in the openings. But in terms of calculation, that's always been a weird issue for me. I've always been really, really bad at solving exercises in chess. Like that's been like a blind spot for me. First of all, I found it hard to concentrate on them and to look deep enough. So this is like a puzzle, a position made in X. I mean, one thing is made, but find the best move. That's generally the exercise. Like find the best move, find the best line. You just don't connect with it. Usually you have to look deep. And then when I get these lines during the game, I very often find the right solution, even though it's not still the best part of my game to calculate very, very deeply. But it doesn't feel like calculation you're saying in terms of- No, it does sometimes, but for me, it's more like I'm at the board trying to find the solution. And I understand like the training at home is like trying a little bit to replicate that. Like you give somebody half an hour in a position, like in this instance, you might've thought for half an hour if you play the game. But I just cannot do it. One thing I know that I am good at though is calculating short lines. Cause I calculate them well. I'm good at seeing little details and I'm also much better than most at evaluating, which I think is something that sets me apart from others. So evaluating specific position, if I make this move and the position changes in this way, is this a step in the right direction, like in a big picture way? Yeah, like you calculate a few moves ahead and then you evaluate. Because a lot of the times you cannot, the branch has become so big that you cannot calculate everything. So you have to- Like a fog. Yeah, so you have to make evaluations based on, based mostly on knowledge and intuition. And somehow I seem to do that pretty well. When you say you're good at short lines, what's short? That's usually like lines of, two to four moves each. Okay, so that's directly applicable to even faster games like Blitz, chess and so on. Yeah, Blitz is a lot about calculating forest lines. So those, you can see pretty clearly that the players who struggle at Blitz, who are great at classical, are those who rely on deep calculating ability. Cause you simply don't have time for that in Blitz. You have to calculate quickly and rely a lot on intuition. Can you try to, I know it's really difficult. Can you try to talk through what's actually being visualized in your head? Is there a visual component? Yeah, no, I just visualized the board. I mean, the board is in my head. Two dimensional? My interpretation is that it is two dimensional. Like what colors? Is it brown tinted? Is it black tinted? Is it black? Is it, like what's the theme? Is it a big board, small board? Are the, what do the pawns look like? Or is it more in the space of concepts? Like, is this- Yeah, there aren't a lot of colors. It's mostly, yeah. So what is it? Queens gambit on the ceiling, whatever. I'm trying right now to imagine it. What about when you do the branching, when you have multiple boards and so on, how does that look? No, but it's only one at a time. So like- One position at a time. One position at a time, so then I go back. And that's what, when people play, or at least that's what I do, when I play blindfold chess against several people, then it's just always one board at a time and the rest are stored away somewhere. But how do you store them away? So like you went down one branch, you're like, all right, that's, I got that. I understand that there's some good there, there's some bad there. Now let me go down another branch. Like how do you store away the information? Just put it on a shelf kind of? I try and store it away. Sometimes I have to sort of repeat it because I forget. And it does happen frequently in games that you're thinking for, especially if you're thinking for long, let's say half an hour, or even more than that, that you play a move and then your opponent plays a move, then you play a move and they play a move again and you realize, oh, I actually calculated that. I just forgot about it. So that's obviously what happens when you store the information and you cannot retrieve it. When you think about a move for 20, 30 minutes, like how do you break that down? Can you describe what, like what's the algorithm here that takes 30 minutes to run? 30 minutes is, at least for me, it's usually a waste. 30 minutes usually means that I don't know what to do. And I'm trying- You're running into the wall over and over. Yeah, I'm trying to find something that isn't there. I think 10 to 15 minutes thinks in complicated positions can be really, really helpful. Then you can spend your time pretty efficiently. Just means that the branches are getting wide. There's a lot to run through, both in terms of calculation and lots you have to evaluate as well. And then based on that 10 to 15 minutes, think you have a pretty good idea what to do. It's very rare that I would think for half an hour and I would have a eureka moment during the game. If I haven't seen it in 10 minutes, I'm probably not gonna see it at all. You're going through different branches. Yeah. And after 15 minutes, it's like- Mainly to the middle game, because when you get to the end game, it's usually brute force calculation that makes you spend so much time. So middle game is normally, it's a complicated mix of brute force calculation and like creativity and evaluation. So end game, it's easier in that sense. Well, you're good at every aspect of chess, but also your end game is legendary. It baffles experts. So can you linger on that then? Try to explain what the heck is going on there. Like if you look at game six of the previous world championship, the longest game ever played in chess, it was, I think, his queen versus your rook knight in two pawns. There's so many options there. It's such an interesting little dance and it's kind of not obvious that it wouldn't be a draw. So how do you escape it not being a draw and you win that match? No, I knew that for most of the time, it was a theoretical draw since chess with seven or less pieces on the board is solved. So you can, like people who are watching online, they can just check it. They can check a so-called table base and it just gonna spit out win for white, win for black or a draw. So, and also I knew that, I knew that didn't know that position specifically, but I knew that it had to be a draw. So for me, it was about staying alert. First of all, trying to look for the best way to put my pieces. But yeah, those end games are a bit, they're a bit unusual. They don't happen too often. So what I'm usually good at is I'm using my strengths that I also use in middle games is that I evaluate well and I calculate short variations quite. Even for the end game, short variations matter. Yes, it does matter in some simpler end games. Yeah, but also like there are these theoretical end games with very few pieces like Rook Knights and two pawns versus queens, but a lot of end games are simply defined by the queens being exchanged and there are a lot of other pieces left and then it's usually not brute force. It's usually more of understanding and evaluation and then I can use my strengths very well. Why are you so damn good at the end game? Isn't there a lot of moves from when the end game starts to when the end game finishes and you have a few pieces and you have to figure out, it's like a sequence of little games that happens, right? Like little pattern, like how does it being able to evaluate a single position lead you to evaluate a long sequence of positions that eventually lead to a checkmate? Well, I think if you evaluate well at the start, you know what plans to go for and then usually the play from there is often pretty simple. Let's say you understand how to arrange your pieces and often also how to arrange your pawns early in the end game, then that makes all the difference. And after that is like what we call technique very often that it's technique basically just means that the moves are simple and these are moves that a lot of players could make, not only the very strongest ones, these are moves that are kind of understood and known. So with the evaluation, you're just constantly improving a little bit and that just leads to suffocating the position and then eventually to the win as long as you're doing the evaluation well, one step at a time. To some extent. Also, yeah, I said like if you evaluate it better and thus accumulated some small advantages, then you can often make your life pretty easy towards the end of the end game. So you said in 2019, sort of the second phase of why you're so damn good. You did a lot of opening preparation. What's the goal for you of the opening game of chess? Is it to throw the opponent off from any prepared lines is there something you could put into words about why you're so damn good at the openings? Again, these things have changed a lot over time. Back in Kasparov's days, for instance, he very often got huge advantages from the opening as white. Can you explain why? There were several reasons for that. First of all, he worked harder, he was more creative in finding ideas. He was able to look places others didn't. Also, he had a very strong team of people who had specific strengths in openings that he could use. So they will come up with ideas and he would integrate those ideas into... Yeah, and he would also very often come up with them himself. Also, at the start, he had some of the first computer engines to work for him to find his ideas, to look deeper, to verify his ideas. He was better at using them than a lot of others. Now I feel like the playing field is a lot more level. There are both computer engines, neural networks, and hybrid engines available to practically anybody. So it's much harder to find ideas now that actually give you an advantage with the white pieces. I mean, people don't expect to find those ideas anymore. Now it's all about finding ideas that are missed by the engines. Either they're missed entirely or they're missed at low depth. And using them to gain some advantage in the sense that you have more knowledge. And it's also good to know that usually these are not complete bluffs. These are like semi-bluffs so that you know that even if your opponent makes all the right moves, you can still make a draw. And also at the start of 2019, neural networks had just started to be available in chess and I'm not entirely sure, but there were at least some players, even in the top events, who you could see did not use them or did not use them in the right way. And then you could gain a huge advantage because a lot of positions, they were being evaluated differently by the neural networks than traditional chess engines because they simply think about chess in a very simple way. Because they simply think about chess in a very, very different way. So short answer is these days, it's all about surprising your opponent and taking it into position where you have more knowledge. So is there some sense in which it's okay to make suboptimal quote unquote moves? No, but you have to. I mean, you have to because the best moves have been analyzed to death mostly. So that's a kind of, when you say semi-bluff, that's a kind of sacrifice. You're sacrificing the optimal move, the optimal position so that you can take the opponent. I mean, that's a game theoretic sense. You take the opponent to something they didn't prepare well. Yeah, but you could also look at it another way that regardless, like if you turn on, whatever engine you turn on, like if you try to analyze either from the starting position or the starting position of some popular opening, like if you analyze long enough, it's always gonna end up in a draw. So in that sense, you may not be going for like the objective, the tries that are objectively the most difficult to draw against, but you are trying to look at least at the less obvious paths. How much do you use engines? Do you use Leela, Stockfish in your preparations? My team does. Personally, I try not to use them too much on my own because I know that when I play, you obviously cannot have help from engines. And often, I feel like often having imperfect or knowledge about a position or some engine knowledge can be a lot worse than having no knowledge. So I try to look at engines as little as possible. So yeah, so your team uses them for research, for a generation of ideas, but you are relying primarily on your human resources. Yeah, for sure. You can evaluate well, you don't lean. Yeah, I can evaluate as a human. I can know what they find unpleasant and so on. And it's very often the case for me to some extent, but a lot for others that you arrive in a position and your opponent plays a move that you didn't expect. And if you didn't expect it, you know that it's probably not a great move since it hasn't been expected by the engine. But if it's not obvious why it's not a good move, it's usually very, very hard to figure it out. And so then looking at the engines doesn't necessarily help because at that point, like you're facing a human, you have to sort of think as a human. I was chatting with the Demisus Habes, CEO of DeepMind a couple of days ago, and he asked me to ask you about what you first felt when you saw the play of AlphaZero. Like interesting ideas, any creativity. Did you feel fear that the machine is taking over? Were you inspired? And what was going on in your mind and heart? Funny thing about Demisus, he doesn't play chess at all like an AI. He plays in a very, very human way. No, I was hugely inspired when I saw the games at first. And in terms of man versus machine, I mean, that battle was kind of lost for humans even before I entered top level chess. So that's never been an issue for me. I never liked playing as computers much anyway. So that's completely fine. But it was amazing to see how they quote unquote thought about chess in such a different way and in a way that you could mistake for creativity. Mistake for creativity, strong words. Is it wild to you how many sacrifices it's willing to make that like sacrifice pieces and then wait for prolonged periods of time before doing anything with that? Is that weird to you that that's part of chess? No, it's one of the things that's hardest to replicate as a human as well, or at least for my playing style. That usually when I sacrifice, I feel like I'm, you know, I don't do it unless I feel like I'm getting something like tangible in return. And like a few moves down the line. A few moves down the line, you can see that you can either retrieve the material or you can put your opponent's king under pressure or have some very like very concrete positional advantage that sort of compensates for it. For instance, in chess, so bishops and knights are fairly equivalent. We both give them three points, but bishops are a little bit better. And especially a bishop pair is a lot better than a bishop and a knight. So, or especially two knights depends on the position, but like on average they are. So like sacrificing a pawn in order to get a bishop pair, that's one of the most common sacrifices in chess. Oh, you're okay making that sacrifice. Yeah, I mean, it depends on the situation, but generally that's fine. And there are a lot of openings that are based on that, that you sacrifice a pawn for the bishop pair and then eventually it's some sort of positional equality. So that's fine. But the way AlphaZero would sacrifice a knight or sometimes two pawns, three pawns. And you could see that it's looking for some sort of positional domination, but it's so hard to understand. And it was really fascinating to see. Yeah, in 2019, I was sacrificing a lot of pawns especially, and it was a great joy. Unfortunately, it's not so easy to continue to do that. People have found more solid opening lines since that don't allow me to do that as often. I'm still trying both to get those positions and still trying to learn the art of sacrificing pieces. So Demis also made a comment that was interesting to my new chess brain, which is one of the reasons that chess is fun is because of the quote, creative tension between the bishop and the knight. So you're talking about this interesting difference between the two pieces, that there's some kind of, how would you convert that? I mean, that's like a poetic statement about chess. I think he said that why has chess been played for such a long time? Why is it so fun to play at every level? That if you can reduce it to one thing, is it the bishop and the knight, some kind of weird dynamics that they create in chess. Is there any truth to that? It sounds very good. I haven't tried a lot of other games, but I tried to play a little bit of Shogi. And for my new Shogi brain, comparing it to chess, what annoyed me about that game is how much the pieces suck. Basically you have one rook and you have one bishop that move like in chess, and the rest of the pieces are really not very powerful. So I think that's one of the attractions of chess, like how powerful, especially the queen is, which- Interesting. I kind of think makes it a lot of fun. You think power is more fun than variety? No, there is variety in chess as well though. But not much more so than like go or something? No, no, no, that's for- So like knight, I mean, they all move in different ways. They're all weird. There's just all these weird patterns and positions that can emerge. The difference in the pieces create all kinds of interesting dynamics, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, and I guess it is quite fascinating that all those years ago they created the knight and the bishop without probably realizing that they would be almost equally strong with such different qualities. That's crazy that this, like when you design computer games, it's like an art form, it's science and an art to balance it. You talk about StarCraft and all those games. Like so that you can have competitive play at the highest level with all those different units. And in the case of chess, it's different pieces. And they somehow designed a game that was super competitive. But there's probably some kind of natural selection that the chess would just wouldn't last if it was designed poorly. Yeah, and I think the rules have changed over time a little bit. But I would be, I mean, speaking of games and all that, I'm also interested to play other games like chess 960 or Fisher Random, as they call it, like that you have 960 maps instead of one. Yeah, so for people who don't know, Fisher Random Chess, Chess 960 is- Yeah, that basically just means that the pawns are in the same way and the major pieces are distributed randomly on the last rank. Only that there have to be obviously bishops of opposite color and the king has to be in between the rooks so that you can castle both ways. Oh, you can still castle in- You can still castle, but it makes it interesting. So you still have, it still castles in the same way. So let's say the king is like- Yeah, what happens in that case? Yeah, let's say the king is in the corner. So to castle this side, you have to clear a whole lot of pieces. What would castling look like though? No, the king would go here and the rook would go there. Oh, okay. And that's happened in my games as well. Like I forgot about castling and I'd be like attacking a king over here. And then all of a sudden it escapes to the other side. I think Fisher Chess is good that it's, the maps will generally be worse than regular chess. Like I think the starting position is as close to ideal for creating a competitive game as possible, but they will still be like interesting and diverse enough that you can play very, very interesting games. So when you say maps, there's nine, 60 different options and like what fraction of that creates interesting games at the highest level? This is something that a lot of people are curious about because when you challenge a great chess player like yourself to look at a random starting position, that feels like it pushes you to play pure chess versus memorizing life. Oh yeah, for sure. For sure, but that's the whole idea. That's what you want. How hard is it to play? I mean, can you talk about what it feels like to you to play with a random starting position? Is there some intuition you've been building up? It's very, very different. And I mean, understandably, engines have an even greater advantage in 960 than they have in classical chess. Now it's super interesting. And that's why also I really wish that we played more classical chess, like long games, four to seven hours and in fish random chess, just 960, because then you really need that time even on the first moves. What usually happens is that you get 15 minutes before the game, you're getting told the position 15 minutes before the game, and then you can think about it a little bit, even check the computer, but that's all the time you have, but then you really need to figure it out. And like some of the positions obviously are a lot more interesting than the others. In some of them, it appears that like, if you don't play symmetrically at the beginning, at the start, then you're probably gonna be in a pretty bad position. What do you mean with the pawns? With the pawns, yeah. Why, how does that make sense? That's the thing about chess though. So let's say why it opens with E4, which has always been the most played move. There are many ways to meet that, but the most solid ways of playing has always been the symmetrical response. Yeah. With E5 and then there's the, there's the Rillopus, there's the Petrov opening and so on. And if you just banned symmetry on the first move in chess, you would get more interesting games. Oh, interesting. Or you'd get more decisive games. So that's the good thing about chess is that we've played it so long that we've actually devised non-symmetrical openings that are also fairly equal. And- But symmetry is a good default. But yeah, symmetry is a good default. And it's a problem that by playing symmetrical, armed with good preparation in regular chess, it's just a little bit too easy to, it's a little bit too dry. And I guess if you analyzed, if you analyzed a lot in chess 960, then the, a lot of the position would end up being pretty dry as well. Because the random starting point is so shitty, you're forced to- You're actually forced to play symmetrically. Like you cannot actually try and play in a more sort of interesting, interesting manner. Is there any other kind of variations that are interesting to you? Oh yeah, there are, there are several. So no castling chess has been, has been promoted by former world champion, Vladimir Kramnik. There have been a few tournaments with that not any that I've participated in though. I kind of like it. Also my coach uses like non-castling engines quite a bit to analyze regular positions to just to get a different, different perspective. So castling is like a defensive thing. So if you remove castling, it forces you to be more offensive. Is that why? Yeah, it just, yeah, for sure. It seems like a tiny little difference. No castling probably forces you to be a little bit more defensive at the start, or I would guess so. Because you cannot suddenly escape with the kings. It's gonna make the game a bit slower at the start, but I feel like eventually it's gonna, it's gonna make the more games more, well, less drawish for sure. Then you have some weirder variants like where the pawns can move both diagonally and forward. And also you have self-capture chess, which is quite interesting. So the pawns can, or- Like commit suicide or what? Yeah, people can- Why would that be a good move? No, sometimes one of your pieces occupy a square. I mean, let me just set up a position. Let's put it like this. For instance, like here, I mean, there are a lot of ways to checkmate for why it's like this, for instance, or there are several ways. But like this would be a- Oh, cool. For people who are just listening, yeah, basically you bring in a knight close to the whole, the king and the queen and so on, and you replace the knight with a queen. Yeah, that's interesting. So you can have like a front of pieces and then you just replace them with the second- Yeah, I mean, that could be interesting. I think also maybe sometimes it's just clearance, basically. It adds an extra element of clearance. So I think there are many different variants. I don't think any of them are better than the one that has been played for at least a thousand years, but it's certainly interesting to see. So one of your goals is to reach the Fidea Elo chess rating of 2900. Maybe you can comment on how is this rating calculated and what does it take to get there? Is it possible for a human being to get there? Basically, you play with a factor of 10, which means that if I were to play against an opponent who's rated the same as me, I would be expected to score 50%, obviously, and that means that I would win five points with a win, lose five points with a draw, and then equal if I draw. If your opponent is 200 points lower rated, you're expected to score 75% and so on. And you establish that rating by playing a lot of people and then it slowly converges towards an estimate of how likely you are to win or lose against different people. And my rating is obviously carried through thousands of games. Right now, my rating is 2861, which is decent. I think that pretty much corresponds to the level I have at the moment, which means in order to reach 2900, I would have to either get better at chess, which I think is fairly hard to do, at least considerably better. So what I would need to do is try and optimize even more in terms of the matchups, the preparations, everything, but not necessarily like selecting tournaments and so on, but just optimizing in terms of preparation, like making sure I never have any bad days. So you basically can't lose. Yeah, I basically can't fuck up ever if I wanna reach that goal. And so I think reaching 2900 is pretty unlikely. The reason I've set the goal is to have something to play for, to have a motivation to actually try and be at my best when I play, because otherwise I'm playing to some extent, mostly for fun these days in that I love to play, I love to try and win, but I don't have a lot to prove or anything, but that gives me at least the motivation to try and be at my best all the time, which I think is something to aim for. So at the moment I'm quite enjoying that process of trying to optimize. What would you say motivates you in this now and in the years leading up to now, the love of winning or the fear of losing? So for the world championship, it's been fair of losing for sure. Other tournaments, love of winning is a great, great factor. And that's why I also get more joy from winning most tournaments than I do for winning the world championship because then it's mostly been a relief. I also think I enjoy winning more now than I did before, because I feel like I'm a little bit more relaxed now. And I also know that it's not gonna last forever. So every little win I appreciate a lot more now. And yeah, in terms of fear for losing, that's a huge reason why I'm not gonna play the world championship because it really didn't give me a lot of joy. It really was all about avoiding losing. Why is it that the world championship really makes you feel this way, the anxiety? So, and when you say losing, do you mean not just the match, but like every single position, like the fear of a blunder? No, I mean, the blunder is okay. Like when I sit down at the board, then it's mostly been fine because then I'm focused on, then I'm focused on the game. And then I know that I can play the game. It's a time like in between, like knowing that, I feel like losing is not an option because it's the world championship. And because in a world championship, there are two players, there's a winner and the loser. If I don't win a random tournament that I play, then I'm usually, it depends on the tournament. I might be disappointed for sure. Might even be pretty pissed, but ultimately, you go on to the next one. With the world championship, you don't go on to the next one. It's like, it's years. And it also has been like, it's been a core part of my identity for a while now that I am world champion. And so there's not an option of losing that. Yeah. Yeah, there's, you're gonna have to, at least for a couple of years, carry the weight of having lost. You're the former world champion now, if you lose versus the current world champion. There are certain sports that create that anxiety and others that don't. For example, I think UFC makes martial arts are a little better with losing. It's understood, everybody loses. But they're- Not everybody though. Not everybody, not everybody, not everybody. Could be bent to the chat. But in boxing, there is that extra pressure of maintaining the championship. I mean, maybe you could say the same thing about the UFC as well. So for you personally, for a person who loves chess, the first time you won the world championship, that was the big, that was the thing that was fun. Yeah. And then everything after is like stressful. Yeah. Essentially. There was certainly stress involved the first time as well, but it was nothing compared to the others. So the only world championship after that that I really enjoyed was the one in 2018 against the American Fabiano Caruana. And what that made that different is that I'd been kind of slumping for a bit and he'd been on the rise. So our ratings were very, very similar. They were so close that if at any point during the match, I'd lost the game, he would have been ranked as number one in the world. Like our ratings were so close that for each draw they didn't move. And- And the game itself was close. Yeah, the games themselves were very close. I had a winning position in the first game that I couldn't really get anywhere for a lot of games. Then he had a couple of games where he could potentially have won. Then in the last game I was a little bit better. And eventually they were all drawn. But I felt like all the way that this is an interesting match against an opponent who is at this position at this point equal to me. And so losing that would not have been a disaster because in all the other matches I would know that I've lost against somebody who I know I'm much better than. And that would be a lot harder for me to take. Well, that's fascinating and beautiful that the stress isn't from losing. Because you have fun. You enjoy playing against somebody who's as good as you, maybe better than you. That's exciting to you. Yeah. It's losing at this high stakes thing that only happens rarely to a person who's not as good as you. Yeah, and that's why it's also been incredibly frustrating in other matches. Like when I know, when we play draw after draw and I can just, I know that I'm better. I can sense during the game that I understand it better than them, but I cannot get over the hump. So you are the best chess player in the world and you not playing the world championship really makes the world championship not seem important. Or, I mean, there's an argument to be made for that. Is there anything