Magnus Carlsen: Greatest Chess Player of All Time | Lex Fridman Podcast #315

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, 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, for his all round game. And frankly, like my Real Madrid fandom sort of predates the Ronaldo era. Era, the second Ronaldo, not the first one. So I always liked Ronaldo, but I always kind of thought that Messi was, 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, it was very important, but it wasn't, wasn't that huge to, to me.

So Messi over Maradona.

Yeah, but it's, I think it just like with chess, it's hard to compare eras. Obviously the improvements in football have been like in, in technique and such have been even greater than they have been in, in, in chess. But it's, it's always, it's always a weird, 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 Mardona'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, pretty overrated, seeing us 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. At least some luck. So I do appreciate the statistics a bit. And all the statistics say that Messi is 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 rare. It's just like the Olympics. You. 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, you don't admire the magic of that?

No, I, I do. I just think that, like, rising and through pressure and breaking under. Under the pressure is often a really oversimplified, like, take on. On what's. On what's happening.

We, yeah, we do romanticize the game.

Yeah.

Well, let me ask you another ridiculous question. Another. You're also a fan of basketball.

Yes.

Let me ask the goat question. Do you. I, you know, I'm biased because I went to high school in Chicago, you know, Chicago Bulls, during the. The Michael Jordan era. Let me ask the. The Jordan versus LeBron James question. Let's. 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. Oh, depending on my mood and depending who on whom I talk to, I pick one of one of the two, and then I try to argue for.

The quantum mechanical thing. Well, can you. What, again, what, 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.

No, that, I mean, that's the whole, that's the whole debate.

Yes. So it's, well, it's quantifiable versus unquantifiable.

Yeah.

What's more important? And you're depending on mood all over the place. But what do you lean in general with these, 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 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, to the, to the final in 2014 and punish him because they lost to a great team very narrowly after they missed. He set up like a great chance for Egwene in the first half, which he, which he fluffed and then, yeah, eventually they lost the game.

Yeah, they, 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 relocating or maybe once a season or every season you get random.

But let's say every, every player, if, let's say they sign a five year contract for a team like one of them, you're going to get randomly allocated to, to let's say a bottom half team.

I bet you there's going to be so much corruption around that obviously it.

Wouldn'T, wouldn't ever happen or work, but I think it's. You never know 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 intu. 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 and in my career in 2014, well, 2013, 2014, and also in 2019. And in those years, I was very different in terms of my strength, 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. 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, there are things that I understand now that I didn't understand back then, but that's not only for me, that's for, 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 didn't, I couldn't, couldn't beat people in the, 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. That's been a blind spot for me. First of all, I found it hard to concentrate on them and to look. To look deep enough.

So this is like a puzzle, a position mate in X. I mean, one.

Thing is mate, 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.

Like, 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 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 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 have 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, because 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? In a big picture way?

Yeah, you calculate a few moves ahead and then you Evaluate. Because a lot. A lot of the times you cannot. The branches become so big that you cannot calculate everything, so you have to fog. Yeah. So you have to make evaluations based on, you know, 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 that? 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 force 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 a deep calculating ability, because 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 visualize the board. I mean, the board is, in my head, two dimensional. My interpretation is that it is to two dimensional.

Like, what colors? Is. Is it brown 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.

Yeah, there. There aren't a lot of colors. It's. It's mostly.

So what is it? Queen's Gambit, ceiling, whatever.

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 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, I got that. I understand. There's some good there, there's some bad there. Now let me go down another branch. How do you store away the information? You 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, 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 just running into the wall over and over?

Yeah, I'm trying to find something that isn't there. I think 10 to 15 minutes things 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 minute think you have a pretty good idea what to do. What to do. I mean it's, it's very rare that I would think for half an hour and I would have a eureka moment during the game. Like 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 like 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 creativity and evaluation. So endgame, it's easier in that sense.

Well, you're good at every aspect of chess, but also your endgame 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 and 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 and they can check a so called table base and it just going to spit out win for white, win for black or a draw. And also I knew that I 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 endgames 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 strength 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 endgames. Yeah, but also there are these theoretical endgames with very few pieces, like rook knights and two pawns versus queens. But a lot of endgames 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 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 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 lead 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, as I said, 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. 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 would 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. 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, you know, 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 a thing 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, very different way. So, short answer is, these days, it's all about surprising your opponent and taking it into position where have more. 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. You have to, because the best moves have been analyzed to. To death, mostly.

So that's a kind of. When you say semi bluff, that's a kind of sacrifice. You're. You're sacrificing the optimal move, the optimal position, so that you can take the Opponent, I mean, that's a game theoretics 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 going to 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 know, 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 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, 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, to sort of think as a human.

I was chatting with Demis Asaba, CEO of DeepMind a couple 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 what was going on in your mind and heart?

