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 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 messed 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 something anybody jump to mind i think it's pretty hard to make a case for anybody else than messi for his uh for his all-around game and uh frankly like my real madrid fandom sort of uh predates the ronaldo era era uh this the second ronaldo not not 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 um i said somebody else i think i said isko at that point and i was like okay take two now you say ronaldo so for them it was um it was very important but it wasn't wasn't that huge too um to me so messy over maradona yeah but it's i think 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 just but it's um it's always um it's always a weird weird discussion uh 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 assists 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 marduna's hand of god there's some creativity on the pitch is 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 um as it's uh such a small sample size so uh uh it sort of annoys me always when you know titles are always um always appreciated so much even though that particular title can be can be a lot of a lot of luck or at least some at least some luck so i do appreciate um statistics a bit and all the statistics say that mess 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 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 to the pressure and breaking on the under the pressure is often a really oversimplified like uh taken on what's um on what's happening we're 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 uh i went to high school in chicago uh you know chicago bulls during the the michael jordan era uh let me ask the the jordan versus lebron james question let's let's continue on this threat of greatness which one do you pick or somebody else so i'll give you a completely different answer um depending on my mood and depending who on whom i talk to i pick one of one of the two and then i tried to argue the quantum mechanical thing well can you what again what what would uh 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 yeah all over the place but what do you lean in general with these f with these folks with with soccer with anything in life towards the unquantifiable more no definitely towards the quantifiable so when you're unsure lean towards the numbers yeah but see like it's later generations there's something that's what people say about maradona is you know he took uh 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 um 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 iguain in the first half which he um 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 uh if the league could make a decision yeah just random random allocation yeah um and just every single game just keep relocating or maybe once a season um or every season you get random but let's say every every player um 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 could be not obviously it wouldn't ever happen or or work but i think it's if you never know first thing to think about so on chess let's uh zoom out if you break down your approach to chess when you're at your best uh what what do you think um 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 um that you do i think the answer differs a little bit now from what it did eight years ago for instance like i've i feel like i've had like two peaks in in my career in 2014 uh well 2013 2014 and also in 2019 and in those years i i was very different um in terms of um of my strength strengths as specifically in 2019 i benefited a lot from opening preparation uh while in 2013 2014 i mostly tried to avoid my uh opponent's preparation rather than that being a um being a strength so i'm mentioning that also because it's something something you didn't um didn't mention i think like 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 um 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 um but in terms of calculation that's always been a weird issue for me like i've always been really really um 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 um and to look uh to look deep enough so this is like a puzzle a position yeah me 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 like you have to to look look deep and then when i get these lines during the game i've very often find the the right solution even though um even though i'm it's not still the best part of my game to 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 trying to find the solution and i understand like the training at home is like trying a little bit to to replicate that like you give somebody half an hour um in a position like in this instance you might have thought for half an hour if you play the game but i just i just cannot do it one thing i know that i am good at though is calculating short lines because i calculate them them well i'm good at seeing little details and i'm also much better than than most at uh evaluating which i think is something that sets me sets me uh apart from from others so evaluating specific position if i if i make this move and the position changes in this way is this the 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 a lot of time a lot of the times you cannot um the branches become so big that you cannot calculate everything so you have a fog yeah so you have to you have to make evaluations based on you know based based mostly on knowledge and and intuition and somehow i seem to do that uh pretty well when you say you're good at short lines what's that what's what's short that's usually like lines of um two to four moves each okay so that that's directly applicable to even faster games like blitz chess and so on yeah um 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 ha don't have time for for that templates you have to calculate quickly and rely a lot on iteration 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 is there a visual component yeah no i just visualized the board i mean the board isn't as in as in my head two-dimensional my interpretation is that it's it is too uh two-dimensional like what color is is is it brown tinted is it black is it uh like what's the theme is it a big bore small board are the uh what do the pawns look like or is it more in the space of concepts like uh yeah there are there aren't a lot of colors it's it's mostly [Laughter] so what is it queen's gambit on the ceiling whatever to imagine it what about when you do the branching when you have multiple boards and so on what how does that look are you no there's only one at a time so like position in time one position at a time so then i go back and and that's what when 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 border 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 that's 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 you just put on a shelf kind of i 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 um 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 um 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 what can you describe what like what's the algorithm here that takes 30 minutes to run 30 minutes is uh at least for me it's usually a waste um 30 minutes usually means that i don't