you would like to see for the change about the world championship that would make it more fun for you? And better for the game of chess period for everybody involved? So I think 12 games or now 14 games that there is for the world championship is a fairly low sample size. If you want to determine who the best player is or at least the best player in that particular matchup, you need more games. And I think to some extent, if you're gonna have a world champion and call them the best players, best player you gotta make sure that the format increases the chance of finding the best players. So I think having more games and if you're gonna have a lot more games then you need to decrease the time control a bit, which in turn I think is also a good thing because in very long time controls with deep preparation, you can sort of mask a lot of your deficiencies as a chess player because you have a lot of time to think and to defend and also, yeah, you have deep preparation. So I think those would be for me to play, those would be the main things, more games and less time. So you wanna see more games and rules that emphasize pure chess. Yeah, but already less time emphasizes pure chess because defensive techniques are much harder to execute with a little time. What do you think? Is there a sweet spot in terms of, are we talking about Blitz? Is it how many minutes? I think Blitz is a bit too fast. To their credit, this was suggested by Fita as well. For a start to have two games per day and let's say you have 45 minutes a game plus 15 or 30 seconds per move, that means that each sessions will probably be about or a little less than two hours. Yeah. That would be a start. Also what we're playing in the tournament that I'm playing here in Miami, which is four games a day with 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move, those would be more interesting than the one there is now. And I understand that there are a lot of traditions, people don't wanna change the world championship, that's all fine. I just think that the world championship should do a better job of trying to reflect who's the best overall chess player. So would you say like, if it's faster games, you'd probably be able to get a sample size of like over 20 games, 20, 30, 40. Do you think there's a number that's good over a long period of time? Well, I would prefer as many as possible. So like a hundred? Yeah, but let's say you play 12 days to games a day, that's 24. I feel like that's already quite a bit better. You play like one black game, one white game each day. Endurance wise, that's okay? Yeah, I think that's fine. Like you will have free days as well. So I don't think that will be a problem. And also you have to prepare two sets of openings for each day, which makes it more difficult for the teams preparing, which I think is also good. Let me ask you a fun question. If Hikaru Nakamura was one of the two people, I guess, I apologize for- Yeah, he could have finished second. So he lost the last round of the candidates. Yeah, and maybe you can explain to me, internet speed copium is something you tweeted. Yeah. But if he got second, would you just despite him still play the world championship? That's internet question. And when the internet asks, I must abide the due divides. Yeah, sure. Thank you, internet. So after the last match, I did an interview right after where I talked about the fact that I was unlikely to play the next one. I'd spoken privately to both family, friends, and of course, also my chess team that this was likely going to be the last match. What happened was that right before the world championship match, there was this young player, Alireza Firouza. He had a dramatic rise. He rose to second in the world rankings. He was 18 then, he's 19 now. He qualified for the candidates. And it felt like there was like at least a half realistic possibility that he could be the challenger for the next world championship. And that sort of lit a fire under me. Do you like that idea? I like that a lot. I love the idea of playing him in the next world championship. And originally I was sure that I wanted to announce right after the tournament, the match, that this was it, I'm done. I'm not playing the next one. But this lit a fire under me. So that made me think, you know, this actually motivates me. And I just wanted to get it out there for several reasons, to create more hype about the candidates, to sort of motivate myself a little bit, maybe motivate him. Also, obviously I wanted to give people a heads up for the candidates that you might be playing for more than first place. Normally the candidates is first place or bust. It's like the world championship. And then, so Nakamura was one of many people who just didn't believe me, which is fair. Because I've talked before about not necessarily wanting to defend again, but I never talked as concretely or was as serious as this time. So he simply didn't believe me. And he was very vocal about that. And he said, nobody believed me, no other players who may or may not have been true. And then, yeah, he lost the last game and he didn't qualify. But to answer the question, no, I'd already at that point decided that I wouldn't play. I would have liked it less if he had not lost the last round. But the decision was made. But the decision was already made. Does it break your heart a little bit that you're walking away from it? In all the ways that you mentioned that it's just not fun. There's a bunch of ways that it doesn't seem to bring out the best kind of chess. It doesn't bring out the best out of you and the particular opponents involved. Does it just break your heart a little bit? Like you're walking away from something or maybe the entire chess community is walking away from a kind of a historic event that was so important in the 20th century at least. So I won the championship in 2013. I said no to the candidates in 2011. I didn't particularly like the format. I also wasn't, I was just not in the mood. I didn't want the pressure that was connected with the world championship. And I was perfectly content at the time to play the tournaments that I did play. Also to be ranked number one in the world, I was comfortable with the fact that I knew that I was the best and I didn't need a title to show others. And what happened later is I suddenly decided to play. In 2013, I liked, they changed the format. I liked it better. I just decided, you know, it could be interesting. Let's try and get this. There really wasn't more than that to it. It wasn't like fulfilling lifelong dream or anything. I just thought, you know, let's play. So it's just a cool tournament, a good challenge. Yeah, it's a cool tournament. It's a good challenge. You know, why not? It's something that could be a motivation. It motivated me to get in the best shape of my life that had been till then. So it was a good thing. And 2013 match brought me a lot of joy as well. So I'm very, very happy that I did that. But I never had any thoughts that I'm gonna like keep the title for a long time. Immediately after the match in 2013, I mean, also before the match, I'd spoken against the fact that champion is seated into the final, which I thought was unfair. After the match, I made a proposal that we have a different system where the champion doesn't have these privileges and people's reaction, both players and chess community was generally like, okay, we're good. We don't want that. You keep your privileges. And I was like, okay, whatever. So you want to fight for it every time? Yeah, I want that. Have to ask, just in case you have an opinion, if you can maybe from a fantasy chess perspective, analyze Ding versus Nepo, who wins? The current, the two people that would play if you're not playing. Generally, I would consider that Ding has a slightly better overall chess strength. What are the strengths and weaknesses of each, if you can kind of summarize it? So Nepo, he's even better at calculating short lines than I am, but he can sometimes like a little bit of depth. Like in short lines, he's an absolute calculation monster. He's extremely quick, but he can sometimes like a bit of depth. Also recently, he's improved his openings quite a bit. So now he has a lot of good ideas and he's very, very solid. Ding is not quite as well prepared, but he has an excellent understanding of dynamics and imbalances in chess, I would say. What do you mean by imbalances? Imbalances like bishops against knights, material imbalances. He can take advantage of those. Yes, I would say he's very, very good at that and understanding the dynamic factors, as we call them, like material versus time, especially. I think Nepo got the better of him and the candidates. So what's your sense why Ding has an edge in the championship? I feel like individual past results hasn't necessarily been a great indicator of world championship results. I feel like overall chess strength is more important. I mean, to be fair, I only think like Ding is better and Ding has a very small edge. Like difference is not big at all. But our individual head-to-head record was probably the main reason that a lot of people thought Nepo had a good chance against me as well. It was like four to one in his favor before the match, but that was just another example of why that may not necessarily mean anything. Also in our case, it was a very, very low sample size, I think about the size of the match in total 14 games. And that generally doesn't mean much. How close were those games, would you say, in your mind for the previous championship? So that game six where it was a turning point where you won, was there any doubt in your mind that, like if you do a much larger sample size, that you'll get the better of Nepo? No, no, larger sample size is always good for me. So World Championship is a great parallel to football because it's a low scoring game. And if the better player or the better team scores, they win most of the time. Oh, that's generally for championships or in general? Yeah, for championships. Like they generally win because the other slightly weaker team, they're good enough to defend to make it very, very difficult for the others. But when they actually have to create the chances, then they have no chance. And then it very often ends with a blowout as it did in our match. If I hadn't won game six, it probably would have been very, very close. He might have edged it. There's obviously a bigger chance that I would have edged it. But this is just what happens a lot in chess, but also in football that matches are close. And then they... Somebody scores? Somebody scores and then things change. And this gives people the illusion that the matchup was very close. While actually it just means that the nature of the game makes the matches close very often, but it's always much more likely that one of the teams is gonna or one of the players is gonna break away than the others. And in other matches as well, even though a lot of people before the match in 2016 against Karyakin, there were people who thought before the match that I was massively overrated as a favorite and that essentially the match was pretty close, like whatever, 60-40, or some people even said like 55-45. And what I felt was that the match went very, very wrong for me and I still won. And some people saw that as an indication that the pre-match probabilities were probably a bit closer than people thought. Well, I would look at it in the way that everything went wrong and I still won, which probably means that I was pretty big favorite to begin with. I do have a question too about that match, but first, so Sergey Karyakin was originally a qualifier for the candidate tournament, but was disqualified for breaching the FIDE code of ethics after publicly expressing approval for the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine. You look at the Cold War and some of the US versus Russian games of the past, does politics, some of this geopolitics politics ever creep its way into the game? Do you feel the pressure, the immensity of that as it does sometimes for the Olympics, these big nations playing each other, competing against each other, almost like fighting out in a friendly way, the battles, the tensions that they have in the space of geopolitics? I think it still does. So the president of the World Chess Federation who was just re-elected is a Russian. Like I like him personally for sure, but he is quite connected to the Kremlin. And it's quite clear that the Kremlin considers it at least a semi-important goal to bring the chess crown home to Russia. So it's still definitely a factor. And I mean, I can answer for in the Karyakin case, like I don't have a strong opinion on whether he should have been banned or not. Obviously I don't agree with anything that he says, but in principle, I think that you should ban either no Russians or all Russians. I'm generally not particularly against either, but I don't love banning wrong opinions even if they are as reprehensible as his have been. Yeah, there's something about the World Chess Championships or the Olympics where it feels like banning is counterproductive to the alleviating some of the conflicts. We don't know. This is the thing though. We really don't know about the long-term conflicts. And a lot of people try to do the right thing in this sense, which I don't really blame at all. It's just that we don't know. And I guess sometimes there are other ways you wanna try and help as well. See, like within the competition, within some of those battles of US versus Russia or so on of the past, there's also between the individuals, maybe you'll disagree with this, but from a spectator perspective, there's still a comradery. Like at the end of the day, there's a thing that unites you, which is this like appreciation of the fight over the chessboard. It's even if you hate each other. Yeah, for sure. I think for every match that's been, you would briefly discuss the game with your opponent after the game, no matter how much you hate each other. And I think that's lovely. And Kasparov, I mean, he was quoted, like somebody in his team asked him like, why are you talking to Karpov after the game? Like you hate that guy. And he's like, yeah, sure, but he's the only one who understands me. Yeah, the only one who understands. So that's, no, I think that's really lovely. And I would love to see that in other areas as well, that you can, regardless of what happens, you can have a good chat about the game. You can just talk about the ideas with people who understand what you understand. So if you're not playing the world championships, there's a lot of people who are saying that perhaps the world championships don't matter anymore. Do you think there's some truth to that? I said that back a long time ago as well, that for me, I don't know if it never happened, so I don't know what would have happened, but I was thinking like the moment that I realized that I'm not the best player in the world, like I felt like morally I have to renounce the world championship title, you know, because it doesn't mean anything, as long as you're not the best player. So the ratings really tell a bigger, a clearer story. I think so, at least over time. Like I'm a lot more proud of my streak of being rated number one in the world, which is now since I think the summer of 2011. I'm a lot more proud of that than the world championships. How much anxiety or even fear do you have before making a difficult decision on the chessboard? So when it's a high stakes game, how nervous do you get? How much anxiety do you have in all that calculations you're sitting there for 10, 15 minutes? Because you're in a fog, there's always a possibility of a blunder, of a mistake. Are you anxious about it? Are you afraid of it? Really depends. I have been at times. I think the most nervous I've ever been was game 10 of the world championships in 2018. That was just a thrilling game. I was black. I basically abandoned the queen side at some point to attack him on the king side. And I knew that my attack, if it doesn't work, I'm gonna lose, but I had so much adrenaline. So that was fine. I thought I was gonna win. Then at some point I realized that it's not so clear and my time was ticking and I was just getting so nervous. I still remember what happened. Like we played this time trouble phase where he had very little time, but I had even less. And I just remember, I can't remember much of it, just that when it was over, I was just so relieved because then it was clear that the position was probably gonna be out in a draw. Otherwise, I'm often nervous before games, but when I get there, it's all business. And especially when I'm playing well, I'm never afraid of losing when I play because I trust my instincts, I trust my skills. How much psychological intimidation is there from you to the other person, from the other person to you? I think people would play a lot better if they played against an anonymous me. I would love to- Are people scared of you? I would love to have a tournament online where let's say you play 10 of the best players in the world and for each round, you don't know who you're playing. That's an interesting question. There's these videos where people eat McDonald's, the Burger King or Diet Coke versus Diet Pepsi. Would people be able to tell they're playing you from the style of play, do you think? Or from the strength of play? If there was a decent sample size, sure. And what about you? Would you be able to tell others? In just one game, very unlikely. What sample size would you need to tell accurately? I feel like this is science. Yeah, I think 20 games would help a lot. Per person. But I know that they've already developed AI bots that are pretty good at recognizing somebody's style. Okay. Which is quite fascinating. And it'd be fascinating if those bots were able to summarize the style somehow. Maybe great attacking chess, like some of the same characteristics you've been describing, like great at short line calculations, all that kind of stuff. Or just talk shit. No, but really all the best chess players, there are basically just two camps. People who are good at longer lines or shorter lines, it's the hare and the tortoise, basically. And sometimes, I feel like I'm the closest you can get to a hybrid of those. Because you got both the, you're good in every position, so the middle game and the end game. Yeah, and also I can think to some extent, both rapidly and deeply, which a lot of people, they can't do both. But I mean, to answer your question from before, I think, yeah, I sometimes can get a little bit intimidated by my opponent, but it's mostly if there's something unknown, it's mostly if it's something that I don't understand fully. And I do think, especially when I'm playing, well, people, they just play more timidly against me than they do against each other, sometimes without even realizing it. And I certainly use that to my advantage. If I sense that my opponent is apprehensive, if I sense that they are not gonna necessarily take all their chances, it just means that I can take more risk. And I always try and find that balance. To shake them up a little bit. Yeah. What's been the toughest loss of your career that you remember? Would that be the World Championship match? Oh yeah, for sure. Can you take- Game eight in 2016. And who was it against? Against Karyakin in New York. Can you take it through the story of that game? Where were you before that game in terms of game one through seven? Yeah, so game one and two, not much happened. Game three and four, I was winning in both of them. And normally I should definitely have converted both. I couldn't. Partly due to good defense on his part, but mostly because I just, I messed up. And then after that, games five, six and seven, not much happened. I was getting impatient at that point. So for game eight, I was probably ready to take a little bit more risks than I had before, which I guess was insane because I knew that he couldn't beat me unless I beat myself. Like he wasn't strong enough to outplay me. And that was leading to impatience somehow and impatience- No, because I knew that I was better. I knew that I was better. I knew that I just needed to win one game and then the match is over. That's what happened in 2021 as well. Like when I won the first game against Nebo, I knew that the match was over. Unless I like fuck up royally, then he's not gonna be able to beat me. So what happened was that I played a kind of an innocuous opening as White, just trying to get a game, trying to get him out of book as soon as possible. Then- Okay, can you elaborate, innocuous, get him out of the book? No, basically I set up pretty defensively as White. I wasn't really crossing into his half at the start at all. I was just, I played more like a system more than like a concrete opening. It was like, I'm gonna set up my pieces this way. You can set them up however you want. And then later where sort of the armies are gonna meet, I'm not gonna try and bother you at the start. And that means you can have with as many pieces as possible kind of pure chess in the middle game without any of the lines, the standard lines in the opening. Exactly. And so there was at some point a couple of exchanges, then some maneuvering, a little bit better. Then he was sort of equalizing and then I started to take too many risks. And I was still sort of fine. But then at some point I realized that I'd gone a bit too far and I had to be really careful. Then I just froze. I just completely froze. Mentally? Yeah, mentally. What happened, Deuki? I realized that all the thoughts of, I might lose this, what have I done? Why did I take so many risks? I knew that I could have drawn at any moment. Just be patient. Don't give him these opportunities. What triggered that phase transition in your mind? No, it was just a position on the board. Realizing, there was one particular move he played that I missed. And then I realized that this could potentially not go my way. So then I made another couple of mistakes. And to his credit, once he realized he had the chance, he knew that this was his one chance. He had to take it. And so he did. And yeah, that's the worst I've ever felt after a chess game. I realized that I'm probably gonna lose my title against somebody who's not even close to my level. And I've done it because of my own stupidity, most of all. And that was really, really, at the time, I was all in my own head. That was hard to deal with. And I felt like I didn't really recover too much for the next game. So what I did, there was a free day after the eighth game. So I did something that I never did at any other world championship. Like after game eight, I just, I got drunk with my team. And- That's not a standard procedure? No, no. That's the only time that's happened in the world championship during the match. So yeah, I just tried to forget. But still before game nine, game nine, I was a little bit more relaxed, but I was still a bit nervous. Then game nine, I was almost lost as well. Then only game 10. Game 10, I was still, I wasn't in a great mood. I was really, really tense. The opening was good. I had some advantage. I was getting optimistic. Then I made one mistake. He could have forced a draw. And then the old, the negativity came back. Like I was thinking during the game, like how am I gonna play for a win with black in the next game? Like, what am I doing? And then, you know, eventually it ended well. It didn't find the right line. I ground him down. Actually, I played at some point pretty well in the end game. And after that game, like there was such a weight- Lifted? Lifted, no. After that, there was like no thought of losing the match whatsoever. I knew that, okay, I'd basically gotten away with, not with murder, but gotten away with something. What can you say about the, after game eight, where are the places you've gone in your mind? Do you go to some dark places? We're talking about like depression. Do you think about quitting at that point? No, I mean, I think about quitting every time I lose the classical game. Or at least I used to. Yeah. Like, especially if it's in a stupid way, I'm thinking like, okay, if I'm gonna play like this, if I'm gonna do things that I know are wrong, then I might as well quit. No, that's happened a bunch of times. And I've definitely gotten a bit more carefree about losing these days, which it's not necessarily a good thing. Like my hatred of losing led to me not losing a lot. Losing a lot and it also lit the fire under me that I think my performance after losses in classical chess over the last 10 years is like over 2,900. Like I really play well after a loss, even though it's really, really unpleasant. So apparently like, I don't think the way that I dealt with them is particularly healthy, but it's worked. It's worked so far. But then you've discovered now love for winning to where ultimately longevity wise creates more fun. Yeah, for sure. What's the perfect day in the life of Magnus Carlsen on a day of a big chess match? It doesn't have to be world championship, but if it's a chess match you care about, what time do you wake up? What do you eat? Well, it depends on when the game is, but let's say the game is at three, I'll probably wake up pretty late at about 11. Then I'll go for a walk, might listen to some podcasts. Maybe I'll spend a little bit of time looking at some, some NBA game from the last night or whatever. To not chess related stuff. No, no, no, no. Then I'll get back, I'll have big lunch like usually like a big omelet with a bunch of salad and stuff. Then go to the game, win like a very nice clean game. This is a perfect day. Just go back after relax. Like the things that make me the happiest that tournaments is just having a good routine and feeling, feeling well. I don't like it when too much is happening around me. So the tournament that I came from now was the Chess Olympiad, which is the team event. So we were a team Norway. We did horribly. I did okay, but the team in general did horribly. Who won that Italy? No, Italy beat us, but Uzbekistan won the end. They were this amazing team of young players. It was really impressive. But the thing is like we had a good camaraderie in the team. We had our meals together. We played a bit of football, went swimming. And I couldn't understand why things went wrong. And I still don't understand. But the thing is for me, it was all very nice. But now I'm just so happy to be on my own at a tournament just to have my own routines, not see too many people. Otherwise just have like a very small team of people that I see. You are a kind of celebrity now. So, you know, people within the chess tournament and outside recognize you want to socialize, want to tell you about how much you mean to them, how much you inspire them, all that kind of stuff. Does that get in the way for you when you're like trying to really focus on the match? Are you able to block that? Like, are you able to enjoy those little interactions and still keep your focus? Yeah, most of the time that's fine as long as it's not too much. But I have to admit, when I'm at home in Norway, I rarely go out without big headphones and something. Oh, like a disguise? No, not a disguise, just to block out the world. Otherwise... Don't make eye contact. Yeah, so the thing is people in general are nice. I mean, people, they wish me well and they don't bother me. Also, when I have the headphones on, I don't notice as much people turning around and all of that, so I can be more in my own world. So I like that. Yeah, what about in this perfect day after the game? Do you try to analyze what happened? Do you try to think through systematically or do you just kind of loosely think about like... No, I just loosely think about it. I've never been very structured in that sense. I know that it was always recommended that you analyze your own games, but I generally felt that I mostly had a good idea about that. Like nowadays, I will loosely see what the engine says at a certain point if I'm curious about that. Otherwise, I usually move on to the next. What about diet? You said omelet and salad and so on. I heard in your conversation with the other Magnus, Magnus number two, about you had this bet about meat. One of you are gonna go vegan if you lose... I forget which bet. Vegetarian, though. Vegetarian, sorry. And you both have an admiration for meat. Is there some aspect about optimal performance that you look for in food? Maybe eating only once or twice a day or a particular kind of food, like meat heavy diet. Is there anything like that or you just try to have fun with the food? I think whenever I'm at tournaments, like it's very natural to eat, at least for me to eat only twice a day. So usually I do that when I'm at home as well. So you do eat before the tournament, though. You don't play fasted. No, no, no, no. But I try not to eat too heavy before the game or in general to avoid sugary stuff, to have a pretty stable blood sugar level. Because that's the easiest way to make mistakes, that your energy levels just suddenly drop. And they don't necessarily need to be too high as long as they're pretty stable, yeah. Have you ever tried playing fasted, like intermittent fasting, so playing without having eaten? I mean, the reason I ask, you know, especially when you do a low carb diet, when I have done a person in a low carb diet, I'm able to fast for a long time, like eat once a day, maybe twice a day. But I just, the mind is most focused on like really difficult thinking tasks when it's fasted. It's an interesting, and a lot of people kind of talk about that. Yeah, but- You're able to kind of like zoom in and if you're doing a low carb diet, you don't have this, the energy stable. No, that is true. Maybe that will be interesting to try. So what's happened for me is, I've played a few tournaments where I've had food poisoning. And then that generally means that you're both sleep deprived and you have no energy. And what I've found is that, it makes me very calm, of course, because I don't have the energy. And it makes me super creative. Like being sleep deprived, I think in general makes you creative. Just the first thing that goes away is the ability to do the simple things. That's what it affects you the most. Like you cannot be precise. So that's the only thing I'm worried about. Like if I'm fasted, that I won't be precise when I play. But you might be more creative. It's an interesting trial. Fasted, yeah, potentially. What about you have been known to, on a rare occasion, play drunk. Is there a mathematical formula for, sort of on the X axis, how many drinks you had, and on the Y axis, your performance slash creativity? Is there like an optimal for, like one of the, would you suggest for the FIDE World Championship that people would be required to drink? Would that change things in interesting ways? Yeah, not at all. Maybe for rapid, but for blitz, think if you're playing blitz, you're mostly playing on short calculation and intuition. And I think those are probably enhanced if you've had a little bit to drink. Can you