Funny thing about Demis is 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 against computers much anyway, so that's completely fine. But it was amazing to see how they thought about chess in such a different way and in a way that you could mistake for creativity, mistake for strong words.

Is it wild to you how many sacrifices it's willing to make that 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. 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 or especially two knights, depends on the position, but on average, they are. So 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. It's hard to understand, and it's. 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. Of sacrificing pieces.

So Demis also made a comment that was interesting to my noob 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, 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 noob 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 makes a lot of fun.

You, you think power is more fun than like, variety?

No, There is variety in chess as.

Well, though, but not much more so than like, like.

No, no, no, no. That's for.

It's like night. I mean, they all move in different ways. They're all like, 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, equally strong with such different qualities.

Yeah. It's crazy that this, you know, like when you design computer games, it's. It's like an art form. It's science and an art to. To balance it. You know, 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 just wouldn't last if it was designed poorly.

Yeah. And I think the. The rules have changed over time a little, 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 nine hundred sixties.

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.

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, 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 that 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, I think Fischer chess is, is good that it, 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 960 different options, and what fraction of that creates interesting games at the highest level? And this is something that a lot of people are curious about, because when you challenge a great chess player like yourself to, to look at a random starting position, that feels like it pushes you to play pure chess versus memorizing lines.

Yeah, for sure. Or for sure. But that's, that's the whole idea. Yeah, that's what you want.

And how hard is it to play? I mean, can you talk about what, what it feels like to you to play with a random starting position? Is there some, like, 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. No, 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, chess, 960, because then you really need, 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. Some of the positions obviously are A lot more interesting than the others in some of them. It appears that if you don't play symmetrically at the start, then you're probably going to be in a pretty bad position.

What do you mean? With the pawns.

With the pawns, yeah. That's the thing about chess though. So let's say white opens with E4, which is, 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 with E5. And then there's the Ruy Lopez, 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 get more decisive, 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.

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 is just a little bit too easy, it's a little bit too dryish. And I guess if you analyzed a lot in chess, 960, then a lot of the position would end up being pretty drawish as well because the random.

Starting points are 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, for, for sure.

It seems like a, I think 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, with, with the kings that it's going to make the game a bit slower at the start. But I feel like eventually it's going to, it's going to make the more games more, well, less dry for, 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 that pawns can.

Or excuses could commit suicide or.

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 checkmates for white. Like this for instance. Or there are several ways. But like this would be, would be.

Oh, cool for people who are just listening. Yeah. Basically you bring in a knight close to the, the whole. The, the king, the queen and so on, and you replace the knight with a queen. Yeah, that's interesting. So you have like a front of pieces and then you just replace them with the second piece.

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 the draw, and then equal if I, if I draw. If your opponent is 200 points lower rated, you're expected to score 75% and, 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.

Yeah, and my rating is obviously carried through thousands of of games. Right now My rating is 2861, which is decent. Like I think that pretty much corresponds to, to the level I have at, 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 necessarily like selecting tournaments and so on, but like just optimizing in terms of, of preparation, like making sure I'm, I'm. I never have any bad days.

And you say you basically can't lose.

Yeah, I basically can't fuck up ever, if I want to. If. If I want to reach that goal. And so I. 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 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 fear 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, you know, it's not gonna last forever. So every. Every little win, I. I appreciate, Appreciate a lot more now. And yeah, in terms of fear of losing, like, that's a huge reason why I'm not gonna play the World Championship, because it really didn't give me. Giving 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 a match, but, like, every single position? Like, no, it's just 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. Then I'm focused on.

Got it.

Then I'm focused on the game, and I know that I can play the game. It's a time in between 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 a loser. If I don't win a random tournament that I play, then I'm. Usually, it depends on a tournament. I might be disappointed for sure, Might even be pretty pissed. But ultimately, you know, 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.

Yeah.

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 going to have to, at least for a couple of years, carry the. 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, like mixed martial arts, are a little better with losing. It's understood. Like, everybody loses, but there's not everybody, though. Not everybody. Not everybody. Not everybody. Yes. Khabib entered the chat. But in boxing, there is, like, that extra pressure of, like, maintaining the championship. I mean, maybe you could say the same thing about the. The UFC as well. So for you personally, for a person who loves chess, the first time you won the World Championship, that was. That was the biggest. 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. Compared to the others. So the only world championship after that that I really enjoyed was the one in 2018 against the American, Fabiano Carrana. 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. During the match I'd lost the game, he would have been ranked as number one in world. Like, our ratings were so close that for each draw, they didn't move. And.

And the game itself was close.

Yeah, the game themselves were very close. I. I had a winning position in. 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. They were all drawn, but I felt like all the way that this is an interesting match against an. An opponent who is at this position at this point equal to me. And so losing that would not have been disaster, because in all the other matches, I would know that I would have lost against somebody who I know I'm much better than, and that would be. Would be a lot harder for me to. To take.