explain the physiology of why it's enhanced? Or the- You're just, you're thinking less. You're more confident. Oh yeah, it's confidence. I think it's just confidence. I think also like a lot of people feel like they're better at speaking languages, for instance, if they've drunk a little bit. It's just like removing these barriers. I think that it's a little bit of the same in chess. In 2012, I played the World Blitz Championship, and then I was doing horribly for a long time. I also had food poisoning there. I couldn't play at all for three days. So before the last break, I was in the middle of the pack, like in, I don't know, 20th place or something. And so I decided as the last gasp, I'm gonna go to the mini bar and just have a few drinks. And what happened is that I came back and I was suddenly relaxed. And I was playing fast and I was playing confident. And I thought I was playing so well. I wasn't playing nearly as well as I thought, but it still helped me. I won my remaining eight games. And if there had been one more round, I probably would have won the whole thing. But finally I was second. So generally I wouldn't recommend that. But maybe as a last resort sometimes, if you feel that you have the ability, obviously none of this is remotely relevant if you don't feel like you have the ability to begin with. But if you feel like you have the ability, there are just factors that make it impossible for you to show it. Like numbing your mind a bit can probably be a good thing. Yeah, well it's interesting, especially during training, you have all kinds of sports that have interacted with a lot of athletes. And grappling sports, it's different when you train under extreme exhaustion. For example, you start becoming, you start to discover interesting things. You start being more creative. A lot of people, at least in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, they'll smoke weed. It creates this kind of anxiety and relaxation that kind of enables that creative aspect. It's interesting for training. Of course you can't rely on any one of those things too much. But it's cool to throw in a few drinks every once in a while to, yeah, one, first of all, to relax and have fun. And two, to kind of try things differently, to unlock a different part of your brain. Yeah, for sure. What about supplements? You a coffee guy? Oh, no. I quite like the taste of coffee. But the thing is I've never had a job. So I've never needed to wake up early. So my thought is basically that if I'm tired, I'm tired. That's fine. Then I'll work it out. So I don't wanna ever make my brain get used to coffee. Like if you see me drinking coffee, that probably means that I'm massively, massively hungover. And I just want to try anything to make my brain work. Yeah, that's interesting. But for a lot of people, like you said, taste of coffee, for a lot of people, coffee is part of a certain kind of ritual. Yeah, for sure. That they enjoy. So hopefully you can have rituals without that. I know that I would enjoy it a lot. Yeah. Just so you don't wanna rely on it. Yeah. I also like the taste, so there's no problem there. What about exercise? So how does that, like what, you know, a lot of people talk about the extreme stress that chest puts in your body, physically and mentally. How do you prepare for that to be physically and mentally? Is it just through playing chess or do you do cardio and that kind of stuff? This is kind of it up and down. Like, as I said, in 2013, I was in great shape. Like, I mean, generally I was exercising, doing sports every day, either playing football or tennis or even other sports. Otherwise, if I couldn't do that, I would try and take my bike for a ride. I had a few training camps and I played tennis against one of my seconds. Like, he's not a super fit guy, but he's always been very good at tennis. And I never like played in any organized way. And that was like, that was the perfect exercise because I was running around enough to make the games pretty competitive. And it meant that he had to run a bit less as well. But he was just, he said like, he was shocked that if we played like for two hours, I wouldn't flinch at all. Interesting, so like a combination of fun and the differential between skill result in good cardio. Yeah, it's just that, so in those days, I was pretty fit in that sense. I've always liked doing sports, but at times, you know, I think in winter especially, like I never had like a schedule. So at times I'll let myself go a little bit and I've always kind of done it more for fun than like for a concrete benefit. But now I'm at least after the pandemic, I was not in great shape. So now I'm trying to get back, get better habits and so on. But I feel like I've always been the poster boy for making being fit a big thing in chess. And I always felt that it was not really deserved because I never liked doing weights much at all. I run a bit at times, but I never liked it too much. You just love playing sports. I just love playing sports. So I think people confuse that because I'm not like massively athletic, but I am decent at sports and that sort of helped build that perception, even though others who are top level chess players, they're more fit like Karana for instance, he's really, really, his body is really, really strong. It's just that he doesn't- He like goes to the gym and- Yeah, he doesn't play sports. That's the difference. And the thing about sports is also is just, it's an escape. It helps you forget for a brief moment about like the obsessions, the pursuits of the main thing, which is chess. Yeah, for sure. And I think it also helps your main pursuit to feel that you're even if not mastering, but like doing well in something else. Like I found that if I just juggle a ball, that makes me feel better before a game. So a skilled activity- Juggle with football, yeah. Yeah, skilled activity that you can improve on over time. It's like flexes the same kind of muscle, but another thing that you're much worse at. Yeah. It focuses you, relaxes you. That's really interesting. What's the perfect day in the life of Magnus Carlsen when he's training? So like what's a good training regimen in terms of daily kind of training that you have to put in across many days, months, and years to just keep yourself sharp in terms of chess? I would say when I'm at home, I do very little deliberate practice. I've never been that guy at all. Like I could never force myself to just sit down and work. So deliberate practice, just so maybe you can educate me. For some grandmasters, what would that look like? Just doing puzzles kind of thing? Or- Yeah, doing puzzles and opening analysis. That would be the main things. Studying games? Just studying games. Yeah, a little bit. But I feel like that's something that I do, but it's not deliberate. It's like reading our article or reading a book. Got it. Like I love chess books. I'll read just anything and I'll find something interesting. So chess books that are like on openings and stuff like that, or chess books that go over different games. Yeah. Both. Books on, so there are three main categories. There are books on openings and there are books on strategy and there are books on chess history. And I find all of them very, very interesting. Like what fraction of the day would you say you have a chess board floating somewhere in your head? Meaning like you're thinking about it. Probably be a better question to ask how many hours a day I don't have a chess board floating. I mean, it could be just floating there and nothing's happening, but like- I often do it parallel to some other activity though. And what does that look like? Like are you daydreaming like different, is it actual positions you're just fucking around with? Like fumbling with different pieces in your head? Often I've looked at a random game on my phone, for instance, or in a book and then my brain just keeps going at the same position, analyzing it. And often it goes all the way to the end game. And those are actual games or you conjure up like fake games? No, they were often based on real games. And then I'm thinking like, oh, but it wouldn't be more interesting if the pieces were a little bit different. And then often I play it out from there. So you don't have a, like, you don't sit behind a computer or a chess board and you lay out the pieces and- No, I'm not at all a poster board for deliberate practice. I could never, I could never work that way. My first coach, he gave me some exercises at home sometimes, but he realized at some point that wasn't gonna work. Yeah. Because I wouldn't do it really or enjoy it. So what he would do instead is that at the school where I had the trainings with him, there was this massive chess library. So he was just like, yeah, pick out books. You can have anything you want. Just pick out books you like and then you give it back the next time. So that's what I did instead. Yeah, I just absolutely rated. Then my next tournament, I will try out one of the openings from that book if it was an opening book and so on. Does it feel like a struggle, like challenging? Like to be thinking of those positions or is it fun and relaxing? No, it's completely fine. I don't- Like if it's a difficult position to figure out, you know? Like to calculate- Then I go on to something else. Okay. Like if I can't figure it out, then, you know, I go on. Change it so that it's easier to figure out. There was a point in your life where Kasparov was interested in being your coach or at least training with you. Why did you choose not to go with him? That's a pretty bold move. Was there a good reason for this? No. The first homework exercise he gave me was to analyze, like he picked out, I think, three, four of my worst losses and he wanted me to analyze them and give him my thoughts. And it wasn't that there were painful losses or anything, that that was a problem. I just didn't really enjoy that. Also, I felt that this whole structured approach and everything, I just felt like from the start, it was a hassle. So I loved the idea of being able to pick his brain, but everything else, I just, you know, couldn't see myself enjoying. And at the end of the day, I did then and always have played for fun. That's always been the main reason. It's great that you had the confidence to sort of basically turn down the approach of one of the greatest chess players of all time at that time, probably the greatest chess player of all time. I don't think I thought of it that way. I just thought this is not for me. I want to try another way. I don't think I was particularly thinking that this is my one opportunity or anything. It was just, yeah, I don't enjoy this. Let's try something else. When you were 13, you faced Kasparov and he wasn't able to beat you. Can you go through that match? What did that feel like? How important was that? How epic was that? We played three games. I lost two and I drew one. Right, but one draw. No, the one draw. And but didn't you say that you kind of had a better position in that? Yeah, I remember that day very well. There was a blitz game. This was a rapid tournament. And there was a blitz tournament the day before, which determined the pairings for the rapids. And for people who don't know, super short games are called bullet, kind of short games are called blitz, semi short games are called rapid. Yeah. And classic chess, I guess, is like very super long. Yeah, yeah, basically bullet is never played over the board. So in terms of where the board chess blitz is the shortest, rapid is like a hybrid between classical and blitz. You need to have the skills of both. And then classical is, it's like the blitz tournament, which didn't go so well. Like I got a couple of wins, but I was beaten badly in a lot of games, including by Gary. And so there was the pairing that I had to play him, which is pretty exciting. So I remember I was so tired after the blitz tournament, like I slept for 12 hours or something. Then I woke up like, okay, I'll turn on my computer. I'll search chess space for Kasparov. And we'll go from there. So before that, I hadn't spent like a lot of time specifically studying his games. It was super intimidating because a lot of these openings I knew I was like, oh, he was the first one to play that. Oh, that was his idea. I actually didn't know that. So I was a bit intimidated before we played. Then of course, the first game he arrived a bit late because they changed the time from the first day to the other, which is a bit strange. But everybody else had noticed it, but him. Then he tried to surprise me in the opening. I think like psychologically, the situation was not so easy for him. Like clearly it would be embarrassing for him if he didn't win both games against me. Then like I was spending way too much time on my moves because I was playing Kasparov. I was double checking everything too much. Like normally I would be playing pretty fast in those days. And then at some point I calculated better than him. He missed a crucial detail and had a much better position. I couldn't convert it though. I knew what line I had to go for in order to have a chance to win. But I thought like, I'll play a bit more carefully. Maybe I can win still. I couldn't. And then I lost the second game pretty badly, which it wasn't majorly upsetting, but I felt that I had two black games against Kasparov, both in the Blitz and the Rapid. And I lost both of them without any fight whatsoever. I wasn't happy about that at all. That was like less than I thought I could be able to do. So to me, yeah, I was proud of that, but it was a gimmick. I was like a very strong IAM, but had GM strength. I was like, it can happen that a player of that strength makes a draw against Gary once in a while. But I understand that I'm 13, but still I felt a bit more gimmicky than anything. I mean, I guess it's a good thing that made me notice, but apart from that, it wasn't, yeah. And for people who don't know, IAM is international master and GM is grand master. And you were just on the verge of becoming a youngest grand master ever. I was the second youngest ever. I think I'm like the seventh youngest now. I mean, these kids these days. Kids these days. Yeah. Yeah. But I was the youngest grand master at the time in the world. Yeah. So there is a, you know, you say it's gimmicky, but there's a romantic notion, especially as things have turned out, right? Like- No, for sure. And have you talked to Gary since then about that? No, not really. I think he's embarrassed. He's still bitter, you think? No, I don't think he's bitter, but I think the game in itself was a bit embarrassing for him. Even he can't see past, like- No, no, no, I think he's completely fine with that. I think like in retrospect, it's a good story. He appreciates that. I don't think that's the problem, but it never made sense for me to broach the subject with him. Yeah. I just, it's funny just having interacted with Gary, now having talked to you. There is a little thing you still hate losing, no matter how beautiful like that moment is, because it's like, in a way it's a passing of the baton from like one great champion to another, right? But like you still just don't like the fact that you didn't play a good game from Gary's perspective. Like he's still just annoyed probably that he could have played better. And we did, so we did work together in 2009 quite a lot, and that corporation ended early 2010, but we did play a lot of training games in 2009, which was interesting because he was still very, very strong. And at that time it was fairly equal. Like he was playing me quite a bit, but I was fighting well. So it was pretty even then. So I mean, I appreciate those games a lot more than some random game from when I was 13. And maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about, but I've always found it, at least based on that game, you couldn't tell that I was gonna take his spot. Like I made a horrible blunder and lost to an Uzbek kid in the World Rapid Championship in 2018. And I mean, granted he was part of the team that now won gold in the Chess Olympia, but he wasn't the crucial part. He barely played any games. Like it wasn't like I would think that he would become world champion because he beat me. I'm always skeptical of those who said that they knew that I was gonna be world champion after that game or at all at that time. I mean, it was easy to see that I would become a very, very strong player. Everybody could see that, but to be the best in the world or one of the best ever. It's true. It is hard to say, but I do remember seeing Messi when he was 16 and 17. But hasn't that happened with other players though? Yeah, but I just had a personal experience. He did look different than, there's like magic there. Maybe you can't tell he would be one of the greatest ever, but there's still magic. But you're right, most of the time, we try to project, we see a young kid being an older person and you start to think, okay, this could be the next great person. Then we forget when they don't become that. Yeah, exactly. That's I think what happens. But when it does become- Or maybe some people are just so good at seeing these patterns that they can actually see. Aren't you supposed to do that kind of thing with fantasy football? Like see the long shot and bet on them and then they turn out to be good? That's the whole point. No, you make a lot of long shot bets and then some of them come good. And then people call you a genius for making the bet. Well, let me ask you the goat question again, from fantasy perspective. Can you make the case for the greatest chess player of all time for each, yourself, Magnus Carlsen, for Garry Kasparov, I don't know who else, Bobby Fischer, Mikhail Tal, anyone else? For Hikaru Nakamura, just kidding. Yeah, I think I can make a case for myself, for Garry and for Fischer. So I'll start with Fischer. For him, it's very, very simple. He was ahead of his time, but that's like intangible. You can say that about a lot of people. But he had a peak from 1970 to 72 when he was so much better than the others. He won 20 games in a row. Also, the way that he played was so powerful and with so few mistakes that he just had no position there. So he had just a peak that's been better than anybody. The gap between first and second was the highest. The gap between him and others was greater than it's ever been in history at any other time. And that would be the argument for him. For Garry, he's played in a very competitive era and he's beaten several generations. He was the best, well, he was the consensus best player, I would say, for almost 20 years, which nobody else has done, at least in recent time. Longevity. The longevity, for sure. Also, at his peak, he was not quite the level of fissure in terms of the gap, but it was similar to, or I think even a little bit better than mine. As for me, I'm of course unbeaten as a world champion in five tries. I've been world number one for 11 years straight in an even more competitive era than Garry. I have the highest chess rating of all time. I have the longest streak ever without losing a game. I think for me, the main argument would be about the era where the engines have leveled the playing field so much that it's harder to dominate. And still, I haven't always been a clear number one, but I've been number one for 11 years. And for a lot of the time, the gap has been pretty big. So I think there are decent arguments for all of them. I've said before, and I haven't changed my mind, that Garry generally edges it because of the longevity in the competitive era, but there are arguments. But people also talk about you in terms of the style of play. So it's not just about dominance or the height, it's just the creative genius of it. Yeah, but I'm not interested in that. In terms of greatest of all time, I'm not interested in questions of style. So for Messi, you don't give credit for the style, for the stylistic. I like watching it. But you're not gonna give points for the... So Messi gets best ever because of the finishing. Yeah, it's the... No, it's not because of the finishing, it's because of his overall impact on the game. It's higher than anybody else's. Okay. He contributes. He just contributes more to winning than anybody else does. So you're somebody who is advocated for and has done quite a bit of study of classic games. What would you say is, I mean, maybe the number one or maybe top three games of chess ever played? It doesn't interest me at all. You don't think of those? No, I don't think of it. I mean, I try to, I find the games interesting. I try to learn from them, but trying to rank them has never interested me. What games pop out to you as super interesting then? Is there things like where ideas, like old school games, where there was interesting ideas that you go back, that you go back, or like you find surprising and pretty cool that those ideas were developed back then. Is there something that jumps to mind? Yeah, there are several games of young Kasparov, like before he became world champion. If you're gonna ask for like my favorite player or favorite style, that's probably... Young Kasparov. Young Kasparov. Can you describe, statistically or in any other way, what young Kasparov was like? That you like? It was just an overflow energy in his play. So aggressive attacking chess. Yeah, extremely aggressive dynamic chess. It probably appeals to me a lot because these are the things that I cannot do as well, that it just feels very special to me. But yeah, in terms of games, I never thought about that too much. Is there memories, big or small, weird, surprising, just any kind of beautiful anecdote from your chess career? Like stuff that pops out that people might not know about? Just stuff when you look back, it just makes you smile. No, so I'll tell you about the most satisfying tournament victory of my career. So that was the Norwegian Championship under 11 in 2000. Before that tournament, I was super anxious because I started like kind of late at chess. I played my first tournament when I was eight and a half and a lot of my competitors had already played for a couple of years or even three, four years at that point. And the first time, so I played the under 11 championship in 99, I was like a little over the middle of the pack. I'd never played against any of them before, so I didn't know what to expect at all. And then over the next year, I was like edging a little bit closer. In each tournament, I felt like I was getting a little bit better. And when we had the championship, I knew that I was ready, that I was now at the same level of the best players. I was so anxious to show it. I remember I was just, the feeling of excitement and nervousness before the tournament was incredible. The tournament was weird because I started out, I gave away a draw to a weaker player whom I shouldn't have drawn to. And then I drew against the other guy who was clearly like the best or second best. And at that point, I thought it was over because I thought he wouldn't give away points to others. And then the very next day, he lost to somebody. So the rest of the tournament, it was just like, I was always playing my game and watching his. And we both won the rest of our games, but it meant that I was half a point ahead. Like the feeling when I realized that I was gonna win, that was just so amazing. It was like the first time that I was the best at my age. And at that point- You were hooked. Yeah, at that point I realized, you know, I could actually be very good at this. So you kind of saw, where did you think your ceiling would be? Did you see that one day you could be the number one? No, I didn't think that was possible at all. But I thought I could be the best in Norway. The best in Norway. At that point. When did you first- Because like I started relatively late. Right. And also like, I knew that I studied a lot more than the others. I knew that I had a passion that they didn't have. They saw chess as something like, it was, you know, it was a hobby. It was like an activity. It was like, it was like going to football practice or any other sports. Like you go, you practice like once or twice a week, and then you play a tournament at the weekend. That's what you did. For me, it wasn't like that. Like I would go with my books and my board every day after school. And I would just constantly be trying to learn new things. I had like two hours of internet time on the computer each week, and I would always spend them on chess. Like, I think before I was 13 or 14, I'd never opened a browser for any other reason than to play chess. Would you describe that as love or as obsession or something in between? It's everything? Yeah, everything. But so, I mean, it wasn't hard for me to tell at that point that I had something that the other kids didn't because I was never the kind of person to grasp something very, very quickly. But once I started, I always got hooked and then I never stopped learning. What would you say, you've talked about the middle game as a place where you can play pure chess. What do you think is beautiful to you about chess? Like the thing when you were 11. What is beautiful to me is when your opponent can predict every single one of your moves and they still lose. So, I think that's the thing. You can predict every single one of your moves and they still lose. How does that happen? No, like it means that at some point early, your planning, your evaluation has been better. So that you play just very simply, very clearly. It looks like you did nothing special and your opponent lost without a chance. So how do you think about that, by the way? Are you basically narrowing down this gigantic tree of options to where your opponent has less and less and less options to win, to escape, and then they're trapped? Yeah, essentially. Is there some aspect to the patterns themselves, to the positions, to the elegance of like the dynamics of the game that you just find beautiful that doesn't, that where you forget about the opponent? General, I try and create harmony on the board. Like what I would usually find harmonious is that the pieces work together, that they protect each other, and that there are no pieces that are suboptimally placed. Or if they are suboptimally placed, they can be improved pretty easily. Like I hate when I have one piece that I know is badly placed and I cannot improve it. When you're thinking about the harmony of the pieces, when you're looking at the position, you're evaluating it, are you looking at the whole board? Or is it like a bunch of groupings of pieces overlapping? I would- And like dancing together kind of thing. I would say it's more of the latter that would be more precise that you look. I mean, I look mostly closer to the middle, but then I would focus on one, like there are usually like one grouping of pieces on one side and then some more closer to the other side. So I would think of it a little bit that way. So, and everything is kind of gravitating to the middle. If it's going well, then yes. And in harmony. Yeah, in harmony. Or like if you can control the middle, you can more easily attack on both sides. That applies to pretty much any game. It's as simple as that. And like attacking on one side without control of the middle would feel very non-harmonious for me. Like I talked about the 10th game in the world championship. That's the time I was the most nervous. And it was because it was the kind of attack that I hate where you just have to, you're abandoned one side and you, the attack has to work. There was one side and part of the middle as well, which I didn't control at all. And that's like the opposite of harmony for me. What advice would you give to chess players of different levels, how to improve in chess? Very beginner, complete beginner. I mean, at every level, is there something you can say? It's very hard for me to say. Because I mean, the easiest way is like love chess, be obsessed. Well, that's a really important statement. But that doesn't work for everybody. So I feel like- Sometimes it can feel like a grind. So you're saying the less it can feel like a grind, the better, the better. Yeah, for sure. At least for you. That's for sure. But I'm also very, very skeptical about giving advice because I think, again, my way only works if you have some combination of talent and obsession. So I'm not sure that I'd generally recommend it. Like what I've done doesn't go with what most coaches suggest for their kids. I've been lucky that I've had coaches from early on that have been very, very hands-off and just allowed me to do my thing, basically. Well, there's a lot to be said about cultivating the obsession. Like really, really letting that flourish to where you spend a lot of hours, like with the chessboard in your head, and it doesn't feel like a struggle. No, so like just letting me do my thing. Like if you give me a bunch of work, it will probably feel like a sure. And if you don't give me, I will spend all of that time on my own without thinking that it's work or without thought that I'm doing this thing. I'm doing this to improve my chess. Well, in terms of learning stuff like books, there's one thing that's relatively novel from your perspective. People are starting now, is there's YouTube. There's a lot of good YouTubers. You're a part-time YouTuber. You have stuff on YouTube, I guess. Yeah, but if you've seen my YouTube, it's mostly live. It's very, it's carefree. It's not high effort content. Yeah, but do you like any particular YouTubers? I could just recommend like stuff I've seen. So I've got Matter, Gotham Chess, both is live. I really like St. Louis Chess Club, Daniel Narodzicki and John Bartholomew. Those are good channels, but is there something you can recommend? No, all of them are good. You know, the best recommendation I could give is I got Matter, purely. How much did he pay you to say that? No, so the thing about that is that I haven't really, I have, so I can tell you I've never watched any of his videos from start to finish. I'm not like, I'm not the target audience, obviously. But I think the only chess YouTube video that my dad has ever watched from start to finish is I got Matter. And he said, like, I watched one of his videos. I wanted to know what it was all about because I think I got Matter is like the same strength as my father, maybe just a little bit weaker, like 1900 or something. My father is probably about 2000. And my father has played chess his whole life. He loves, he absolutely loves the game. It was like, that's the only time he's actually sat through one of those videos. And he said like, yeah, I get it. I enjoy it. So that's the best recommendation I could give. That's the only channel that my father actually enjoys. This is hilarious. I talked to him before this to ask him if he has any questions for you. And he said, no, just do your thing. You know what you're doing. No, he's so careful. He wouldn't do that. He did mention jokingly about Evans Gambit, I think. Is that a thing? Evans Gambit is some weird thing he made up. It might be an inside joke. I don't know, but he asked