Well, that's fascinating and beautiful that the stress isn't from losing this because you have fun, you enjoy playing against somebody who's as good as you, may be better than you. That's exciting to you? Yeah, it's, it's, 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 drawing 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, you know, 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 FIDE change about the World Championship that will 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, 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 going to have a world champion and call them the best players, best player, you got to make sure that the format increases the chance of finding the best players. So I think having more games and if you're going to have a lot more games than you need to, 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, more games and less time.

So you want to see more games and rules that emphasize pure chess.

Yeah, but already less time. Emphasize. Emphasizes pure, pure chess. Because defensive techniques are much harder to execute with with little time.

What do you think? Is there a sweet spot in terms of. Are we talking about blitz? Is it how many?

Blitz is a bit too fast. Yeah. To their credit, this was suggested by FIDA 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. 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 want to 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, would you say, like, if it's faster games, you probably be able to get a sample size of like over 20 games? 20, 30, 40. You think there's a number that's good over a long period of time?

Well, I would prefer as many as possible.

Like 100.

Yeah, but let's say you play 12 days, two games a day, you know, 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 three days as well. So I don't think that will be, 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. Yeah, I think is also good.

Let me ask you a fun question. If Hikaru Nakamura was one of the two people. What? I guess I apologize.

Yeah. He could have, he could have finished second.

Yeah.

So he lost the last round of the candidates.

Yeah. And you maybe can explain to me Internet speak Copium is something you tweeted.

Yeah.

But if he, if he got second, would you, would you, would you just despite him, still, still play the World Championship? That's Internet question. And when the Internet asks I must abide, the dude abides.

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, the last match. What happened was that right before the World Championship match, there was this young player, Alrea Safirrusa. 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 they 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?

Yeah, I like that. I like that. A lot. I love the idea of. Of playing him in the next World Championship. And originally I just. 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, like, sort of motivate myself a little bit, maybe motivate him also, obviously, I wanted to give people and people a heads up for the candidates that you might be playing for more than. More than first place. Like, normally the candidates is. It's first place or bust. It's like the World Championship.

Yeah.

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, none of the players, which may or may not have been true. And then, yeah, he lost. He lost the last game and he didn't. Didn't qualify. But to answer the question, no, I'd already, at that point decided that I wouldn't. Wouldn't play. I would have liked it less if he had. If he had not lost the last round.

But the decision was.

But the decision was already. 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 doesn't seem to bring out the best kind of chess. It doesn't bring out the best out of you in 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. They changed the format. I liked it better. I just decided it could be interesting. Let's try and get this. There really wasn't more than, more than that to it. It wasn't like, fulfill fulfilling lifelong dream or anything. I just thought, you know, let's. Let's play.

So it's just a cool tournament?

Yeah, it's a cool tournament. It's a good challenge. You know, why not? It's. It's something that could be a motivation. It motivated me to get in the, 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, lot of joy as well. So I'm very, very happy that I. That I did that. But I never had any thoughts that I'm going to keep the title for, 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 seeded 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. 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 chest strength.

What are the strength 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 lack a little bit of. Little bit of depth. Like his. In short lines. He's an absolute calculation monster. He's extremely. He's extremely quick, but he can sometimes lack a bit of depth. Also recently, he's improved his openings quite a bit. So now he. He has a lot of. 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. In chess, I would, I would say.

What do you mean by imbalances?

Imbalances like bishop, bishops against knights and material imbalances.

He can take advantage of those.

Yes, I would say he's very, very good at that and understanding the, you know, 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 Deng has an edge in the, in the championship?

I feel like individual past results hasn't necessarily been a great indicator of World Championship results. I feel like over overall chess strength is more, more important. I mean, to be fair, I only think like 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 you know, like if you do a much larger sample size that you'll get the better of Nepo?

No, no. Large, larger sample size is always good for me. So World Championship, it's a great parallel to, 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.

That's generally for, for big. For championships or in general.

Yeah, for, for championships like they generally, 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, our match. If I hadn't won Game 6, 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, which. Well, 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 Karjakin, 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 to you about that match. But first. So Sergey Karjakin 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. Ukraine. When you look at the Cold War and some of the US versus Russian games of the past, does 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?

Yeah, I think it still does. So the President of the World Chess Federation who was just re elected is a Russian. 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, a factor. And I mean I can answer for in the Karjakin case, like I don't have a strong opinion on, on whether he should have been banned or not. Obviously I don't agree with anything that he, 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. Yeah, we really don't know about the long term conflicts and a lot of people try to do the right, the right thing in this sense, which I don't really blame at all. It's just that, it's just that we don't know. And I guess sometimes there are other ways you want to try and 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 camaraderie. Like, at the end of the day, there's a thing that unites you, which. 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. Every match that's been, you would briefly discuss the game with your opponent after. After the game, no matter how much you hate each other. And I. I think that's lovely. And Kasparov, I mean, he was quoted like one. Somebody in his team asked him, like, why. Why are you talking to Karpov after the game? Like, he. 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. In other areas as well, that you can. Regardless of what happens, you can have. You can have a good chat about the game. You can. You can just talk about the ideas with people who, who understand what you. 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 it's a high stakes game. How nervous do you get? How much anxiety do you have? And all that calculation, 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. I have been at times, I think the most nervous I ever been with game 10 of the World Championship in 2018, I know 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. That was fine. I thought I was gonna win. Then at some point, I realized that it's not so clear. And then 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 fair little time, but I had even less. And I just remember. I cannot 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 peter out and 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. Of losing when I. When I play because I trust. I trust my instincts, I trust my. 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 are 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 you don't for each round, you don't know who you're playing.

That's an interesting question. You know, like, there's these videos where people eat McDonald's or Burger King or Diet Coke versus Diet Pepsi. Would people be able to tell they're playing you, like, 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.

One game? Very unlikely.

What. What sample size would you need to tell accurately? I feel like it's a science.

Yeah. I think 20 games would help a lot per person. Yeah. But I know that they've already developed AI bots that are pretty good at recognizing somebody's style.

Okay.

Which is. 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.

Yeah.

Line calculations, all that kind of stuff.

No, but really, all the best chess players there are Basically just two camps. People who are good at long, longer lines or. Or shorter lines. It's the hair and the tortoise, basically. And sometimes, you know, 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 in the middle game and the end game.

Yeah. And also I can. I. I can think to some extent, both rapidly and deeply, which a lot of people, they can't do both. But I mean, to. 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, if it's. Mostly if it's. 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. My advantage. If I sense that my opponent is apprehensive, if I sense that they are not going to necessarily take all their chances, it just means that I can take more risk. And I always try and 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 Karjakin 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 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 8, I was probably ready to take a little bit more risks than I. I had before, which I guess was insane, because I knew that he wouldn'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. Yeah, I knew that I was better. I knew that I just needed to win one game and then the match is over. Yeah, that's what happened in 2021 as well. Like when I won the first game against Nepo, I knew that the match was over. Unless I, like, fuck up royally, then he's not going to 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.

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 going to set up my pieces this way. You can set them up however you want. And then later, where sort of the armies are going to meet. I'm not going to 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. 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, like.

Yeah, mentally.

What happened? Do you keep.

I realized that, I mean, all the time, 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, like, face transition in your mind? No, it was one thing, or it.

Was just a position on the board, like, realizing, like, there was one particular move he played that I missed. And then, like, then I realized this could potentially not go my way. So then I made another couple of mistakes. And he, to his credit, like, once he realized he had the chance, he was like, 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. After a chess game, I realized that I'm probably going to 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, like, 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, I. After game eight, I just, I got drunk with my team.

And that's not a standard procedure.

No, no, that's, that's the only time that's happened in, 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 almost lost as well. Then only game ten. Game ten, 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 the draw. And then the old, all the negativity came back. I was thinking during the game, like, how I'm going to play for a win with black in the next game. What am I doing? And then eventually it ended. Well, he 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. 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, gonna play like this, if I'm gonna do things that I know are wrong, then, you know, I might as well quit. No, that's happened. That's happened a bunch of times. And I definitely gotten a bit more carefree about losing these days, which is not necessarily a good thing. My hatred of losing led to me not 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 2900. 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 a love for winning to where ultimately longevity wise, creates more fun.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. 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?

It depends on when the game is, but let's say the game is at 3. 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, you know, some NBA game from last night or whatever to.

Not chess related stuff.

No, no, no, no. Then I'll, 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, perfect day. Just go back after relaxing. Like the, the things that make me the happiest at 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 land. So we were a team Norway. We did horribly. Yeah, I like, I did okay, but the team in general did, did horribly.

Italy.

No, no, Italy beat us, but Uzbekistan won the end. They were this amazing team of young players. It was really, 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 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 that, those little interactions and still keep your focus?

Yeah, most of the time that's, 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 with like without big headphones and something.

Oh, like a disguise on my.

No, not just, not. Not just to block the world. Otherwise.

Don't make eye contact.

Yeah, no. So the thing is, people in general are nice. I mean, people, they wish me well and they don't like bother me. Also when I have the headphones on I don't notice as much People like turning around and all of that so I can be more of in my own world. So I like that.

Yeah. What about after the. 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 like loosely see what the engine says at at a certain point if I'm curious about that. Otherwise I usually move on to the next.

What about diet? You said omelette and salad and so on. I heard in your conversation with the. With the other Magnus. Magnus number two about your. You had like this bet about me.