me to, well, anyway. Yeah, I didn't even get the... It's something he made up. I didn't even realize that he plays the Evans Gambit. Like he plays a lot of Gambits that are... Wait, Evans Gambit is a thing? Yeah, yeah, that's a thing. Like that's an old opening from the 1800s. Captain Evans apparently invented it. Why would he mention that particular one? Yeah, I don't know. Is there something hilarious about that one? I don't know. I don't think I've ever faced the Evans Gambit in a game. I feel like both of you are trolling me right now. I mean, he's played a lot of other Gambits. Maybe this is the one he wanted to mention. So maybe this is called the Evans Gambit as well, but I just know it as like the 2G4 Gambit. Maybe this is the one. Like this one he has played a bunch. And he's been telling me a lot about his games in this line. It's like, oh, it's not so bad. And I'm like, yeah, but you're a pawn down. But I can sort of see it. I can sort of understand it. And he's like, he's proud of the fact that nobody told him to play this line or anything. He came up with it himself. And there's this, I'll tell you another story about my father. So there's this line that I call the Henry Carlson line. So at some point, he never knew a lot of openings in chess, but I taught him a couple of openings as black. It's the Sveshnikov Sicilian that I played a lot myself. Also during the World Championship in 2018, I won a bunch of games in 2019 as well. So that's one opening. And I also taught him as black to play the Rogozin defense. And then, so the Rogozin defense goes like this. It's characterized by this bishop move. And so he would play those openings pretty exclusively as black in the tournaments that he did play. And also the Sveshnikov Sicilian is like, that's the only two of my sisters have played a bunch of chess tournaments as well. And that's the only opening they know as well. So my family's portrait is very narrow. So this is the system. Black goes here and then we're off and white takes the pawn and black takes the pawn. So at some point I was watching one of my father's online blitz game. And as white, he played this. So this is called the Karakhan defense. He took the pawn, it was taken back and then he went with the knight. His opponent went here and then he played the bishop here. So I'd never seen this opening before. And I was like, wow, how on earth did he come up with that? And he said, no, I just played the Rogozin with the different colors, because if the knight was here, it would be the same position. I was like, how am I one of the best 20 players in the world? And I've never thought about that. So I actually started playing this line as white with pretty decent results. And it actually became kind of popular. And everybody who asked about the line, I would always tell them, yeah, that's the Henry Carlson navigation. I wouldn't necessarily explain why it was called that. I would just always call it that. So I really hope at some point, this line will find its rightful name. Yeah, it finds its way into the history books. What did you learn about life from your dad? What role has your dad played in your life? He's taught me a lot of things, but most of all, as long as you win a chess, then everything else is fine. Everything else is fine. I think my, especially my father, but my parents in general, they always wanted me to get a good education and find a job and so on. Even though my father loves chess and he wanted me to play chess, I don't think he had any plans for me to be professional. I think things changed at some point. I was less and less interested in school and for a long time, we were kind of going back and forth fighting about that, especially my father, but also my mother a little bit. It was at times a little bit difficult. They wanted you to go to school. Yeah, they sort of wanted me to do more school, to have more options. And then I think at some point, they just gave up. But I think that sort of coincided when I was actually starting to make real money of tournaments and after that, everything's been sort of easy. And in terms of the family, they've never put any pressure on me or they've never put any demands on me. They're just, yeah, minus has to focus on chess. That's it. I think they taught me that, that's it, I think they taught me in general to be curious about the world and to get a decent general education, not necessarily from school, but just knowing about the world around you and knowing history and being interested in society. I think in that sense, they've done well. And he's been with you throughout your chess career. I mean, there's something to be said about just family support and love that you have. This world is a lonely place. It's good to have people around you that are like, they've got your back kind of. Yeah, it's a cliche, but I think to some extent, all the people you surround yourself with, they can help you a lot. It's only family that only has their own interests at heart. And so for that reason, my father is the only one that's been constantly in the team and that he's always been around. And it's for that reason that I know he has my back no matter what. Now, there's a cliche question here. Let's try to actually get to some deep truth, perhaps. But people who don't know much about chess seem to like to use chess as a metaphor for everything in life. But there is some aspect to the decision-making, to the kind of reasoning involved in chess that's transferable to other things. Can you speak to that in your own life and in general? The kind of reasoning involved with chess, how much does that transfer to life out there? It just helps to make decisions. Of all kinds. Yeah, that would be my main takeaway, that you learn to make informed guesses in a limited amount of time. I mean, does it frustrate you when you have geopolitical thinkers and leaders? Henry Kissinger will often talk about geopolitics as a game of chess or 3D chess. Is that too oversimplified of a projection? Or do you think that the kind of deliberations you have on the world stage is similar to the kind of decision-making you have on the chessboard? Well, I'm never trying to get re-elected when I play a game of chess. There's no special interest you have to get happy. Yeah, that kind of helps. No, I can understand that. Obviously, for every action, there's a reaction, and you have to calculate. Far ahead, it probably would be a good thing if more big players on the international scene thought a little bit more like a chess player in that sense, like trying to make a good decision based on a limited amount of data, rather than thinking about other factors. But it's so tough. But it does annoy me when people make moves that they know are wrong for different reasons. And they should know. If they did some calculation, they should know they're wrong. Yeah, exactly. They should know they're wrong. So much politics is like... You're often asked to do something when it would be much better to do nothing. No, but that happens in chess all the time. You have a choice. I often tell people that in certain situations, you should not try and win. You should just let your opponent lose. And that happens in politics all the time. But yeah, just let your opponents continue whatever they're doing, and then you'll win. Don't try to do something just to do something. Often, they say in chess that having a bad plan is better than having no plan. It's absolute nonsense. I forget what General said, but it was like, don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake. Also, Petrosyan, the former world champion, said, when your opponent wants to play Dutch defense, don't stop them. I mean, chess players will know that it's the same thing. Actually, this reminds me. Is there something you found really impressive about Queen's Gambit, the TV show? That's one of the things that really captivated the public imagination about chess. People who don't play chess became very curious about the game, about the beauty of the game, the drama of the game, all that kind of stuff. Is there, in terms of accuracy, in terms of the actual games played, that you found impressive? First of all, they did the chess well. They did it accurately. And also, they found actual games and positions that I'd never seen before. It really captivated me. I would not follow the story at times. I was just trying to, wow, where the hell did I find that game? I was trying to solve the positions. So, Beth Harmon, the main character, were you impressed by the play she was doing? Was there a particular style that they developed consistently? At the end, she was just totally universal. At the start, she was probably a bit too aggressive, but no, she was absolutely universal. Wait, what adjective are you using? Universal in the sense that she could play in any style. Oh, interesting. And was dominant in that way. Wow, so there was a development in the style, too, throughout the show. Yeah, for sure. It's really interesting they did that. Yeah. And it actually happened with me a bit, as well. I started out really aggressive. Then I became probably too technical at some point, taking a little bit too few risks, and not playing dynamic enough. And then I started to get a little bit better at dynamics, so that now I would say definitely the most universal player in terms of style. Are there any skills in chess that are transferable to poker? So, as you're playing around poker a little bit now, how fundamentally different of a game is it? What I find the most transferable probably is not letting past decisions dictate future thinking. Yeah. But in terms of the patterns in the betting strategies and all that kind of stuff, what about bluffing? I bluff way too much. It does seem you enjoy bluffing, and Daniel Negreanu was saying you're quite good at it. But yeah, it has very little material to go by. Sample size is small. Yeah. No, I mean, I enjoy bluffing for the more of the gambling aspects, the thrill of... So not the technical aspect of the bluffing like you would on the chessboard? Not bluffing in the same sense, but there is some element. But I do enjoy it on the chessboard. If I know that, like, oh, I successfully scared away my opponent from making the best move, that's of course satisfying. In that same way, it might be satisfying in poker, right? That you represent something, you scare away your opponent in the same kind of way. Yeah. And also, like, you tell a story, you try and tell a story, and then they believe it. Yeah. Tell a story with your betting, with all the different other cues. Do you like the money aspect, the betting strategies? So it's almost like another layer on top of it, right? It's the uncertainty in the cards, but the betting, there's so much freedom to the betting. I'm not very good at that, so I cannot say that I understand it completely. You know, when it comes to different sizing and all that, I just haven't studied it enough. How much of luck is part of poker, would you say, from what you've seen versus skill? I mean, it's so different in the sense that you can be one of the best players in the world and lose two, three years in a row without that being like a massive outlier. Okay, the thing that more than one person told me that you're very good at is trash talking. I don't think I am. A lot of people who make those observations about me, I think they just expect very, very little. So they expect from the best chess player in the world, anything that's non-robotic is interesting. Also, when it comes to trash talking, I have the biggest advantage in the world that I'm the best at what I'm doing. So trash talking becomes very, very easy because I can back it up. Yeah, but a lot of people that are extremely good at stuff don't trash talk and they're not good at it. I don't think I'm very good at it. It's just that I can back it up, which makes it seem that I'm better. And also, being non-robotic or not completely robotic helps. Yeah, you're not trash talking. You're just stating facts. That's right. Have you ever considered that there will be trash talking over the chessboard in some of the big tournaments? Like adding that kind of component or even talking, you know? Would that completely distract from the game of chess? No, I think it could be funny. When people play off-fant games, when they play blitz games, people trash talk all the time. It's a normal part of the game. So you emphasize fun a lot. Do you think we're living inside of a simulation that is trying to maximize fun? But that's only happened for the last 100 years or so. Fun has always been increasing, I think. Yeah, okay. It's always been increasing, but I feel like it's been increasing exponentially. Or at least the importance of fun. But I guess it depends on the society as well. In the West, we've had such a Christian influence. I mean, Christianity hasn't exactly embraced the concept of fun over time. Well, actually, to push back, I think forbidding certain things kind of makes them more fun. So sometimes I think you need to say, you're not allowed to do this. And then a lot of people start doing it and then they have fun doing that. Because it's like doing a thing in the face of the resistance of the thing. So whenever there's resistance, that does somehow make it more fun. Oppressive regimes have always been kind of good for comedy, no? Yes. Supposedly, like in the Soviet Union, I don't know about fun, but supposedly comedy, at least underground, it thrived. Yeah, there's a... Well, no, it permeates the entire culture. There's a dark humor that sort of the cruelty, the absurdity of life really brings out the humor amongst the populace, plus vodka on top of that. But this idea that, for example, Elon Musk has that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. That it seems like the most absurd, silly, funny thing seems to be the thing. So it happens more often than it should. And it somehow becomes viral in our modern connected world. And so the fun stuff, the memes spread. And then we start to optimize for the fun meme that seems to be a fundamental property of the reality we live in. And so emerges the fun maximizer in all walks of life. Like in chess, in poker and everything. I think... You're skeptical. No, I'm not skeptical. I'm just taking it all in. But I find it interesting and not at all impossible. Do you ever get lonely? Oh, yeah, for sure. Like a chess player's life is, by definition, pretty lonely. Because you have nobody else to blame but yourself when you lose. Or you don't achieve the results that you want to achieve. It's difficult for you to find comfort elsewhere. It's in your own mind. Yeah. It's you versus yourself, really. Yeah, really. But it's part of the profession. But I think any sport or activity where it's just you and your own mind is just, by definition, lonely. Are you worried that it destroys you? Oh, not at all. As long as I'm aware of it, then it's fine. And I don't think the inherent loneliness of my profession really affects the rest of my life in a major way. What role does love play in the human condition in your lonely life of calculation? You know, I'm like everybody else. Trying to find love? No, not necessarily like trying to find love. Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. I'm just trying to find my way. And my love for the game, obviously it comes and goes a little bit, but there's always at least some level of love. So that doesn't go away. But I think in other parts of life, I think it's just about doing things that make you happy, that give you joy. That also makes you more receptive to love in general. So that has been my approach to love now for quite a while, that I'm just trying to live my best life and then the love will come when it comes. And in terms of romantic love, it has come and gone in my life. It's not there now. But I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about, you know, not worried, but more like trying to just be a good version of myself. I cannot always be the best version of myself, but at least try to be good. Yeah, and keep your heart open. What is this Daniel Johnson song? True love will find you in the end. It may or may not. But it will only find you if you're looking. So you have to be open to it. It may or may not. And no matter what, you're going to lose it in the end because the whole thing ends. Yeah, I don't think stressing over that. Obviously, it's so human that you can't help it to some degree. But I feel like stressing over love, that's the blueprint for whether you're looking or you're not looking or you're in a relationship or married or anything like stressing over it is like the blueprint for being unhappy. Just to clarify confusion, I have just a quick question. How does the night move? So the night moves in an L and unlike in Shogi, it can move both forwards and backwards. It is quite a nimble piece. It can jump over everything, but it's less happy in open position where it has to move from side to side quickly. I am generally more of a bishop's guy myself for the old debate. I just prefer quality over the intangibles. But I can appreciate a good night once in a while. Last simple question. What's the meaning of life, Magnus Carlsen? There is obviously no meaning to life. Is that obvious? I think we're here by accident. There's no meaning. It ends at some point, but it's still a great thing. So you can still have fun even if there's no meaning. You can still have fun. You can try and pursue your goals, whatever they may be. But I'm pretty sure there's no special meaning. And trying to find it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. For me, life is both meaningless and meaningful for just being here. Trying to make not necessarily the most of it, but the things that make you happy both short term and long term. Yeah, it seems to be full of cool stuff to enjoy. It certainly does. And one of those is having a conversation with you, Magnus. It's a huge honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I can't wait to see what you do in this world. And thank you for creating so much elegance and beauty on the chessboard and beyond. So thanks for talking today, brother. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And I wanted to say this at the start, but I never really got the chance. I was always a bit apprehensive about doing this podcast because you are a very smart guy and your audience is very smart. And I always had a bit of imposter syndrome. So I'll tell you this now after the podcast. So please do judge me, but I hope you've enjoyed it. I loved it. You're a brilliant man. And I love the fact that you have imposter syndrome because a lot of us do. And so that's beautiful to see even at the very top. You still feel like an imposter. Thank you, brother. Thanks for talking to them. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Magnus Carlsen. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with some words from Bobby Fisher. Chess is a war over the board. The object is to crush the opponent's mind. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
 The following is a conversation with Magnus Carlsen,
 the number one ranked chess player in the world
 and widely considered to be one of,
 if not the greatest chess player of all time.
 The camera on Magnus died 20 minutes into the conversation.
 Most folks still just listen to the audio
 through a podcast player anyway,
 but if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify,
 we did our best to still make it interesting
 by adding relevant image overlays.
 I mess things up sometimes, like in this case,
 but I'm always working hard to improve.
 I hope you understand.
 Thank you for your patience and support along the way.
 I love you all.
 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
 To support it, please check out our sponsors
 in the description.
 And now, dear friends, here's Magnus Carlsen.
 You're considered by many to be one of the greatest,
 if not the greatest chess players of all time,
 but you're also one of the best fantasy football,
 AKA soccer competitors in the world,
 plus recently picking up poker
 and competing at a world-class level.
 So before chess, let's talk football and greatness.
 You're a Real Madrid fan,
 so let me ask you the ridiculous big question.
 Who do you think is the greatest football,
 AKA soccer player of all time?
 Can you make the case for Messi?
 Can you make the case for Cristiano Ronaldo,
 Pele, Maradona, does anybody jump to mind?
 I think it's pretty hard to make a case
 for anybody else than Messi for his all-around game.
 And frankly, like my Real Madrid fandom sort of
 predates the Ronaldo era, the second Ronaldo,
 not the first one.
 So I always liked Ronaldo, but I always kind of thought
 that Messi was better.
 And I went to quite a number of Madrid games
 and they've always been super helpful to me down there.
 The only thing is that, like they asked me,
 they were gonna do an interview
 and they were gonna ask me who my favorite player was.
 And I said somebody else, I think I said Isco at that point,
 and I was like, okay, take two, now you say Ronaldo.
 So for them, it was very important,
 but it wasn't that huge to me.
 So Messi over Maradona.
 Yeah, but I think just like with chess,
 it's hard to compare eras.
 Obviously the improvements in football have been,
 like in technique and such have been even greater
 than they have been in chess,
 but it's always a weird discussion to have.
 But just as a fan, what do you think is beautiful
 about the game?
 What defines greatness?
 Is it, you know, with Messi,
 one, he's really good at finishing,
 two, very good at assist,
 like three, there's just magic,
 it's just beautiful to see the play.
 So it's not just about the finishing.
 There's some, it's like Maradona's hand of God.
 There's some creativity on the pitch.
 Is that important or is it very important
 to get the World Cups and the big championships
 and that kind of stuff?
 I think the World Cup is pretty overrated
 seeing as it's such a small sample size.
 So it sort of annoys me always when, you know,
 titles are always appreciated so much,
 even though that particular title can be a lot of luck
 or at least some luck.
 So I do appreciate statistics a bit
 and all the statistics say that Messi's the best finisher
 of all time, which I think helps a lot.
 And then there's the intangibles as well.
 The flip side of that is the small sample size
 is what really creates the magic.
 It's so, it's just like the Olympics.
 You basically train your whole life for this.
 You live your whole life for this and it's a rare moment.
 One mistake and it's all over.
 That's for some reason a lot of people
 either break under that pressure
 or rise up under that pressure.
 You don't admire the magic of that?
 No, I do.
 I just think that like rising and pressure
 and breaking under the pressure
 is often a really oversimplified take on what's happening.
 Yeah, we do romanticize the game.
 Well, let me ask you another ridiculous question.
 You're also a fan of basketball.
 Yes.
 Let me ask the goat question.
 I'm biased because I went to high school in Chicago,
 Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era.
 Let me ask the Jordan versus LeBron James question.
 Let's continue on this thread of greatness.
 Which one do you pick or somebody else?
 So I'll give you a completely different answer.
 Depending on my mood and depending on who I talk to,
 I pick one of the two and then I try to argue for that.
 The quantum mechanical thing.
 Well, can you, what, again, what would,
 if you were to argue for either one,
 statistically, I think LeBron James
 is going to surpass Jordan.
 Yeah, no doubt.
 And so again, there's a debate between.
 Unquantifiable greatness.
 Know that, I mean, that's the whole debate.
 Yes, so it's, well, it's quantifiable versus unquantifiable.
 What's more important.
 And you're depending on mood all over the place.
 Yeah.
 But what do you lean in general with these folks,
 with soccer, with anything in life
 towards the unquantifiable more?
 No, definitely towards the quantifiable.
 So when you're unsure, lean towards the numbers.
 But see like it's later generations.
 There's something, that's what people say about Maradona
 is, you know, he took a arguably somewhat mediocre team
 to a World Cup.
 So there's that also uplifting nature of the player
 to be able to rise up the whole, it is a team sport.
 So are you gonna like, are you gonna punish Messi
 for taking a mediocre Argentine squad to the final in 2014
 and punish him because they lost to a great team
 very narrowly after they missed.
 The internet does.
 He set up like a great chance for Iguayan
 in the first half, which he fluffed.
 And then, yeah, eventually they lost the game.
 Yeah, they do criticize Cristiano Ronaldo,
 Messi for being on really strong squads
 in terms of the club teams and saying, yeah, okay,
 it's easy when you have like Ronaldinho
 or whoever on your team.
 It would be very interesting.
 Just if the league could make a decision.
 Yeah, just random, random allocation.
 Yeah.
 And just every single game, just keep reallocating
 or maybe once a season or every season you get random.
 Let's say every player,
 if let's say they sign a five-year contract for a team,
 like one of them you're gonna get randomly allocated to,
 to let's say a bottom half team.
 I bet you there's gonna be so much corruption around that.
 It'll be random.
 No, obviously it wouldn't ever happen or work,
 but I think it's interesting to think about.
 So on chess, let's zoom out.
 If you break down your approach to chess,
 when you're at your best,
 what do you think contributes to that approach?
 Is it memory recall, specific lines and positions?
 Is it intuition?
 How much of it is intuition?
 How much of it is pure calculation?
 How much of it is messing with the strategy of the opponent?
 So the game theory aspect in terms of what contributes
 to the highest level of play that you do.
 I think the answer differs a little bit now
 from what it did eight years ago.
 For instance, I feel like I've had two peaks
 in my career in 2014, well, 2013, 2014,
 and also in 2019.
 And in those years, I was very different
 in terms of my strengths.
 Specifically in 2019,
 I benefited a lot from opening preparation.
 While in 2013, 2014,
 I mostly tried to avoid my opponent's preparation
 rather than that being a strength.
 So I'm mentioning that also
 because it's something you didn't mention.
 I think my intuitive understanding of chess
 has over those years always been a little bit better
 than the others, even though it has evolved as well.
 Certainly there are things that I understand now
 that I didn't understand back then,
 but that's not only for me, that's for others as well.
 I was younger back then, so I played with more energy,
 which meant that I could play better
 in long drawn out games,
 which was also a necessity for me
 because I couldn't beat people in the openings.
 But in terms of calculation,
 that's always been a weird issue for me.
 I've always been really, really bad
 at solving exercises in chess.
 Like that's been like a blind spot for me.
 First of all, I found it hard to concentrate on them
 and to look deep enough.
 So this is like a puzzle, a position made in X.
 I mean, one thing is made, but find the best move.
 That's generally the exercise.
 Like find the best move, find the best line.
 You just don't connect with it.
 Usually you have to look deep.
 And then when I get these lines during the game,
 I very often find the right solution,
 even though it's not still the best part of my game
 to calculate very, very deeply.
 But it doesn't feel like calculation you're saying
 in terms of-
 No, it does sometimes, but for me,
 it's more like I'm at the board trying to find the solution.
 And I understand like the training at home
 is like trying a little bit to replicate that.
 Like you give somebody half an hour in a position,
 like in this instance, you might've thought
 for half an hour if you play the game.
 But I just cannot do it.
 One thing I know that I am good at though
 is calculating short lines.
 Cause I calculate them well.
 I'm good at seeing little details
 and I'm also much better than most at evaluating,
 which I think is something that sets me apart from others.
 So evaluating specific position,
 if I make this move and the position changes in this way,
 is this a step in the right direction,
 like in a big picture way?
 Yeah, like you calculate a few moves ahead
 and then you evaluate.
 Because a lot of the times you cannot,
 the branch has become so big
 that you cannot calculate everything.
 So you have to-
 Like a fog.
 Yeah, so you have to make evaluations based on,
 based mostly on knowledge and intuition.
 And somehow I seem to do that pretty well.
 When you say you're good at short lines,
 what's short?
 That's usually like lines of,
 two to four moves each.
 Okay, so that's directly applicable to even faster games
 like Blitz, chess and so on.
 Yeah, Blitz is a lot about calculating forest lines.
 So those, you can see pretty clearly
 that the players who struggle at Blitz,
 who are great at classical,
 are those who rely on deep calculating ability.
 Cause you simply don't have time for that in Blitz.
 You have to calculate quickly and rely a lot on intuition.
 Can you try to, I know it's really difficult.
 Can you try to talk through
 what's actually being visualized in your head?
 Is there a visual component?
 Yeah, no, I just visualized the board.
 I mean, the board is in my head.
 Two dimensional?
 My interpretation is that it is two dimensional.
 Like what colors?
 Is it brown tinted?
 Is it black tinted?
 Is it black?
 Is it, like what's the theme?
 Is it a big board, small board?
 Are the, what do the pawns look like?
 Or is it more in the space of concepts?
 Like, is this-
 Yeah, there aren't a lot of colors.
 It's mostly, yeah.
 So what is it?
 Queens gambit on the ceiling, whatever.
 I'm trying right now to imagine it.
 What about when you do the branching,
 when you have multiple boards and so on,
 how does that look?
 No, but it's only one at a time.
 So like-
 One position at a time.
 One position at a time, so then I go back.
 And that's what, when people play,
 or at least that's what I do,
 when I play blindfold chess against several people,
 then it's just always one board at a time
 and the rest are stored away somewhere.
 But how do you store them away?
 So like you went down one branch,
 you're like, all right, that's, I got that.
 I understand that there's some good there,
 there's some bad there.
 Now let me go down another branch.
 Like how do you store away the information?
 Just put it on a shelf kind of?
 I try and store it away.
 Sometimes I have to sort of repeat it because I forget.
 And it does happen frequently in games that
 you're thinking for, especially if you're thinking for long,
 let's say half an hour, or even more than that,
 that you play a move and then your opponent plays a move,
 then you play a move and they play a move again
 and you realize, oh, I actually calculated that.
 I just forgot about it.
 So that's obviously what happens
 when you store the information and you cannot retrieve it.
 When you think about a move for 20, 30 minutes,
 like how do you break that down?
 Can you describe what,
 like what's the algorithm here that takes 30 minutes to run?
 30 minutes is, at least for me, it's usually a waste.
 30 minutes usually means that I don't know what to do.
 And I'm trying-
 You're running into the wall over and over.
 Yeah, I'm trying to find something that isn't there.
 I think 10 to 15 minutes thinks in complicated positions
 can be really, really helpful.
 Then you can spend your time pretty efficiently.
 Just means that the branches are getting wide.
 There's a lot to run through,
 both in terms of calculation
 and lots you have to evaluate as well.
 And then based on that 10 to 15 minutes,
 think you have a pretty good idea what to do.
 It's very rare that I would think for half an hour
 and I would have a eureka moment during the game.
 If I haven't seen it in 10 minutes,
 I'm probably not gonna see it at all.
 You're going through different branches.
 Yeah.
 And after 15 minutes, it's like-
 Mainly to the middle game,
 because when you get to the end game,
 it's usually brute force calculation
 that makes you spend so much time.
 So middle game is normally,
 it's a complicated mix of brute force calculation
 and like creativity and evaluation.
 So end game, it's easier in that sense.
 Well, you're good at every aspect of chess,
 but also your end game is legendary.
 It baffles experts.
 So can you linger on that then?
 Try to explain what the heck is going on there.
 Like if you look at game six
 of the previous world championship,
 the longest game ever played in chess,
 it was, I think, his queen versus your rook knight
 in two pawns.
 There's so many options there.
 It's such an interesting little dance
 and it's kind of not obvious that it wouldn't be a draw.
 So how do you escape it not being a draw
 and you win that match?
 No, I knew that for most of the time,
 it was a theoretical draw
 since chess with seven or less pieces on the board is solved.
 So you can, like people who are watching online,
 they can just check it.
 They can check a so-called table base
 and it just gonna spit out win for white,
 win for black or a draw.
 So, and also I knew that,
 I knew that didn't know that position specifically,
 but I knew that it had to be a draw.
 So for me, it was about staying alert.
 First of all, trying to look for the best way
 to put my pieces.
 But yeah, those end games are a bit,
 they're a bit unusual.
 They don't happen too often.
 So what I'm usually good at is I'm using my strengths
 that I also use in middle games is that I evaluate well
 and I calculate short variations quite.
 Even for the end game, short variations matter.
 Yes, it does matter in some simpler end games.
 Yeah, but also like there are these theoretical end games
 with very few pieces like Rook Knights
 and two pawns versus queens,
 but a lot of end games are simply defined
 by the queens being exchanged
 and there are a lot of other pieces left
 and then it's usually not brute force.
 It's usually more of understanding and evaluation
 and then I can use my strengths very well.
 Why are you so damn good at the end game?
 Isn't there a lot of moves from when the end game starts
 to when the end game finishes and you have a few pieces
 and you have to figure out,
 it's like a sequence of little games that happens, right?
 Like little pattern, like how does it being able
 to evaluate a single position lead you to evaluate
 a long sequence of positions
 that eventually lead to a checkmate?
 Well, I think if you evaluate well at the start,
 you know what plans to go for
 and then usually the play from there is often pretty simple.
 Let's say you understand how to arrange your pieces
 and often also how to arrange your pawns
 early in the end game,
 then that makes all the difference.
 And after that is like what we call technique very often
 that it's technique basically just means
 that the moves are simple and these are moves
 that a lot of players could make,
 not only the very strongest ones,
 these are moves that are kind of understood and known.
 So with the evaluation,
 you're just constantly improving a little bit
 and that just leads to suffocating the position
 and then eventually to the win
 as long as you're doing the evaluation well,
 one step at a time.
 To some extent.
 Also, yeah, I said like if you evaluate it better
 and thus accumulated some small advantages,
 then you can often make your life pretty easy
 towards the end of the end game.
 So you said in 2019,
 sort of the second phase of why you're so damn good.
 You did a lot of opening preparation.
 What's the goal for you of the opening game of chess?
 Is it to throw the opponent off from any prepared lines
 is there something you could put into words
 about why you're so damn good at the openings?
 Again, these things have changed a lot over time.
 Back in Kasparov's days, for instance,
 he very often got huge advantages from the opening as white.
 Can you explain why?
 There were several reasons for that.
 First of all, he worked harder,
 he was more creative in finding ideas.
 He was able to look places others didn't.
 Also, he had a very strong team of people
 who had specific strengths in openings that he could use.
 So they will come up with ideas
 and he would integrate those ideas into...
 Yeah, and he would also very often come up with them himself.
 Also, at the start, he had some of the first computer engines
 to work for him to find his ideas, to look deeper,
 to verify his ideas.
 He was better at using them than a lot of others.
 Now I feel like the playing field is a lot more level.
 There are both computer engines, neural networks,
 and hybrid engines available to practically anybody.
 So it's much harder to find ideas now that actually
 give you an advantage with the white pieces.
 I mean, people don't expect to find those ideas anymore.
 Now it's all about finding ideas
 that are missed by the engines.
 Either they're missed entirely or they're missed at low depth.
 And using them to gain some advantage
 in the sense that you have more knowledge.
 And it's also good to know that usually
 these are not complete bluffs.
 These are like semi-bluffs so that you know
 that even if your opponent makes all the right moves,
 you can still make a draw.
 And also at the start of 2019,
 neural networks had just started to be available
 in chess and I'm not entirely sure,
 but there were at least some players,
 even in the top events, who you could see did not use them
 or did not use them in the right way.
 And then you could gain a huge advantage
 because a lot of positions,
 they were being evaluated differently
 by the neural networks than traditional chess engines
 because they simply think about chess
 in a very simple way.
 Because they simply think about chess
 in a very, very different way.
 So short answer is these days,
 it's all about surprising your opponent
 and taking it into position where you have more knowledge.
 So is there some sense in which it's okay
 to make suboptimal quote unquote moves?
 No, but you have to.
 I mean, you have to because the best moves
 have been analyzed to death mostly.
 So that's a kind of, when you say semi-bluff,
 that's a kind of sacrifice.
 You're sacrificing the optimal move,
 the optimal position so that you can take the opponent.
 I mean, that's a game theoretic sense.
 You take the opponent to something they didn't prepare well.
 Yeah, but you could also look at it another way
 that regardless, like if you turn on,
 whatever engine you turn on,
 like if you try to analyze either from the starting position
 or the starting position of some popular opening,
 like if you analyze long enough,
 it's always gonna end up in a draw.
 So in that sense, you may not be going for like
 the objective, the tries that are objectively
 the most difficult to draw against,
 but you are trying to look at least at the less obvious paths.
 How much do you use engines?
 Do you use Leela, Stockfish in your preparations?
 My team does.
 Personally, I try not to use them too much on my own
 because I know that when I play,
 you obviously cannot have help from engines.
 And often, I feel like often having imperfect
 or knowledge about a position
 or some engine knowledge can be a lot worse
 than having no knowledge.
 So I try to look at engines as little as possible.
 So yeah, so your team uses them for research,
 for a generation of ideas,
 but you are relying primarily on your human resources.
 Yeah, for sure.
 You can evaluate well, you don't lean.
 Yeah, I can evaluate as a human.
 I can know what they find unpleasant and so on.
 And it's very often the case for me to some extent,
 but a lot for others that you arrive in a position
 and your opponent plays a move that you didn't expect.
 And if you didn't expect it,
 you know that it's probably not a great move
 since it hasn't been expected by the engine.
 But if it's not obvious why it's not a good move,
 it's usually very, very hard to figure it out.
 And so then looking at the engines doesn't necessarily help
 because at that point, like you're facing a human,
 you have to sort of think as a human.
 I was chatting with the Demisus Habes,
 CEO of DeepMind a couple of days ago,
 and he asked me to ask you about what you first felt
 when you saw the play of AlphaZero.
 Like interesting ideas, any creativity.
 Did you feel fear that the machine is taking over?
 Were you inspired?
 And what was going on in your mind and heart?
 Funny thing about Demisus,
 he doesn't play chess at all like an AI.
 He plays in a very, very human way.
 No, I was hugely inspired when I saw the games at first.
 And in terms of man versus machine,
 I mean, that battle was kind of lost for humans
 even before I entered top level chess.
 So that's never been an issue for me.
 I never liked playing as computers much anyway.
 So that's completely fine.
 But it was amazing to see how they quote unquote
 thought about chess in such a different way
 and in a way that you could mistake for creativity.
 Mistake for creativity, strong words.
 Is it wild to you how many sacrifices it's willing to make
 that like sacrifice pieces and then wait
 for prolonged periods of time
 before doing anything with that?
 Is that weird to you that that's part of chess?
 No, it's one of the things that's hardest to replicate
 as a human as well, or at least for my playing style.
 That usually when I sacrifice, I feel like I'm, you know,
 I don't do it unless I feel like I'm getting something
 like tangible in return.
 And like a few moves down the line.
 A few moves down the line,
 you can see that you can either retrieve the material
 or you can put your opponent's king under pressure
 or have some very like very concrete positional advantage
 that sort of compensates for it.
 For instance, in chess,
 so bishops and knights are fairly equivalent.
 We both give them three points,
 but bishops are a little bit better.
 And especially a bishop pair is a lot better
 than a bishop and a knight.
 So, or especially two knights depends on the position,
 but like on average they are.
 So like sacrificing a pawn in order to get a bishop pair,
 that's one of the most common sacrifices in chess.
 Oh, you're okay making that sacrifice.
 Yeah, I mean, it depends on the situation,
 but generally that's fine.
 And there are a lot of openings that are based on that,
 that you sacrifice a pawn for the bishop pair
 and then eventually it's some sort of positional equality.
 So that's fine.
 But the way AlphaZero would sacrifice a knight
 or sometimes two pawns, three pawns.
 And you could see that it's looking for some sort
 of positional domination, but it's so hard to understand.
 And it was really fascinating to see.
 Yeah, in 2019, I was sacrificing a lot of pawns especially,
 and it was a great joy.
 Unfortunately, it's not so easy to continue to do that.
 People have found more solid opening lines since
 that don't allow me to do that as often.
 I'm still trying both to get those positions
 and still trying to learn the art of sacrificing pieces.
 So Demis also made a comment that was interesting
 to my new chess brain, which is one of the reasons
 that chess is fun is because of the quote,
 creative tension between the bishop and the knight.
 So you're talking about this interesting difference
 between the two pieces, that there's some kind of,
 how would you convert that?
 I mean, that's like a poetic statement about chess.
 I think he said that why has chess been played
 for such a long time?
 Why is it so fun to play at every level?
 That if you can reduce it to one thing,
 is it the bishop and the knight,
 some kind of weird dynamics that they create in chess.
 Is there any truth to that?
 It sounds very good.
 I haven't tried a lot of other games,
 but I tried to play a little bit of Shogi.
 And for my new Shogi brain, comparing it to chess,
 what annoyed me about that game is how much the pieces suck.
 Basically you have one rook and you have one bishop
 that move like in chess, and the rest of the pieces
 are really not very powerful.
 So I think that's one of the attractions of chess,
 like how powerful, especially the queen is, which-
 Interesting.
 I kind of think makes it a lot of fun.
 You think power is more fun than variety?
 No, there is variety in chess as well though.
 But not much more so than like go or something?
 No, no, no, that's for-
 So like knight, I mean, they all move in different ways.
 They're all weird.
 There's just all these weird patterns and positions
 that can emerge.
 The difference in the pieces create all kinds
 of interesting dynamics, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
 Yeah, and I guess it is quite fascinating
 that all those years ago they created the knight
 and the bishop without probably realizing
 that they would be almost equally strong
 with such different qualities.
 That's crazy that this, like when you design computer games,
 it's like an art form, it's science and an art to balance it.
 You talk about StarCraft and all those games.
 Like so that you can have competitive play
 at the highest level with all those different units.
 And in the case of chess, it's different pieces.
 And they somehow designed a game that was super competitive.
 But there's probably some kind of natural selection
 that the chess would just wouldn't last
 if it was designed poorly.
 Yeah, and I think the rules have changed
 over time a little bit.
 But I would be, I mean, speaking of games and all that,
 I'm also interested to play other games
 like chess 960 or Fisher Random, as they call it,
 like that you have 960 maps instead of one.
 Yeah, so for people who don't know,
 Fisher Random Chess, Chess 960 is-
 Yeah, that basically just means that the pawns
 are in the same way and the major pieces
 are distributed randomly on the last rank.
 Only that there have to be obviously bishops
 of opposite color and the king has to be
 in between the rooks so that you can castle both ways.
 Oh, you can still castle in-
 You can still castle, but it makes it interesting.
 So you still have, it still castles in the same way.
 So let's say the king is like-
 Yeah, what happens in that case?
 Yeah, let's say the king is in the corner.
 So to castle this side,
 you have to clear a whole lot of pieces.
 What would castling look like though?
 No, the king would go here and the rook would go there.
 Oh, okay.
 And that's happened in my games as well.
 Like I forgot about castling
 and I'd be like attacking a king over here.
 And then all of a sudden it escapes to the other side.
 I think Fisher Chess is good that it's,
 the maps will generally be worse than regular chess.
 Like I think the starting position is as close to ideal
 for creating a competitive game as possible,
 but they will still be like interesting and diverse enough
 that you can play very, very interesting games.
 So when you say maps, there's nine, 60 different options
 and like what fraction of that creates interesting games
 at the highest level?
 This is something that a lot of people are curious about
 because when you challenge a great chess player
 like yourself to look at a random starting position,
 that feels like it pushes you to play pure chess
 versus memorizing life.
 Oh yeah, for sure.
 For sure, but that's the whole idea.
 That's what you want.
 How hard is it to play?
 I mean, can you talk about what it feels like to you
 to play with a random starting position?
 Is there some intuition you've been building up?
 It's very, very different.
 And I mean, understandably,
 engines have an even greater advantage in 960
 than they have in classical chess.
 Now it's super interesting.
 And that's why also I really wish that we played
 more classical chess, like long games,
 four to seven hours and in fish random chess,
 just 960, because then you really need that time
 even on the first moves.
 What usually happens is that you get 15 minutes
 before the game, you're getting told the position
 15 minutes before the game,
 and then you can think about it a little bit,
 even check the computer, but that's all the time you have,
 but then you really need to figure it out.
 And like some of the positions obviously
 are a lot more interesting than the others.
 In some of them, it appears that like,
 if you don't play symmetrically at the beginning,
 at the start, then you're probably gonna be
 in a pretty bad position.
 What do you mean with the pawns?
 With the pawns, yeah.
 Why, how does that make sense?
 That's the thing about chess though.
 So let's say why it opens with E4,
 which has always been the most played move.
 There are many ways to meet that,
 but the most solid ways of playing
 has always been the symmetrical response.
 Yeah.
 With E5 and then there's the,
 there's the Rillopus, there's the Petrov opening and so on.
 And if you just banned symmetry on the first move in chess,
 you would get more interesting games.
 Oh, interesting.
 Or you'd get more decisive games.
 So that's the good thing about chess
 is that we've played it so long
 that we've actually devised non-symmetrical openings
 that are also fairly equal.
 And-
 But symmetry is a good default.
 But yeah, symmetry is a good default.
 And it's a problem that by playing symmetrical,
 armed with good preparation in regular chess,
 it's just a little bit too easy to,
 it's a little bit too dry.
 And I guess if you analyzed,
 if you analyzed a lot in chess 960,
 then the, a lot of the position would end up
 being pretty dry as well.
 Because the random starting point is so shitty,
 you're forced to-
 You're actually forced to play symmetrically.
 Like you cannot actually try and play
 in a more sort of interesting, interesting manner.
 Is there any other kind of variations
 that are interesting to you?
 Oh yeah, there are, there are several.
 So no castling chess has been,
 has been promoted by former world champion,
 Vladimir Kramnik.
 There have been a few tournaments
 with that not any that I've participated in though.
 I kind of like it.
 Also my coach uses like non-castling engines quite a bit
 to analyze regular positions to just to get
 a different, different perspective.
 So castling is like a defensive thing.
 So if you remove castling,
 it forces you to be more offensive.
 Is that why?
 Yeah, it just, yeah, for sure.
 It seems like a tiny little difference.
 No castling probably forces you
 to be a little bit more defensive at the start,
 or I would guess so.
 Because you cannot suddenly escape with the kings.
 It's gonna make the game a bit slower at the start,
 but I feel like eventually it's gonna,
 it's gonna make the more games more,
 well, less drawish for sure.
 Then you have some weirder variants
 like where the pawns can move both diagonally and forward.
 And also you have self-capture chess,
 which is quite interesting.
 So the pawns can, or-
 Like commit suicide or what?
 Yeah, people can-
 Why would that be a good move?
 No, sometimes one of your pieces occupy a square.
 I mean, let me just set up a position.
 Let's put it like this.
 For instance, like here,
 I mean, there are a lot of ways to checkmate
 for why it's like this, for instance,
 or there are several ways.
 But like this would be a-
 Oh, cool.
 For people who are just listening,
 yeah, basically you bring in a knight close to the whole,
 the king and the queen and so on,
 and you replace the knight with a queen.
 Yeah, that's interesting.
 So you can have like a front of pieces
 and then you just replace them with the second-
 Yeah, I mean, that could be interesting.
 I think also maybe sometimes it's just clearance, basically.
 It adds an extra element of clearance.
 So I think there are many different variants.
 I don't think any of them are better
 than the one that has been played for at least a thousand years,
 but it's certainly interesting to see.
 So one of your goals is to reach
 the Fidea Elo chess rating of 2900.
 Maybe you can comment on how is this rating calculated
 and what does it take to get there?
 Is it possible for a human being to get there?
 Basically, you play with a factor of 10,
 which means that if I were to play against
 an opponent who's rated the same as me,
 I would be expected to score 50%, obviously,
 and that means that I would win five points with a win,
 lose five points with a draw, and then equal if I draw.
 If your opponent is 200 points lower rated,
 you're expected to score 75% and so on.
 And you establish that rating by playing a lot of people
 and then it slowly converges towards an estimate
 of how likely you are to win or lose
 against different people.
 And my rating is obviously carried
 through thousands of games.
 Right now, my rating is 2861, which is decent.
 I think that pretty much corresponds
 to the level I have at the moment,
 which means in order to reach 2900,
 I would have to either get better at chess,
 which I think is fairly hard to do,
 at least considerably better.
 So what I would need to do is try and optimize
 even more in terms of the matchups,
 the preparations, everything,
 but not necessarily like selecting tournaments and so on,
 but just optimizing in terms of preparation,
 like making sure I never have any bad days.
 So you basically can't lose.
 Yeah, I basically can't fuck up ever
 if I wanna reach that goal.
 And so I think reaching 2900 is pretty unlikely.
 The reason I've set the goal is to have something
 to play for, to have a motivation to actually try
 and be at my best when I play,
 because otherwise I'm playing to some extent,
 mostly for fun these days in that I love to play,
 I love to try and win, but I don't have a lot to prove
 or anything, but that gives me at least the motivation
 to try and be at my best all the time,
 which I think is something to aim for.
 So at the moment I'm quite enjoying that process of trying
 to optimize.
 What would you say motivates you in this now
 and in the years leading up to now,
 the love of winning or the fear of losing?
 So for the world championship,
 it's been fair of losing for sure.
 Other tournaments, love of winning is a great, great factor.
 And that's why I also get more joy from winning
 most tournaments than I do for winning the world championship
 because then it's mostly been a relief.
 I also think I enjoy winning more now than I did before,
 because I feel like I'm a little bit more relaxed now.
 And I also know that it's not gonna last forever.
 So every little win I appreciate a lot more now.
 And yeah, in terms of fear for losing,
 that's a huge reason why I'm not gonna play
 the world championship because it really didn't give me
 a lot of joy.
 It really was all about avoiding losing.
 Why is it that the world championship
 really makes you feel this way, the anxiety?
 So, and when you say losing, do you mean not just the match,
 but like every single position, like the fear of a blunder?
 No, I mean, the blunder is okay.
 Like when I sit down at the board,
 then it's mostly been fine because then I'm focused on,
 then I'm focused on the game.
 And then I know that I can play the game.
 It's a time like in between, like knowing that,
 I feel like losing is not an option
 because it's the world championship.
 And because in a world championship,
 there are two players, there's a winner and the loser.
 If I don't win a random tournament that I play,
 then I'm usually, it depends on the tournament.
 I might be disappointed for sure.
 Might even be pretty pissed,
 but ultimately, you go on to the next one.
 With the world championship,
 you don't go on to the next one.
 It's like, it's years.
 And it also has been like,
 it's been a core part of my identity for a while now
 that I am world champion.
 And so there's not an option of losing that.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, there's, you're gonna have to,
 at least for a couple of years,
 carry the weight of having lost.
 You're the former world champion now,
 if you lose versus the current world champion.
 There are certain sports that create that anxiety
 and others that don't.
 For example, I think UFC makes martial arts
 are a little better with losing.
 It's understood, everybody loses.
 But they're-
 Not everybody though.
 Not everybody, not everybody, not everybody.
 Could be bent to the chat.
 But in boxing, there is that extra pressure
 of maintaining the championship.
 I mean, maybe you could say the same thing
 about the UFC as well.
 So for you personally, for a person who loves chess,
 the first time you won the world championship,
 that was the big, that was the thing that was fun.
 Yeah.
 And then everything after is like stressful.
 Yeah.
 Essentially.
 There was certainly stress involved the first time as well,
 but it was nothing compared to the others.
 So the only world championship after that
 that I really enjoyed was the one in 2018
 against the American Fabiano Caruana.
 And what that made that different is that
 I'd been kind of slumping for a bit
 and he'd been on the rise.
 So our ratings were very, very similar.
 They were so close that if at any point during the match,
 I'd lost the game,
 he would have been ranked as number one in the world.
 Like our ratings were so close that
 for each draw they didn't move.
 And-
 And the game itself was close.
 Yeah, the games themselves were very close.
 I had a winning position in the first game
 that I couldn't really get anywhere for a lot of games.
 Then he had a couple of games
 where he could potentially have won.
 Then in the last game I was a little bit better.
 And eventually they were all drawn.
 But I felt like all the way that this is an interesting match
 against an opponent who is at this position
 at this point equal to me.
 And so losing that would not have been a disaster
 because in all the other matches I would know
 that I've lost against somebody
 who I know I'm much better than.
 And that would be a lot harder for me to take.
 Well, that's fascinating and beautiful
 that the stress isn't from losing.
 Because you have fun.
 You enjoy playing against somebody who's as good as you,
 maybe better than you.
 That's exciting to you.
 Yeah.
 It's losing at this high stakes thing
 that only happens rarely
 to a person who's not as good as you.
 Yeah, and that's why it's also been incredibly frustrating
 in other matches.
 Like when I know, when we play draw after draw
 and I can just, I know that I'm better.
 I can sense during the game
 that I understand it better than them,
 but I cannot get over the hump.
 So you are the best chess player in the world
 and you not playing the world championship
 really makes the world championship not seem important.
 Or, I mean, there's an argument to be made for that.
 Is there anything you would like to see
 for the change about the world championship
 that would make it more fun for you?
 And better for the game of chess period
 for everybody involved?
 So I think 12 games or now 14 games
 that there is for the world championship
 is a fairly low sample size.
 If you want to determine who the best player is
 or at least the best player in that particular matchup,
 you need more games.
 And I think to some extent,
 if you're gonna have a world champion
 and call them the best players,
 best player you gotta make sure that the format
 increases the chance of finding the best players.
 So I think having more games
 and if you're gonna have a lot more games
 then you need to decrease the time control a bit,
 which in turn I think is also a good thing
 because in very long time controls with deep preparation,
 you can sort of mask a lot of your deficiencies
 as a chess player
 because you have a lot of time to think and to defend
 and also, yeah, you have deep preparation.
 So I think those would be for me to play,
 those would be the main things,
 more games and less time.
 So you wanna see more games
 and rules that emphasize pure chess.
 Yeah, but already less time emphasizes pure chess
 because defensive techniques are much harder to execute
 with a little time.
 What do you think?
 Is there a sweet spot in terms of,
 are we talking about Blitz?
 Is it how many minutes?
 I think Blitz is a bit too fast.
 To their credit, this was suggested by Fita as well.
 For a start to have two games per day
 and let's say you have 45 minutes a game
 plus 15 or 30 seconds per move,
 that means that each sessions will probably be about
 or a little less than two hours.
 Yeah.
 That would be a start.
 Also what we're playing in the tournament
 that I'm playing here in Miami,
 which is four games a day with 15 minutes
 plus 10 seconds per move,
 those would be more interesting than the one there is now.
 And I understand that there are a lot of traditions,
 people don't wanna change the world championship,
 that's all fine.
 I just think that the world championship
 should do a better job of trying to reflect
 who's the best overall chess player.
 So would you say like, if it's faster games,
 you'd probably be able to get a sample size
 of like over 20 games, 20, 30, 40.
 Do you think there's a number that's good
 over a long period of time?
 Well, I would prefer as many as possible.
 So like a hundred?
 Yeah, but let's say you play 12 days to games a day,
 that's 24.
 I feel like that's already quite a bit better.
 You play like one black game, one white game each day.
 Endurance wise, that's okay?
 Yeah, I think that's fine.
 Like you will have free days as well.
 So I don't think that will be a problem.
 And also you have to prepare two sets of openings
 for each day, which makes it more difficult
 for the teams preparing, which I think is also good.
 Let me ask you a fun question.
 If Hikaru Nakamura was one of the two people,
 I guess, I apologize for-
 Yeah, he could have finished second.
 So he lost the last round of the candidates.
 Yeah, and maybe you can explain to me,
 internet speed copium is something you tweeted.
 Yeah.
 But if he got second, would you just despite him
 still play the world championship?
 That's internet question.
 And when the internet asks, I must abide the due divides.
 Yeah, sure.
 Thank you, internet.
 So after the last match, I did an interview
 right after where I talked about the fact
 that I was unlikely to play the next one.
 I'd spoken privately to both family, friends,
 and of course, also my chess team
 that this was likely going to be the last match.
 What happened was that right before
 the world championship match,
 there was this young player, Alireza Firouza.
 He had a dramatic rise.
 He rose to second in the world rankings.
 He was 18 then, he's 19 now.
 He qualified for the candidates.
 And it felt like there was like
 at least a half realistic possibility
 that he could be the challenger
 for the next world championship.
 And that sort of lit a fire under me.
 Do you like that idea?
 I like that a lot.
 I love the idea of playing him
 in the next world championship.
 And originally I was sure that I wanted to announce
 right after the tournament, the match,
 that this was it, I'm done.
 I'm not playing the next one.
 But this lit a fire under me.
 So that made me think, you know,
 this actually motivates me.
 And I just wanted to get it out there for several reasons,
 to create more hype about the candidates,
 to sort of motivate myself a little bit,
 maybe motivate him.
 Also, obviously I wanted to give people a heads up
 for the candidates that you might be playing
 for more than first place.
 Normally the candidates is first place or bust.
 It's like the world championship.
 And then, so Nakamura was one of many people
 who just didn't believe me, which is fair.
 Because I've talked before about not necessarily wanting
 to defend again, but I never talked as concretely
 or was as serious as this time.
 So he simply didn't believe me.
 And he was very vocal about that.
 And he said, nobody believed me, no other players
 who may or may not have been true.
 And then, yeah, he lost the last game
 and he didn't qualify.
 But to answer the question, no, I'd already at that point
 decided that I wouldn't play.
 I would have liked it less if he had not lost the last round.
 But the decision was made.
 But the decision was already made.
 Does it break your heart a little bit
 that you're walking away from it?
 In all the ways that you mentioned that it's just not fun.
 There's a bunch of ways that it doesn't seem
 to bring out the best kind of chess.
 It doesn't bring out the best out of you
 and the particular opponents involved.
 Does it just break your heart a little bit?
 Like you're walking away from something
 or maybe the entire chess community is walking away
 from a kind of a historic event
 that was so important in the 20th century at least.
 So I won the championship in 2013.
 I said no to the candidates in 2011.
 I didn't particularly like the format.
 I also wasn't, I was just not in the mood.
 I didn't want the pressure that was connected
 with the world championship.
 And I was perfectly content at the time
 to play the tournaments that I did play.
 Also to be ranked number one in the world,
 I was comfortable with the fact that I knew
 that I was the best and I didn't need a title to show others.
 And what happened later is I suddenly decided to play.
 In 2013, I liked, they changed the format.
 I liked it better.
 I just decided, you know, it could be interesting.
 Let's try and get this.
 There really wasn't more than that to it.
 It wasn't like fulfilling lifelong dream or anything.
 I just thought, you know, let's play.
 So it's just a cool tournament, a good challenge.
 Yeah, it's a cool tournament.
 It's a good challenge.
 You know, why not?
 It's something that could be a motivation.
 It motivated me to get in the best shape of my life
 that had been till then.
 So it was a good thing.
 And 2013 match brought me a lot of joy as well.
 So I'm very, very happy that I did that.
 But I never had any thoughts that I'm gonna like
 keep the title for a long time.
 Immediately after the match in 2013,
 I mean, also before the match,
 I'd spoken against the fact that champion is seated
 into the final, which I thought was unfair.
 After the match, I made a proposal
 that we have a different system
 where the champion doesn't have these privileges
 and people's reaction, both players and chess community
 was generally like, okay, we're good.
 We don't want that.
 You keep your privileges.
 And I was like, okay, whatever.
 So you want to fight for it every time?
 Yeah, I want that.
 Have to ask, just in case you have an opinion,
 if you can maybe from a fantasy chess perspective,
 analyze Ding versus Nepo, who wins?
 The current, the two people that would play
 if you're not playing.
 Generally, I would consider that Ding has a slightly
 better overall chess strength.
 What are the strengths and weaknesses of each,
 if you can kind of summarize it?
 So Nepo, he's even better at calculating short lines
 than I am, but he can sometimes like a little bit of depth.
 Like in short lines, he's an absolute calculation monster.
 He's extremely quick,
 but he can sometimes like a bit of depth.
 Also recently, he's improved his openings quite a bit.
 So now he has a lot of good ideas
 and he's very, very solid.
 Ding is not quite as well prepared,
 but he has an excellent understanding of dynamics
 and imbalances in chess, I would say.
 What do you mean by imbalances?
 Imbalances like bishops against knights,
 material imbalances.
 He can take advantage of those.
 Yes, I would say he's very, very good at that
 and understanding the dynamic factors,
 as we call them, like material versus time, especially.
 I think Nepo got the better of him and the candidates.
 So what's your sense why Ding has an edge
 in the championship?
 I feel like individual past results
 hasn't necessarily been a great indicator
 of world championship results.
 I feel like overall chess strength is more important.
 I mean, to be fair, I only think like Ding is better
 and Ding has a very small edge.
 Like difference is not big at all.
 But our individual head-to-head record
 was probably the main reason that a lot of people thought
 Nepo had a good chance against me as well.
 It was like four to one in his favor before the match,
 but that was just another example
 of why that may not necessarily mean anything.
 Also in our case, it was a very, very low sample size,
 I think about the size of the match in total 14 games.
 And that generally doesn't mean much.
 How close were those games, would you say,
 in your mind for the previous championship?
 So that game six where it was a turning point where you won,
 was there any doubt in your mind that,
 like if you do a much larger sample size,
 that you'll get the better of Nepo?
 No, no, larger sample size is always good for me.
 So World Championship is a great parallel to football
 because it's a low scoring game.
 And if the better player or the better team scores,
 they win most of the time.
 Oh, that's generally for championships or in general?
 Yeah, for championships.
 Like they generally win
 because the other slightly weaker team,
 they're good enough to defend
 to make it very, very difficult for the others.
 But when they actually have to create the chances,
 then they have no chance.
 And then it very often ends with a blowout
 as it did in our match.
 If I hadn't won game six,
 it probably would have been very, very close.
 He might have edged it.
 There's obviously a bigger chance that I would have edged it.
 But this is just what happens a lot in chess,
 but also in football that matches are close.
 And then they...
 Somebody scores?
 Somebody scores and then things change.
 And this gives people the illusion
 that the matchup was very close.
 While actually it just means that the nature of the game
 makes the matches close very often,
 but it's always much more likely that one of the teams
 is gonna or one of the players is gonna break away
 than the others.
 And in other matches as well,
 even though a lot of people before the match in 2016
 against Karyakin,
 there were people who thought before the match
 that I was massively overrated as a favorite
 and that essentially the match was pretty close,
 like whatever, 60-40,
 or some people even said like 55-45.
 And what I felt was that the match went very, very wrong for me
 and I still won.
 And some people saw that as an indication
 that the pre-match probabilities were probably a bit closer
 than people thought.
 Well, I would look at it in the way
 that everything went wrong and I still won,
 which probably means that I was pretty big favorite
 to begin with.
 I do have a question too about that match,
 but first, so Sergey Karyakin was originally a qualifier
 for the candidate tournament,
 but was disqualified for breaching the FIDE code of ethics
 after publicly expressing approval
 for the 2022 Russian invasion in Ukraine.
 You look at the Cold War
 and some of the US versus Russian games of the past,
 does politics, some of this geopolitics politics
 ever creep its way into the game?
 Do you feel the pressure, the immensity of that
 as it does sometimes for the Olympics,
 these big nations playing each other,
 competing against each other,
 almost like fighting out in a friendly way,
 the battles, the tensions that they have
 in the space of geopolitics?
 I think it still does.
 So the president of the World Chess Federation
 who was just re-elected is a Russian.
 Like I like him personally for sure,
 but he is quite connected to the Kremlin.
 And it's quite clear that the Kremlin considers it
 at least a semi-important goal
 to bring the chess crown home to Russia.
 So it's still definitely a factor.
 And I mean, I can answer for in the Karyakin case,
 like I don't have a strong opinion
 on whether he should have been banned or not.
 Obviously I don't agree with anything that he says,
 but in principle, I think that you should ban
 either no Russians or all Russians.
 I'm generally not particularly against either,
 but I don't love banning wrong opinions
 even if they are as reprehensible as his have been.
 Yeah, there's something about the World Chess Championships
 or the Olympics where it feels like banning
 is counterproductive to the alleviating
 some of the conflicts.
 We don't know.
 This is the thing though.
 We really don't know about the long-term conflicts.
 And a lot of people try to do the right thing
 in this sense, which I don't really blame at all.
 It's just that we don't know.
 And I guess sometimes there are other ways
 you wanna try and help as well.
 See, like within the competition,
 within some of those battles of US versus Russia
 or so on of the past,
 there's also between the individuals,
 maybe you'll disagree with this,
 but from a spectator perspective,
 there's still a comradery.
 Like at the end of the day,
 there's a thing that unites you,
 which is this like appreciation
 of the fight over the chessboard.
 It's even if you hate each other.
 Yeah, for sure.
 I think for every match that's been,
 you would briefly discuss the game with your opponent
 after the game, no matter how much you hate each other.
 And I think that's lovely.
 And Kasparov, I mean, he was quoted,
 like somebody in his team asked him like,
 why are you talking to Karpov after the game?
 Like you hate that guy.
 And he's like, yeah, sure,
 but he's the only one who understands me.
 Yeah, the only one who understands.
 So that's, no, I think that's really lovely.
 And I would love to see that in other areas as well,
 that you can, regardless of what happens,
 you can have a good chat about the game.
 You can just talk about the ideas with people
 who understand what you understand.
 So if you're not playing the world championships,
 there's a lot of people who are saying that
 perhaps the world championships don't matter anymore.
 Do you think there's some truth to that?
 I said that back a long time ago as well,
 that for me, I don't know if it never happened,
 so I don't know what would have happened,
 but I was thinking like the moment that I realized
 that I'm not the best player in the world,
 like I felt like morally I have to renounce
 the world championship title, you know,
 because it doesn't mean anything,
 as long as you're not the best player.
 So the ratings really tell a bigger, a clearer story.
 I think so, at least over time.
 Like I'm a lot more proud of my streak
 of being rated number one in the world,
 which is now since I think the summer of 2011.
 I'm a lot more proud of that than the world championships.
 How much anxiety or even fear do you have
 before making a difficult decision on the chessboard?
 So when it's a high stakes game, how nervous do you get?
 How much anxiety do you have in all that calculations
 you're sitting there for 10, 15 minutes?
 Because you're in a fog,
 there's always a possibility of a blunder, of a mistake.
 Are you anxious about it?
 Are you afraid of it?
 Really depends.
 I have been at times.
 I think the most nervous I've ever been was game 10
 of the world championships in 2018.
 That was just a thrilling game.
 I was black.
 I basically abandoned the queen side at some point
 to attack him on the king side.
 And I knew that my attack, if it doesn't work,
 I'm gonna lose, but I had so much adrenaline.
 So that was fine.
 I thought I was gonna win.
 Then at some point I realized that it's not so clear
 and my time was ticking and I was just getting so nervous.
 I still remember what happened.
 Like we played this time trouble phase
 where he had very little time,
 but I had even less.
 And I just remember, I can't remember much of it,
 just that when it was over, I was just so relieved
 because then it was clear that the position
 was probably gonna be out in a draw.
 Otherwise, I'm often nervous before games,
 but when I get there, it's all business.
 And especially when I'm playing well,
 I'm never afraid of losing when I play
 because I trust my instincts, I trust my skills.
 How much psychological intimidation is there
 from you to the other person, from the other person to you?
 I think people would play a lot better
 if they played against an anonymous me.
 I would love to-
 Are people scared of you?
 I would love to have a tournament online
 where let's say you play 10 of the best players in the world
 and for each round, you don't know who you're playing.
 That's an interesting question.
 There's these videos where people eat McDonald's,
 the Burger King or Diet Coke versus Diet Pepsi.
 Would people be able to tell they're playing you
 from the style of play, do you think?
 Or from the strength of play?
 If there was a decent sample size, sure.
 And what about you?
 Would you be able to tell others?
 In just one game, very unlikely.
 What sample size would you need to tell accurately?
 I feel like this is science.
 Yeah, I think 20 games would help a lot.
 Per person.
 But I know that they've already developed AI bots
 that are pretty good at recognizing somebody's style.
 Okay.
 Which is quite fascinating.
 And it'd be fascinating if those bots were able
 to summarize the style somehow.
 Maybe great attacking chess,
 like some of the same characteristics you've been describing,
 like great at short line calculations,
 all that kind of stuff.
 Or just talk shit.
 No, but really all the best chess players,
 there are basically just two camps.
 People who are good at longer lines or shorter lines,
 it's the hare and the tortoise, basically.
 And sometimes, I feel like I'm the closest you can get
 to a hybrid of those.
 Because you got both the,
 you're good in every position,
 so the middle game and the end game.
 Yeah, and also I can think to some extent,
 both rapidly and deeply,
 which a lot of people, they can't do both.
 But I mean, to answer your question from before,
 I think, yeah, I sometimes can get a little bit
 intimidated by my opponent, but it's mostly
 if there's something unknown,
 it's mostly if it's something that I don't understand fully.
 And I do think, especially when I'm playing,
 well, people, they just play more timidly against me
 than they do against each other,
 sometimes without even realizing it.
 And I certainly use that to my advantage.
 If I sense that my opponent is apprehensive,
 if I sense that they are not gonna necessarily
 take all their chances,
 it just means that I can take more risk.
 And I always try and find that balance.
 To shake them up a little bit.
 Yeah.
 What's been the toughest loss of your career
 that you remember?
 Would that be the World Championship match?
 Oh yeah, for sure.
 Can you take- Game eight in 2016.
 And who was it against?
 Against Karyakin in New York.
 Can you take it through the story of that game?
 Where were you before that game
 in terms of game one through seven?
 Yeah, so game one and two, not much happened.
 Game three and four, I was winning in both of them.
 And normally I should definitely have converted both.
 I couldn't.
 Partly due to good defense on his part,
 but mostly because I just, I messed up.
 And then after that, games five, six and seven,
 not much happened.
 I was getting impatient at that point.
 So for game eight, I was probably ready
 to take a little bit more risks than I had before,
 which I guess was insane because I knew that
 he couldn't beat me unless I beat myself.
 Like he wasn't strong enough to outplay me.
 And that was leading to impatience somehow
 and impatience-
 No, because I knew that I was better.
 I knew that I was better.
 I knew that I just needed to win one game
 and then the match is over.
 That's what happened in 2021 as well.
 Like when I won the first game against Nebo,
 I knew that the match was over.
 Unless I like fuck up royally,
 then he's not gonna be able to beat me.
 So what happened was that I played a kind of
 an innocuous opening as White,
 just trying to get a game,
 trying to get him out of book as soon as possible.
 Then-
 Okay, can you elaborate, innocuous,
 get him out of the book?
 No, basically I set up pretty defensively as White.
 I wasn't really crossing into his half at the start at all.
 I was just, I played more like a system
 more than like a concrete opening.
 It was like, I'm gonna set up my pieces this way.
 You can set them up however you want.
 And then later where sort of the armies are gonna meet,
 I'm not gonna try and bother you at the start.
 And that means you can have with as many pieces as possible
 kind of pure chess in the middle game
 without any of the lines,
 the standard lines in the opening.
 Exactly.
 And so there was at some point a couple of exchanges,
 then some maneuvering, a little bit better.
 Then he was sort of equalizing
 and then I started to take too many risks.
 And I was still sort of fine.
 But then at some point I realized that
 I'd gone a bit too far and I had to be really careful.
 Then I just froze.
 I just completely froze.
 Mentally?
 Yeah, mentally.
 What happened, Deuki?
 I realized that all the thoughts of,
 I might lose this, what have I done?
 Why did I take so many risks?
 I knew that I could have drawn at any moment.
 Just be patient.
 Don't give him these opportunities.
 What triggered that phase transition in your mind?
 No, it was just a position on the board.
 Realizing, there was one particular move he played
 that I missed.
 And then I realized that this could
 potentially not go my way.
 So then I made another couple of mistakes.
 And to his credit, once he realized he had the chance,
 he knew that this was his one chance.
 He had to take it.
 And so he did.
 And yeah, that's the worst I've ever felt
 after a chess game.
 I realized that I'm probably gonna lose my title
 against somebody who's not even close to my level.
 And I've done it because of my own stupidity, most of all.
 And that was really, really, at the time,
 I was all in my own head.
 That was hard to deal with.
 And I felt like I didn't really recover too much
 for the next game.
 So what I did, there was a free day after the eighth game.
 So I did something that I never did
 at any other world championship.
 Like after game eight, I just,
 I got drunk with my team.
 And-
 That's not a standard procedure?
 No, no.
 That's the only time that's happened
 in the world championship during the match.
 So yeah, I just tried to forget.
 But still before game nine,
 game nine, I was a little bit more relaxed,
 but I was still a bit nervous.
 Then game nine, I was almost lost as well.
 Then only game 10.
 Game 10, I was still, I wasn't in a great mood.
 I was really, really tense.
 The opening was good.
 I had some advantage.
 I was getting optimistic.
 Then I made one mistake.
 He could have forced a draw.
 And then the old, the negativity came back.
 Like I was thinking during the game,
 like how am I gonna play for a win with black in the next game?
 Like, what am I doing?
 And then, you know, eventually it ended well.
 It didn't find the right line.
 I ground him down.
 Actually, I played at some point pretty well in the end game.
 And after that game, like there was such a weight-
 Lifted?
 Lifted, no.
 After that, there was like no thought
 of losing the match whatsoever.
 I knew that, okay, I'd basically gotten away with,
 not with murder, but gotten away with something.
 What can you say about the, after game eight,
 where are the places you've gone in your mind?
 Do you go to some dark places?
 We're talking about like depression.
 Do you think about quitting at that point?
 No, I mean, I think about quitting
 every time I lose the classical game.
 Or at least I used to.
 Yeah.
 Like, especially if it's in a stupid way,
 I'm thinking like, okay, if I'm gonna play like this,
 if I'm gonna do things that I know are wrong,
 then I might as well quit.
 No, that's happened a bunch of times.
 And I've definitely gotten a bit more carefree
 about losing these days,
 which it's not necessarily a good thing.
 Like my hatred of losing led to me not losing a lot.
 Losing a lot and it also lit the fire under me
 that I think my performance after losses
 in classical chess over the last 10 years is like over 2,900.
 Like I really play well after a loss,
 even though it's really, really unpleasant.
 So apparently like, I don't think the way
 that I dealt with them is particularly healthy,
 but it's worked.
 It's worked so far.
 But then you've discovered now love for winning
 to where ultimately longevity wise creates more fun.
 Yeah, for sure.
 What's the perfect day in the life of Magnus Carlsen
 on a day of a big chess match?
 It doesn't have to be world championship,
 but if it's a chess match you care about,
 what time do you wake up?
 What do you eat?
 Well, it depends on when the game is,
 but let's say the game is at three,
 I'll probably wake up pretty late at about 11.
 Then I'll go for a walk,
 might listen to some podcasts.
 Maybe I'll spend a little bit of time looking at some,
 some NBA game from the last night or whatever.
 To not chess related stuff.
 No, no, no, no.
 Then I'll get back, I'll have big lunch
 like usually like a big omelet with a bunch of salad
 and stuff.
 Then go to the game, win like a very nice clean game.
 This is a perfect day.
 Just go back after relax.
 Like the things that make me the happiest
 that tournaments is just having a good routine
 and feeling, feeling well.
 I don't like it when too much is happening around me.
 So the tournament that I came from now
 was the Chess Olympiad, which is the team event.
 So we were a team Norway.
 We did horribly.
 I did okay, but the team in general did horribly.
 Who won that Italy?
 No, Italy beat us, but Uzbekistan won the end.
 They were this amazing team of young players.
 It was really impressive.
 But the thing is like we had a good camaraderie in the team.
 We had our meals together.
 We played a bit of football, went swimming.
 And I couldn't understand why things went wrong.
 And I still don't understand.
 But the thing is for me, it was all very nice.
 But now I'm just so happy to be on my own at a tournament
 just to have my own routines, not see too many people.
 Otherwise just have like a very small team
 of people that I see.
 You are a kind of celebrity now.
 So, you know, people within the chess tournament
 and outside recognize you want to socialize,
 want to tell you about how much you mean to them,
 how much you inspire them, all that kind of stuff.
 Does that get in the way for you
 when you're like trying to really focus on the match?
 Are you able to block that?
 Like, are you able to enjoy those little interactions
 and still keep your focus?
 Yeah, most of the time that's fine
 as long as it's not too much.
 But I have to admit, when I'm at home in Norway,
 I rarely go out without big headphones and something.
 Oh, like a disguise?
 No, not a disguise, just to block out the world.
 Otherwise...
 Don't make eye contact.
 Yeah, so the thing is people in general are nice.
 I mean, people, they wish me well
 and they don't bother me.
 Also, when I have the headphones on,
 I don't notice as much people turning around
 and all of that, so I can be more in my own world.
 So I like that.
 Yeah, what about in this perfect day after the game?
 Do you try to analyze what happened?
 Do you try to think through systematically
 or do you just kind of loosely think about like...
 No, I just loosely think about it.
 I've never been very structured in that sense.
 I know that it was always recommended
 that you analyze your own games,
 but I generally felt that I mostly had a good idea
 about that.
 Like nowadays, I will loosely see what the engine says
 at a certain point if I'm curious about that.
 Otherwise, I usually move on to the next.
 What about diet?
 You said omelet and salad and so on.
 I heard in your conversation with the other Magnus,
 Magnus number two, about you had this bet about meat.
 One of you are gonna go vegan if you lose...
 I forget which bet.
 Vegetarian, though.
 Vegetarian, sorry.
 And you both have an admiration for meat.
 Is there some aspect about optimal performance
 that you look for in food?
 Maybe eating only once or twice a day
 or a particular kind of food,
 like meat heavy diet.
 Is there anything like that
 or you just try to have fun with the food?
 I think whenever I'm at tournaments,
 like it's very natural to eat,
 at least for me to eat only twice a day.
 So usually I do that when I'm at home as well.
 So you do eat before the tournament, though.
 You don't play fasted.
 No, no, no, no.
 But I try not to eat too heavy before the game
 or in general to avoid sugary stuff,
 to have a pretty stable blood sugar level.
 Because that's the easiest way to make mistakes,
 that your energy levels just suddenly drop.
 And they don't necessarily need to be too high
 as long as they're pretty stable, yeah.
 Have you ever tried playing fasted,
 like intermittent fasting,
 so playing without having eaten?
 I mean, the reason I ask, you know,
 especially when you do a low carb diet,
 when I have done a person in a low carb diet,
 I'm able to fast for a long time,
 like eat once a day, maybe twice a day.
 But I just, the mind is most focused
 on like really difficult thinking tasks when it's fasted.
 It's an interesting,
 and a lot of people kind of talk about that.
 Yeah, but- You're able to kind of like zoom in
 and if you're doing a low carb diet,
 you don't have this, the energy stable.
 No, that is true.
 Maybe that will be interesting to try.
 So what's happened for me is,
 I've played a few tournaments where I've had food poisoning.
 And then that generally means
 that you're both sleep deprived and you have no energy.
 And what I've found is that,
 it makes me very calm, of course,
 because I don't have the energy.
 And it makes me super creative.
 Like being sleep deprived,
 I think in general makes you creative.
 Just the first thing that goes away
 is the ability to do the simple things.
 That's what it affects you the most.
 Like you cannot be precise.
 So that's the only thing I'm worried about.
 Like if I'm fasted,
 that I won't be precise when I play.
 But you might be more creative.
 It's an interesting trial.
 Fasted, yeah, potentially.
 What about you have been known to,
 on a rare occasion, play drunk.
 Is there a mathematical formula for,
 sort of on the X axis, how many drinks you had,
 and on the Y axis, your performance slash creativity?
 Is there like an optimal for,
 like one of the,
 would you suggest for the FIDE World Championship
 that people would be required to drink?
 Would that change things in interesting ways?
 Yeah, not at all.
 Maybe for rapid, but for blitz,
 think if you're playing blitz,
 you're mostly playing on short calculation and intuition.
 And I think those are probably enhanced
 if you've had a little bit to drink.
 Can you explain the physiology of why it's enhanced?
 Or the-
 You're just, you're thinking less.
 You're more confident.
 Oh yeah, it's confidence.
 I think it's just confidence.
 I think also like a lot of people
 feel like they're better at speaking languages,
 for instance, if they've drunk a little bit.
 It's just like removing these barriers.
 I think that it's a little bit of the same in chess.
 In 2012, I played the World Blitz Championship,
 and then I was doing horribly for a long time.
 I also had food poisoning there.
 I couldn't play at all for three days.
 So before the last break,
 I was in the middle of the pack,
 like in, I don't know, 20th place or something.
 And so I decided as the last gasp,
 I'm gonna go to the mini bar and just have a few drinks.
 And what happened is that I came back
 and I was suddenly relaxed.
 And I was playing fast and I was playing confident.
 And I thought I was playing so well.
 I wasn't playing nearly as well as I thought,
 but it still helped me.
 I won my remaining eight games.
 And if there had been one more round,
 I probably would have won the whole thing.
 But finally I was second.
 So generally I wouldn't recommend that.
 But maybe as a last resort sometimes,
 if you feel that you have the ability,
 obviously none of this is remotely relevant
 if you don't feel like you have the ability to begin with.
 But if you feel like you have the ability,
 there are just factors that make it impossible
 for you to show it.
 Like numbing your mind a bit can probably be a good thing.
 Yeah, well it's interesting, especially during training,
 you have all kinds of sports
 that have interacted with a lot of athletes.
 And grappling sports, it's different
 when you train under extreme exhaustion.
 For example, you start becoming,
 you start to discover interesting things.
 You start being more creative.
 A lot of people, at least in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,
 they'll smoke weed.
 It creates this kind of anxiety and relaxation
 that kind of enables that creative aspect.
 It's interesting for training.
 Of course you can't rely on any one of those things too much.
 But it's cool to throw in a few drinks
 every once in a while to, yeah, one, first of all,
 to relax and have fun.
 And two, to kind of try things differently,
 to unlock a different part of your brain.
 Yeah, for sure.
 What about supplements?
 You a coffee guy?
 Oh, no.
 I quite like the taste of coffee.
 But the thing is I've never had a job.
 So I've never needed to wake up early.
 So my thought is basically that if I'm tired, I'm tired.
 That's fine.
 Then I'll work it out.
 So I don't wanna ever make my brain get used to coffee.
 Like if you see me drinking coffee,
 that probably means that I'm massively, massively hungover.
 And I just want to try anything to make my brain work.
 Yeah, that's interesting.
 But for a lot of people, like you said, taste of coffee,
 for a lot of people, coffee is part
 of a certain kind of ritual.
 Yeah, for sure.
 That they enjoy.
 So hopefully you can have rituals without that.
 I know that I would enjoy it a lot.
 Yeah.
 Just so you don't wanna rely on it.
 Yeah.
 I also like the taste, so there's no problem there.
 What about exercise?
 So how does that, like what, you know,
 a lot of people talk about the extreme stress
 that chest puts in your body, physically and mentally.
 How do you prepare for that to be physically and mentally?
 Is it just through playing chess or do you do cardio
 and that kind of stuff?
 This is kind of it up and down.
 Like, as I said, in 2013, I was in great shape.
 Like, I mean, generally I was exercising,
 doing sports every day, either playing football
 or tennis or even other sports.
 Otherwise, if I couldn't do that,
 I would try and take my bike for a ride.
 I had a few training camps and I played tennis
 against one of my seconds.
 Like, he's not a super fit guy,
 but he's always been very good at tennis.
 And I never like played in any organized way.
 And that was like, that was the perfect exercise
 because I was running around enough
 to make the games pretty competitive.
 And it meant that he had to run a bit less as well.
 But he was just, he said like,
 he was shocked that if we played like for two hours,
 I wouldn't flinch at all.
 Interesting, so like a combination of fun
 and the differential between skill
 result in good cardio.
 Yeah, it's just that, so in those days,
 I was pretty fit in that sense.
 I've always liked doing sports, but at times, you know,
 I think in winter especially, like I never had like a schedule.
 So at times I'll let myself go a little bit
 and I've always kind of done it more for fun
 than like for a concrete benefit.
 But now I'm at least after the pandemic,
 I was not in great shape.
 So now I'm trying to get back, get better habits and so on.
 But I feel like I've always been the poster boy
 for making being fit a big thing in chess.
 And I always felt that it was not really deserved
 because I never liked doing weights much at all.
 I run a bit at times, but I never liked it too much.
 You just love playing sports.
 I just love playing sports.
 So I think people confuse that because I'm not like
 massively athletic, but I am decent at sports
 and that sort of helped build that perception,
 even though others who are top level chess players,
 they're more fit like Karana for instance,
 he's really, really, his body is really, really strong.
 It's just that he doesn't-
 He like goes to the gym and-
 Yeah, he doesn't play sports.
 That's the difference.
 And the thing about sports is also is just,
 it's an escape.
 It helps you forget for a brief moment
 about like the obsessions, the pursuits of the main thing,
 which is chess.
 Yeah, for sure.
 And I think it also helps your main pursuit
 to feel that you're even if not mastering,
 but like doing well in something else.
 Like I found that if I just juggle a ball,
 that makes me feel better before a game.
 So a skilled activity-
 Juggle with football, yeah.
 Yeah, skilled activity that you can improve on over time.
 It's like flexes the same kind of muscle,
 but another thing that you're much worse at.
 Yeah.
 It focuses you, relaxes you.
 That's really interesting.
 What's the perfect day in the life of Magnus Carlsen
 when he's training?
 So like what's a good training regimen
 in terms of daily kind of training
 that you have to put in across many days, months, and years
 to just keep yourself sharp in terms of chess?
 I would say when I'm at home, I do very little
 deliberate practice.
 I've never been that guy at all.
 Like I could never force myself to just sit down and work.
 So deliberate practice, just so maybe you can educate me.
 For some grandmasters, what would that look like?
 Just doing puzzles kind of thing?
 Or-
 Yeah, doing puzzles and opening analysis.
 That would be the main things.
 Studying games?
 Just studying games.
 Yeah, a little bit.
 But I feel like that's something that I do,
 but it's not deliberate.
 It's like reading our article or reading a book.
 Got it.
 Like I love chess books.
 I'll read just anything and I'll find something interesting.
 So chess books that are like on openings
 and stuff like that, or chess books
 that go over different games.
 Yeah.
 Both.
 Books on, so there are three main categories.
 There are books on openings and there are books on strategy
 and there are books on chess history.
 And I find all of them very, very interesting.
 Like what fraction of the day would you say
 you have a chess board floating somewhere in your head?
 Meaning like you're thinking about it.
 Probably be a better question to ask
 how many hours a day I don't have a chess board floating.
 I mean, it could be just floating there
 and nothing's happening, but like-
 I often do it parallel to some other activity though.
 And what does that look like?
 Like are you daydreaming like different,
 is it actual positions you're just fucking around with?
 Like fumbling with different pieces in your head?
 Often I've looked at a random game on my phone, for instance,
 or in a book and then my brain just keeps going
 at the same position, analyzing it.
 And often it goes all the way to the end game.
 And those are actual games or you conjure up like fake games?
 No, they were often based on real games.
 And then I'm thinking like, oh,
 but it wouldn't be more interesting
 if the pieces were a little bit different.
 And then often I play it out from there.
 So you don't have a, like,
 you don't sit behind a computer or a chess board
 and you lay out the pieces and-
 No, I'm not at all a poster board for deliberate practice.
 I could never, I could never work that way.
 My first coach, he gave me some exercises at home sometimes,
 but he realized at some point that wasn't gonna work.
 Yeah.
 Because I wouldn't do it really or enjoy it.
 So what he would do instead is that at the school
 where I had the trainings with him,
 there was this massive chess library.
 So he was just like, yeah, pick out books.
 You can have anything you want.
 Just pick out books you like
 and then you give it back the next time.
 So that's what I did instead.
 Yeah, I just absolutely rated.
 Then my next tournament,
 I will try out one of the openings from that book
 if it was an opening book and so on.
 Does it feel like a struggle, like challenging?
 Like to be thinking of those positions
 or is it fun and relaxing?
 No, it's completely fine.
 I don't-
 Like if it's a difficult position to figure out, you know?
 Like to calculate-
 Then I go on to something else.
 Okay.
 Like if I can't figure it out, then, you know, I go on.
 Change it so that it's easier to figure out.
 There was a point in your life
 where Kasparov was interested in being your coach
 or at least training with you.
 Why did you choose not to go with him?
 That's a pretty bold move.
 Was there a good reason for this?
 No.
 The first homework exercise he gave me
 was to analyze, like he picked out, I think,
 three, four of my worst losses
 and he wanted me to analyze them and give him my thoughts.
 And it wasn't that there were painful losses or anything,
 that that was a problem.
 I just didn't really enjoy that.
 Also, I felt that this whole structured approach
 and everything, I just felt like from the start,
 it was a hassle.
 So I loved the idea of being able to pick his brain,
 but everything else, I just, you know,
 couldn't see myself enjoying.
 And at the end of the day, I did then
 and always have played for fun.
 That's always been the main reason.
 It's great that you had the confidence
 to sort of basically turn down the approach
 of one of the greatest chess players of all time
 at that time, probably the greatest chess player of all time.
 I don't think I thought of it that way.
 I just thought this is not for me.
 I want to try another way.
 I don't think I was particularly thinking
 that this is my one opportunity or anything.
 It was just, yeah, I don't enjoy this.
 Let's try something else.
 When you were 13, you faced Kasparov
 and he wasn't able to beat you.
 Can you go through that match?
 What did that feel like?
 How important was that?
 How epic was that?
 We played three games.
 I lost two and I drew one.
 Right, but one draw.
 No, the one draw.
 And but didn't you say that you kind of
 had a better position in that?
 Yeah, I remember that day very well.
 There was a blitz game.
 This was a rapid tournament.
 And there was a blitz tournament the day before,
 which determined the pairings for the rapids.
 And for people who don't know,
 super short games are called bullet,
 kind of short games are called blitz,
 semi short games are called rapid.
 Yeah.
 And classic chess, I guess, is like very super long.
 Yeah, yeah, basically bullet is never played over the board.
 So in terms of where the board chess blitz is the shortest,
 rapid is like a hybrid between classical and blitz.
 You need to have the skills of both.
 And then classical is, it's like the blitz tournament,
 which didn't go so well.
 Like I got a couple of wins,
 but I was beaten badly in a lot of games, including by Gary.
 And so there was the pairing that I had to play him,
 which is pretty exciting.
 So I remember I was so tired after the blitz tournament,
 like I slept for 12 hours or something.
 Then I woke up like, okay, I'll turn on my computer.
 I'll search chess space for Kasparov.
 And we'll go from there.
 So before that, I hadn't spent like a lot of time
 specifically studying his games.
 It was super intimidating because a lot of these openings
 I knew I was like, oh, he was the first one to play that.
 Oh, that was his idea.
 I actually didn't know that.
 So I was a bit intimidated before we played.
 Then of course, the first game he arrived a bit late
 because they changed the time from the first day
 to the other, which is a bit strange.
 But everybody else had noticed it, but him.
 Then he tried to surprise me in the opening.
 I think like psychologically,
 the situation was not so easy for him.
 Like clearly it would be embarrassing for him
 if he didn't win both games against me.
 Then like I was spending way too much time on my moves
 because I was playing Kasparov.
 I was double checking everything too much.
 Like normally I would be playing pretty fast in those days.
 And then at some point I calculated better than him.
 He missed a crucial detail and had a much better position.
 I couldn't convert it though.
 I knew what line I had to go for
 in order to have a chance to win.
 But I thought like, I'll play a bit more carefully.
 Maybe I can win still.
 I couldn't.
 And then I lost the second game pretty badly,
 which it wasn't majorly upsetting,
 but I felt that I had two black games against Kasparov,
 both in the Blitz and the Rapid.
 And I lost both of them without any fight whatsoever.
 I wasn't happy about that at all.
 That was like less than I thought I could be able to do.
 So to me, yeah, I was proud of that, but it was a gimmick.
 I was like a very strong IAM, but had GM strength.
 I was like, it can happen that a player of that strength
 makes a draw against Gary once in a while.
 But I understand that I'm 13,
 but still I felt a bit more gimmicky than anything.
 I mean, I guess it's a good thing that made me notice,
 but apart from that, it wasn't, yeah.
 And for people who don't know,
 IAM is international master and GM is grand master.
 And you were just on the verge
 of becoming a youngest grand master ever.
 I was the second youngest ever.
 I think I'm like the seventh youngest now.
 I mean, these kids these days.
 Kids these days.
 Yeah.
 Yeah.
 But I was the youngest grand master at the time
 in the world.
 Yeah.
 So there is a, you know, you say it's gimmicky,
 but there's a romantic notion,
 especially as things have turned out, right?
 Like-
 No, for sure.
 And have you talked to Gary since then about that?
 No, not really.
 I think he's embarrassed.
 He's still bitter, you think?
 No, I don't think he's bitter,
 but I think the game in itself was a bit embarrassing for him.
 Even he can't see past, like-
 No, no, no, I think he's completely fine with that.
 I think like in retrospect, it's a good story.
 He appreciates that.
 I don't think that's the problem,
 but it never made sense for me to broach the subject with him.
 Yeah.
 I just, it's funny just having interacted with Gary,
 now having talked to you.
 There is a little thing you still hate losing,
 no matter how beautiful like that moment is,
 because it's like, in a way it's a passing of the baton
 from like one great champion to another, right?
 But like you still just don't like the fact
 that you didn't play a good game from Gary's perspective.
 Like he's still just annoyed probably that
 he could have played better.
 And we did, so we did work together in 2009 quite a lot,
 and that corporation ended early 2010,
 but we did play a lot of training games in 2009,
 which was interesting because he was still very, very strong.
 And at that time it was fairly equal.
 Like he was playing me quite a bit, but I was fighting well.
 So it was pretty even then.
 So I mean, I appreciate those games a lot more
 than some random game from when I was 13.
 And maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about,
 but I've always found it, at least based on that game,
 you couldn't tell that I was gonna take his spot.
 Like I made a horrible blunder and lost to an Uzbek kid
 in the World Rapid Championship in 2018.
 And I mean, granted he was part of the team
 that now won gold in the Chess Olympia,
 but he wasn't the crucial part.
 He barely played any games.
 Like it wasn't like I would think
 that he would become world champion because he beat me.
 I'm always skeptical of those who said that they knew
 that I was gonna be world champion after that game
 or at all at that time.
 I mean, it was easy to see
 that I would become a very, very strong player.
 Everybody could see that, but to be the best in the world
 or one of the best ever.
 It's true.
 It is hard to say, but I do remember seeing Messi
 when he was 16 and 17.
 But hasn't that happened with other players though?
 Yeah, but I just had a personal experience.
 He did look different than, there's like magic there.
 Maybe you can't tell he would be one of the greatest ever,
 but there's still magic.
 But you're right, most of the time,
 we try to project, we see a young kid being an older person
 and you start to think, okay,
 this could be the next great person.
 Then we forget when they don't become that.
 Yeah, exactly.
 That's I think what happens.
 But when it does become-
 Or maybe some people are just so good
 at seeing these patterns that they can actually see.
 Aren't you supposed to do that kind of thing
 with fantasy football?
 Like see the long shot and bet on them
 and then they turn out to be good?
 That's the whole point.
 No, you make a lot of long shot bets
 and then some of them come good.
 And then people call you a genius for making the bet.
 Well, let me ask you the goat question again,
 from fantasy perspective.
 Can you make the case for the greatest chess player
 of all time for each, yourself, Magnus Carlsen,
 for Garry Kasparov, I don't know who else,
 Bobby Fischer, Mikhail Tal, anyone else?
 For Hikaru Nakamura, just kidding.
 Yeah, I think I can make a case for myself,
 for Garry and for Fischer.
 So I'll start with Fischer.
 For him, it's very, very simple.
 He was ahead of his time, but that's like intangible.
 You can say that about a lot of people.
 But he had a peak from 1970 to 72
 when he was so much better than the others.
 He won 20 games in a row.
 Also, the way that he played was so powerful
 and with so few mistakes
 that he just had no position there.
 So he had just a peak that's been better than anybody.
 The gap between first and second was the highest.
 The gap between him and others was greater
 than it's ever been in history at any other time.
 And that would be the argument for him.
 For Garry, he's played in a very competitive era
 and he's beaten several generations.
 He was the best, well, he was the consensus best player,
 I would say, for almost 20 years,
 which nobody else has done, at least in recent time.
 Longevity.
 The longevity, for sure.
 Also, at his peak, he was not quite the level of fissure
 in terms of the gap, but it was similar to,
 or I think even a little bit better than mine.
 As for me, I'm of course unbeaten as a world champion
 in five tries.
 I've been world number one for 11 years straight
 in an even more competitive era than Garry.
 I have the highest chess rating of all time.
 I have the longest streak ever without losing a game.
 I think for me, the main argument would be about the era
 where the engines have leveled the playing field so much
 that it's harder to dominate.
 And still, I haven't always been a clear number one,
 but I've been number one for 11 years.
 And for a lot of the time, the gap has been pretty big.
 So I think there are decent arguments for all of them.
 I've said before, and I haven't changed my mind,
 that Garry generally edges it because of the longevity
 in the competitive era, but there are arguments.
 But people also talk about you in terms of the style of play.
 So it's not just about dominance or the height,
 it's just the creative genius of it.
 Yeah, but I'm not interested in that.
 In terms of greatest of all time,
 I'm not interested in questions of style.
 So for Messi, you don't give credit for the style,
 for the stylistic.
 I like watching it.
 But you're not gonna give points for the...
 So Messi gets best ever because of the finishing.
 Yeah, it's the...
 No, it's not because of the finishing,
 it's because of his overall impact on the game.
 It's higher than anybody else's.
 Okay.
 He contributes.
 He just contributes more to winning than anybody else does.
 So you're somebody who is advocated for
 and has done quite a bit of study of classic games.
 What would you say is, I mean, maybe the number one
 or maybe top three games of chess ever played?
 It doesn't interest me at all.
 You don't think of those?
 No, I don't think of it.
 I mean, I try to, I find the games interesting.
 I try to learn from them,
 but trying to rank them has never interested me.
 What games pop out to you as super interesting then?
 Is there things like where ideas, like old school games,
 where there was interesting ideas that you go back,
 that you go back, or like you find surprising
 and pretty cool that those ideas were developed back then.
 Is there something that jumps to mind?
 Yeah, there are several games of young Kasparov,
 like before he became world champion.
 If you're gonna ask for like my favorite player
 or favorite style, that's probably...
 Young Kasparov.
 Young Kasparov.
 Can you describe, statistically or in any other way,
 what young Kasparov was like?
 That you like?
 It was just an overflow energy in his play.
 So aggressive attacking chess.
 Yeah, extremely aggressive dynamic chess.
 It probably appeals to me a lot
 because these are the things that I cannot do as well,
 that it just feels very special to me.
 But yeah, in terms of games,
 I never thought about that too much.
 Is there memories, big or small, weird, surprising,
 just any kind of beautiful anecdote from your chess career?
 Like stuff that pops out that people might not know about?
 Just stuff when you look back, it just makes you smile.
 No, so I'll tell you about the most satisfying
 tournament victory of my career.
 So that was the Norwegian Championship under 11 in 2000.
 Before that tournament, I was super anxious
 because I started like kind of late at chess.
 I played my first tournament when I was eight and a half
 and a lot of my competitors had already played
 for a couple of years or even three, four years
 at that point.
 And the first time, so I played the under 11 championship
 in 99, I was like a little over the middle of the pack.
 I'd never played against any of them before,
 so I didn't know what to expect at all.
 And then over the next year,
 I was like edging a little bit closer.
 In each tournament, I felt like I was getting
 a little bit better.
 And when we had the championship, I knew that I was ready,
 that I was now at the same level of the best players.
 I was so anxious to show it.
 I remember I was just, the feeling of excitement
 and nervousness before the tournament was incredible.
 The tournament was weird because I started
 out, I gave away a draw to a weaker player
 whom I shouldn't have drawn to.
 And then I drew against the other guy
 who was clearly like the best or second best.
 And at that point, I thought it was over
 because I thought he wouldn't give away points to others.
 And then the very next day, he lost to somebody.
 So the rest of the tournament, it was just like,
 I was always playing my game and watching his.
 And we both won the rest of our games,
 but it meant that I was half a point ahead.
 Like the feeling when I realized that I was gonna win,
 that was just so amazing.
 It was like the first time that I was the best at my age.
 And at that point-
 You were hooked.
 Yeah, at that point I realized, you know,
 I could actually be very good at this.
 So you kind of saw,
 where did you think your ceiling would be?
 Did you see that one day you could be the number one?
 No, I didn't think that was possible at all.
 But I thought I could be the best in Norway.
 The best in Norway.
 At that point.
 When did you first-
 Because like I started relatively late.
 Right.
 And also like,
 I knew that I studied a lot more than the others.
 I knew that I had a passion that they didn't have.
 They saw chess as something like,
 it was, you know, it was a hobby.
 It was like an activity.
 It was like, it was like going to football practice
 or any other sports.
 Like you go, you practice like once or twice a week,
 and then you play a tournament at the weekend.
 That's what you did.
 For me, it wasn't like that.
 Like I would go with my books and my board
 every day after school.
 And I would just constantly be trying to learn new things.
 I had like two hours of internet time
 on the computer each week,
 and I would always spend them on chess.
 Like, I think before I was 13 or 14,
 I'd never opened a browser for any other reason
 than to play chess.
 Would you describe that as love or as obsession
 or something in between?
 It's everything?
 Yeah, everything.
 But so, I mean, it wasn't hard for me to tell at that point
 that I had something that the other kids didn't
 because I was never the kind of person
 to grasp something very, very quickly.
 But once I started, I always got hooked
 and then I never stopped learning.
 What would you say, you've talked about the middle game
 as a place where you can play pure chess.
 What do you think is beautiful to you about chess?
 Like the thing when you were 11.
 What is beautiful to me is when your opponent
 can predict every single one of your moves
 and they still lose.
 So, I think that's the thing.
 You can predict every single one of your moves
 and they still lose.
 How does that happen?
 No, like it means that at some point early,
 your planning, your evaluation has been better.
 So that you play just very simply, very clearly.
 It looks like you did nothing special
 and your opponent lost without a chance.
 So how do you think about that, by the way?
 Are you basically narrowing down
 this gigantic tree of options
 to where your opponent has less and less and less options
 to win, to escape, and then they're trapped?
 Yeah, essentially.
 Is there some aspect to the patterns themselves,
 to the positions, to the elegance of like
 the dynamics of the game that you just find beautiful
 that doesn't, that where you forget about the opponent?
 General, I try and create harmony on the board.
 Like what I would usually find harmonious
 is that the pieces work together,
 that they protect each other,
 and that there are no pieces that are suboptimally placed.
 Or if they are suboptimally placed,
 they can be improved pretty easily.
 Like I hate when I have one piece that I know
 is badly placed and I cannot improve it.
 When you're thinking about the harmony of the pieces,
 when you're looking at the position,
 you're evaluating it,
 are you looking at the whole board?
 Or is it like a bunch of groupings of pieces overlapping?
 I would-
 And like dancing together kind of thing.
 I would say it's more of the latter
 that would be more precise that you look.
 I mean, I look mostly closer to the middle,
 but then I would focus on one,
 like there are usually like one grouping of pieces on one side
 and then some more closer to the other side.
 So I would think of it a little bit that way.
 So, and everything is kind of gravitating to the middle.
 If it's going well, then yes.
 And in harmony.
 Yeah, in harmony.
 Or like if you can control the middle,
 you can more easily attack on both sides.
 That applies to pretty much any game.
 It's as simple as that.
 And like attacking on one side
 without control of the middle
 would feel very non-harmonious for me.
 Like I talked about the 10th game
 in the world championship.
 That's the time I was the most nervous.
 And it was because it was the kind of attack that I hate
 where you just have to, you're abandoned one side
 and you, the attack has to work.
 There was one side and part of the middle as well,
 which I didn't control at all.
 And that's like the opposite of harmony for me.
 What advice would you give to chess players
 of different levels, how to improve in chess?
 Very beginner, complete beginner.
 I mean, at every level, is there something you can say?
 It's very hard for me to say.
 Because I mean, the easiest way is like love chess,
 be obsessed.
 Well, that's a really important statement.
 But that doesn't work for everybody.
 So I feel like-
 Sometimes it can feel like a grind.
 So you're saying the less it can feel like a grind,
 the better, the better.
 Yeah, for sure.
 At least for you.
 That's for sure.
 But I'm also very, very skeptical about giving advice
 because I think, again, my way only works
 if you have some combination of talent and obsession.
 So I'm not sure that I'd generally recommend it.
 Like what I've done doesn't go with
 what most coaches suggest for their kids.
 I've been lucky that I've had coaches from early on
 that have been very, very hands-off
 and just allowed me to do my thing, basically.
 Well, there's a lot to be said about
 cultivating the obsession.
 Like really, really letting that flourish
 to where you spend a lot of hours,
 like with the chessboard in your head,
 and it doesn't feel like a struggle.
 No, so like just letting me do my thing.
 Like if you give me a bunch of work,
 it will probably feel like a sure.
 And if you don't give me, I will spend all of that time
 on my own without thinking that it's work
 or without thought that I'm doing this thing.
 I'm doing this to improve my chess.
 Well, in terms of learning stuff like books,
 there's one thing that's relatively novel
 from your perspective.
 People are starting now, is there's YouTube.
 There's a lot of good YouTubers.
 You're a part-time YouTuber.
 You have stuff on YouTube, I guess.
 Yeah, but if you've seen my YouTube, it's mostly live.
 It's very, it's carefree.
 It's not high effort content.
 Yeah, but do you like any particular YouTubers?
 I could just recommend like stuff I've seen.
 So I've got Matter, Gotham Chess, both is live.
 I really like St. Louis Chess Club,
 Daniel Narodzicki and John Bartholomew.
 Those are good channels,
 but is there something you can recommend?
 No, all of them are good.
 You know, the best recommendation I could give
 is I got Matter, purely.
 How much did he pay you to say that?
 No, so the thing about that is that I haven't really,
 I have, so I can tell you I've never watched any
 of his videos from start to finish.
 I'm not like, I'm not the target audience, obviously.
 But I think the only chess YouTube video
 that my dad has ever watched from start to finish
 is I got Matter.
 And he said, like, I watched one of his videos.
 I wanted to know what it was all about
 because I think I got Matter is like the same strength
 as my father, maybe just a little bit weaker,
 like 1900 or something.
 My father is probably about 2000.
 And my father has played chess his whole life.
 He loves, he absolutely loves the game.
 It was like, that's the only time he's actually sat through
 one of those videos.
 And he said like, yeah, I get it.
 I enjoy it.
 So that's the best recommendation I could give.
 That's the only channel that my father actually enjoys.
 This is hilarious.
 I talked to him before this to ask him
 if he has any questions for you.
 And he said, no, just do your thing.
 You know what you're doing.
 No, he's so careful.
 He wouldn't do that.
 He did mention jokingly about Evans Gambit, I think.
 Is that a thing?
 Evans Gambit is some weird thing he made up.
 It might be an inside joke.
 I don't know, but he asked me to, well, anyway.
 Yeah, I didn't even get the...
 It's something he made up.
 I didn't even realize that he plays the Evans Gambit.
 Like he plays a lot of Gambits that are...
 Wait, Evans Gambit is a thing?
 Yeah, yeah, that's a thing.
 Like that's an old opening from the 1800s.
 Captain Evans apparently invented it.
 Why would he mention that particular one?
 Yeah, I don't know.
 Is there something hilarious about that one?
 I don't know.
 I don't think I've ever faced the Evans Gambit in a game.
 I feel like both of you are trolling me right now.
 I mean, he's played a lot of other Gambits.
 Maybe this is the one he wanted to mention.
 So maybe this is called the Evans Gambit as well,
 but I just know it as like the 2G4 Gambit.
 Maybe this is the one.
 Like this one he has played a bunch.
 And he's been telling me a lot about his games in this line.
 It's like, oh, it's not so bad.
 And I'm like, yeah, but you're a pawn down.
 But I can sort of see it.
 I can sort of understand it.
 And he's like, he's proud of the fact
 that nobody told him to play this line or anything.
 He came up with it himself.
 And there's this, I'll tell you another story about my father.
 So there's this line that I call the Henry Carlson line.
 So at some point, he never knew a lot of openings in chess,
 but I taught him a couple of openings as black.
 It's the Sveshnikov Sicilian that I played a lot myself.
 Also during the World Championship in 2018,
 I won a bunch of games in 2019 as well.
 So that's one opening.
 And I also taught him as black to play the Rogozin defense.
 And then, so the Rogozin defense goes like this.
 It's characterized by this bishop move.
 And so he would play those openings pretty exclusively
 as black in the tournaments that he did play.
 And also the Sveshnikov Sicilian is like,
 that's the only two of my sisters have played
 a bunch of chess tournaments as well.
 And that's the only opening they know as well.
 So my family's portrait is very narrow.
 So this is the system.
 Black goes here and then we're off and white takes the pawn
 and black takes the pawn.
 So at some point I was watching one of my father's
 online blitz game.
 And as white, he played this.
 So this is called the Karakhan defense.
 He took the pawn,
 it was taken back and then he went with the knight.
 His opponent went here and then he played the bishop here.
 So I'd never seen this opening before.
 And I was like, wow, how on earth did he come up with that?
 And he said, no, I just played the Rogozin
 with the different colors, because if the knight was here,
 it would be the same position.
 I was like, how am I one of the best 20 players in the world?
 And I've never thought about that.
 So I actually started playing this line as white
 with pretty decent results.
 And it actually became kind of popular.
 And everybody who asked about the line,
 I would always tell them,
 yeah, that's the Henry Carlson navigation.
 I wouldn't necessarily explain why it was called that.
 I would just always call it that.
 So I really hope at some point,
 this line will find its rightful name.
 Yeah, it finds its way into the history books.
 What did you learn about life from your dad?
 What role has your dad played in your life?
 He's taught me a lot of things, but most of all,
 as long as you win a chess, then everything else is fine.
 Everything else is fine.
 I think my, especially my father,
 but my parents in general,
 they always wanted me to get a good education
 and find a job and so on.
 Even though my father loves chess
 and he wanted me to play chess,
 I don't think he had any plans for me to be professional.
 I think things changed at some point.
 I was less and less interested in school
 and for a long time, we were kind of going back and forth
 fighting about that, especially my father,
 but also my mother a little bit.
 It was at times a little bit difficult.
 They wanted you to go to school.
 Yeah, they sort of wanted me to do more school,
 to have more options.
 And then I think at some point, they just gave up.
 But I think that sort of coincided
 when I was actually starting to make real money
 of tournaments and after that,
 everything's been sort of easy.
 And in terms of the family,
 they've never put any pressure on me
 or they've never put any demands on me.
 They're just, yeah, minus has to focus on chess.
 That's it.
 I think they taught me that,
 that's it, I think they taught me in general
 to be curious about the world and to get
 a decent general education, not necessarily from school,
 but just knowing about the world around you
 and knowing history and being interested in society.
 I think in that sense, they've done well.
 And he's been with you throughout your chess career.
 I mean, there's something to be said about just family
 support and love that you have.
 This world is a lonely place.
 It's good to have people around you
 that are like, they've got your back kind of.
 Yeah, it's a cliche, but I think to some extent,
 all the people you surround yourself with,
 they can help you a lot.
 It's only family that only has their own interests at heart.
 And so for that reason, my father is the only one
 that's been constantly in the team
 and that he's always been around.
 And it's for that reason that I know he has my back
 no matter what.
 Now, there's a cliche question here.
 Let's try to actually get to some deep truth, perhaps.
 But people who don't know much about chess
 seem to like to use chess as a metaphor for everything in life.
 But there is some aspect to the decision-making,
 to the kind of reasoning involved in chess
 that's transferable to other things.
 Can you speak to that in your own life and in general?
 The kind of reasoning involved with chess,
 how much does that transfer to life out there?
 It just helps to make decisions.
 Of all kinds.
 Yeah, that would be my main takeaway,
 that you learn to make informed guesses
 in a limited amount of time.
 I mean, does it frustrate you when you have
 geopolitical thinkers and leaders?
 Henry Kissinger will often talk about
 geopolitics as a game of chess or 3D chess.
 Is that too oversimplified of a projection?
 Or do you think that the kind of deliberations
 you have on the world stage is similar
 to the kind of decision-making you have on the chessboard?
 Well, I'm never trying to get re-elected
 when I play a game of chess.
 There's no special interest you have to get happy.
 Yeah, that kind of helps.
 No, I can understand that.
 Obviously, for every action, there's a reaction,
 and you have to calculate.
 Far ahead, it probably would be a good thing
 if more big players on the international scene
 thought a little bit more like a chess player in that sense,
 like trying to make a good decision
 based on a limited amount of data,
 rather than thinking about other factors.
 But it's so tough.
 But it does annoy me when people make moves
 that they know are wrong for different reasons.
 And they should know.
 If they did some calculation, they should know they're wrong.
 Yeah, exactly. They should know they're wrong.
 So much politics is like...
 You're often asked to do something
 when it would be much better to do nothing.
 No, but that happens in chess all the time.
 You have a choice.
 I often tell people that in certain situations,
 you should not try and win.
 You should just let your opponent lose.
 And that happens in politics all the time.
 But yeah, just let your opponents
 continue whatever they're doing, and then you'll win.
 Don't try to do something just to do something.
 Often, they say in chess that having a bad plan
 is better than having no plan.
 It's absolute nonsense.
 I forget what General said, but it was like,
 don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake.
 Also, Petrosyan, the former world champion, said,
 when your opponent wants to play Dutch defense, don't stop them.
 I mean, chess players will know that it's the same thing.
 Actually, this reminds me.
 Is there something you found really impressive about Queen's Gambit, the TV show?
 That's one of the things that really captivated the public imagination about chess.
 People who don't play chess became very curious about the game,
 about the beauty of the game, the drama of the game, all that kind of stuff.
 Is there, in terms of accuracy, in terms of the actual games played,
 that you found impressive?
 First of all, they did the chess well.
 They did it accurately.
 And also, they found actual games and positions that I'd never seen before.
 It really captivated me.
 I would not follow the story at times.
 I was just trying to, wow, where the hell did I find that game?
 I was trying to solve the positions.
 So, Beth Harmon, the main character, were you impressed by the play she was doing?
 Was there a particular style that they developed consistently?
 At the end, she was just totally universal.
 At the start, she was probably a bit too aggressive, but no, she was absolutely universal.
 Wait, what adjective are you using?
 Universal in the sense that she could play in any style.
 Oh, interesting. And was dominant in that way.
 Wow, so there was a development in the style, too, throughout the show.
 Yeah, for sure.
 It's really interesting they did that.
 Yeah. And it actually happened with me a bit, as well.
 I started out really aggressive.
 Then I became probably too technical at some point, taking a little bit too few risks,
 and not playing dynamic enough.
 And then I started to get a little bit better at dynamics,
 so that now I would say definitely the most universal player in terms of style.
 Are there any skills in chess that are transferable to poker?
 So, as you're playing around poker a little bit now,
 how fundamentally different of a game is it?
 What I find the most transferable probably is not letting past decisions dictate future thinking.
 Yeah. But in terms of the patterns in the betting strategies and all that kind of stuff,
 what about bluffing?
 I bluff way too much.
 It does seem you enjoy bluffing, and Daniel Negreanu was saying you're quite good at it.
 But yeah, it has very little material to go by.
 Sample size is small.
 Yeah. No, I mean, I enjoy bluffing for the more of the gambling aspects, the thrill of...
 So not the technical aspect of the bluffing like you would on the chessboard?
 Not bluffing in the same sense, but there is some element.
 But I do enjoy it on the chessboard.
 If I know that, like, oh, I successfully scared away my opponent from making the best move,
 that's of course satisfying.
 In that same way, it might be satisfying in poker, right?
 That you represent something, you scare away your opponent in the same kind of way.
 Yeah. And also, like, you tell a story, you try and tell a story, and then they believe it.
 Yeah. Tell a story with your betting, with all the different other cues.
 Do you like the money aspect, the betting strategies?
 So it's almost like another layer on top of it, right?
 It's the uncertainty in the cards, but the betting, there's so much freedom to the betting.
 I'm not very good at that, so I cannot say that I understand it completely.
 You know, when it comes to different sizing and all that, I just haven't studied it enough.
 How much of luck is part of poker, would you say, from what you've seen versus skill?
 I mean, it's so different in the sense that you can be one of the best players in the world
 and lose two, three years in a row without that being like a massive outlier.
 Okay, the thing that more than one person told me that you're very good at is trash talking.
 I don't think I am.
 A lot of people who make those observations about me, I think they just expect very, very little.
 So they expect from the best chess player in the world, anything that's non-robotic is interesting.
 Also, when it comes to trash talking, I have the biggest advantage in the world that I'm the best at what I'm doing.
 So trash talking becomes very, very easy because I can back it up.
 Yeah, but a lot of people that are extremely good at stuff don't trash talk and they're not good at it.
 I don't think I'm very good at it.
 It's just that I can back it up, which makes it seem that I'm better.
 And also, being non-robotic or not completely robotic helps.
 Yeah, you're not trash talking. You're just stating facts. That's right.
 Have you ever considered that there will be trash talking over the chessboard in some of the big tournaments?
 Like adding that kind of component or even talking, you know?
 Would that completely distract from the game of chess?
 No, I think it could be funny.
 When people play off-fant games, when they play blitz games, people trash talk all the time.
 It's a normal part of the game.
 So you emphasize fun a lot.
 Do you think we're living inside of a simulation that is trying to maximize fun?
 But that's only happened for the last 100 years or so.
 Fun has always been increasing, I think.
 Yeah, okay. It's always been increasing, but I feel like it's been increasing exponentially.
 Or at least the importance of fun.
 But I guess it depends on the society as well.
 In the West, we've had such a Christian influence.
 I mean, Christianity hasn't exactly embraced the concept of fun over time.
 Well, actually, to push back, I think forbidding certain things kind of makes them more fun.
 So sometimes I think you need to say, you're not allowed to do this.
 And then a lot of people start doing it and then they have fun doing that.
 Because it's like doing a thing in the face of the resistance of the thing.
 So whenever there's resistance, that does somehow make it more fun.
 Oppressive regimes have always been kind of good for comedy, no?
 Yes.
 Supposedly, like in the Soviet Union, I don't know about fun, but supposedly comedy, at least underground, it thrived.
 Yeah, there's a... Well, no, it permeates the entire culture.
 There's a dark humor that sort of the cruelty, the absurdity of life really brings out the humor amongst the populace, plus vodka on top of that.
 But this idea that, for example, Elon Musk has that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.
 That it seems like the most absurd, silly, funny thing seems to be the thing.
 So it happens more often than it should.
 And it somehow becomes viral in our modern connected world.
 And so the fun stuff, the memes spread.
 And then we start to optimize for the fun meme that seems to be a fundamental property of the reality we live in.
 And so emerges the fun maximizer in all walks of life.
 Like in chess, in poker and everything.
 I think...
 You're skeptical.
 No, I'm not skeptical.
 I'm just taking it all in.
 But I find it interesting and not at all impossible.
 Do you ever get lonely?
 Oh, yeah, for sure.
 Like a chess player's life is, by definition, pretty lonely.
 Because you have nobody else to blame but yourself when you lose.
 Or you don't achieve the results that you want to achieve.
 It's difficult for you to find comfort elsewhere.
 It's in your own mind.
 Yeah.
 It's you versus yourself, really.
 Yeah, really.
 But it's part of the profession.
 But I think any sport or activity where it's just you and your own mind is just, by definition, lonely.
 Are you worried that it destroys you?
 Oh, not at all.
 As long as I'm aware of it, then it's fine.
 And I don't think the inherent loneliness of my profession really affects the rest of my life in a major way.
 What role does love play in the human condition in your lonely life of calculation?
 You know, I'm like everybody else.
 Trying to find love?
 No, not necessarily like trying to find love.
 Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not.
 I'm just trying to find my way.
 And my love for the game, obviously it comes and goes a little bit, but there's always at least some level of love.
 So that doesn't go away.
 But I think in other parts of life, I think it's just about doing things that make you happy, that give you joy.
 That also makes you more receptive to love in general.
 So that has been my approach to love now for quite a while, that I'm just trying to live my best life and then the love will come when it comes.
 And in terms of romantic love, it has come and gone in my life.
 It's not there now.
 But I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about, you know, not worried, but more like trying to just be a good version of myself.
 I cannot always be the best version of myself, but at least try to be good.
 Yeah, and keep your heart open.
 What is this Daniel Johnson song?
 True love will find you in the end.
 It may or may not.
 But it will only find you if you're looking.
 So you have to be open to it.
 It may or may not.
 And no matter what, you're going to lose it in the end because the whole thing ends.
 Yeah, I don't think stressing over that.
 Obviously, it's so human that you can't help it to some degree.
 But I feel like stressing over love, that's the blueprint for whether you're looking or you're not looking or you're in a relationship or married or anything like stressing over it is like the blueprint for being unhappy.
 Just to clarify confusion, I have just a quick question.
 How does the night move?
 So the night moves in an L and unlike in Shogi, it can move both forwards and backwards.
 It is quite a nimble piece.
 It can jump over everything, but it's less happy in open position where it has to move from side to side quickly.
 I am generally more of a bishop's guy myself for the old debate.
 I just prefer quality over the intangibles.
 But I can appreciate a good night once in a while.
 Last simple question.
 What's the meaning of life, Magnus Carlsen?
 There is obviously no meaning to life.
 Is that obvious?
 I think we're here by accident.
 There's no meaning.
 It ends at some point, but it's still a great thing.
 So you can still have fun even if there's no meaning.
 You can still have fun. You can try and pursue your goals, whatever they may be.
 But I'm pretty sure there's no special meaning.
 And trying to find it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
 For me, life is both meaningless and meaningful for just being here.
 Trying to make not necessarily the most of it, but the things that make you happy both short term and long term.
 Yeah, it seems to be full of cool stuff to enjoy.
 It certainly does.
 And one of those is having a conversation with you, Magnus.
 It's a huge honor to talk to you.
 Thank you so much for spending this time with me.
 I can't wait to see what you do in this world.
 And thank you for creating so much elegance and beauty on the chessboard and beyond.
 So thanks for talking today, brother.
 Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
 And I wanted to say this at the start, but I never really got the chance.
 I was always a bit apprehensive about doing this podcast because you are a very smart guy and your audience is very smart.
 And I always had a bit of imposter syndrome.
 So I'll tell you this now after the podcast.
 So please do judge me, but I hope you've enjoyed it.
 I loved it. You're a brilliant man.
 And I love the fact that you have imposter syndrome because a lot of us do.
 And so that's beautiful to see even at the very top.
 You still feel like an imposter.
 Thank you, brother. Thanks for talking to them.
 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Magnus Carlsen.
 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
 And now let me leave you with some words from Bobby Fisher.
 Chess is a war over the board.
 The object is to crush the opponent's mind.
 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.