know what to do and i'm trying i'm just running into the wall over here yeah i'm trying to find something that isn't there i think um 10 to 15 minutes things in complicated positions can be really really uh helpful then you can spend your time pretty um efficiently um just it just means that the branches are getting getting wider so there's a lot to um to run through um both in terms of calculation and a lot you have to evaluate as well and then based on based on that 10 to 15 minutes think you you have a pretty good idea uh what to 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 going to see it at all you're going to 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 it's it's a complicated mix of brute force calculation and and uh and um by creativity and evaluation so end game it's it's it's more it's it's easier in that sense well you're good at every aspect of chess but you're also your end game is legendary it baffles experts so uh 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 uh the longest game ever played in chess it was uh i think uh his queen versus your rook knight in two pawns yeah there's so many options there it's such an interesting little little dance and it's kind of not obvious that it wouldn't be a draw so how do you escape the it not being a draw and you win that match no i knew um that for most of the time it was a theoretical draw since um chess with seven or less pieces on the board is solved so you can like people who watching online they can just check it they can check and they can check a so-called table base and they it just gonna spit out when for white win for black or a draw so and and also i 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 uh but 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 my strengths that i also use in in middle games is that i evaluate well and i calculate short variations quite uh 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 then i can use my my strengths um 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 you have to figure out it's like a sequence of little games that happens right like little pattern like how 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 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 all the all the difference and after that is like what we call technique of very often uh that it's technique basically just means that the moves are simple and uh these are moves that you know a lot of players could could make not only not only the very strongest ones these are moves that are kind of understood and unknown 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 wind as long as you're doing the evaluation well one step at a time to some extent also yeah as i said like if you evaluate it better and thus accumulated some some small advantages then you can you can often make your your your life pretty easy uh towards the end of the end game so you said in uh 2019 sort of the second phase of why you're so damn good you uh you did a lot of opening preparation what's the goal for you of uh 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 um he very often got huge advantages from the opening as as white can explain why there were several reasons for for that first of all he he worked harder he was more creative and 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 in openings that he could use so they would come up with ideas and he would he would integrate those ideas into yeah and he would also very often come up with them them himself also at the start he had some of the first computer engines to to work um for him to define his ideas to look deeper to verify as 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 it's much harder to find ideas now that um that actually like give you an advantage with what the 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 you know gain some advantage in the sense that you have more 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 in chess and uh i'm not entirely sure but there were at least some players in even in the top events you 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 your opponent and taking it into position where you 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 sami 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 the game theoretics yes you take the opponent into 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 um analyze long enough it's always going to end up in a draw so in 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 um paths okay how much do you use engines do you use lila stock fish in your preparations my team does personally i try not to use them too much on on my own uh because i know that when i play you can obviously cannot have help from from engines and often i feel like often having imperfect or knowledge about a position uh or some engine knowledge can be a lot worse than than having no knowledge uh 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 yeah but you are uh relying primarily on your human resources yeah for sure you can evaluate well you don't leave yeah i can evaluate as a human i can know what they find unpleasant and and and so on and it's very often the case for me to some extent but a lot for for others that you arrive in a position and your opponent plays a move that you didn't expect and you know if you didn't expect it you know that it's probably not a great move since it hasn't been expected by 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 sort of think as a human i was chatting with the demonstrable ceo of deepmind a couple days ago and he asked me to ask you about what you first felt when you saw the the play of alpha zero like interesting ideas any creativity um did you feel fear that the machine is taking over did you were you inspired and you what was going on in your mind and heart funny thing about dem is is he he doesn't play chess at all uh like uh like an ai yeah he um plays in a very very human way no uh i was hugely inspired when i i saw the games at first um and in terms of man versus machine i mean that battle was was kind of lost for humans even before i entered top level chess um so that's never been an issue uh for me i never never liked playing against computers much anyway so so that's completely fine but it was amazing to see uh how they quote-unquote thought about chess and in such a different way and in a way that you could mistake for creativity mistake for cr strong words uh 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 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 playing style that usually when i i sacrifice i feel like i'm you know i don't do it unless i feel like i'm getting something like tangible uh in in return and um 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 uh positional advantage this 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 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 get a bishop pair that's one of the most common sacrifices in general you're okay making a second 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 upon for the bishop pair and then eventually it's some sort of positional equality um so that's fine but um the way alpha zero would 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 um it was really fascinating to see um yeah in 2019 i was sacrificing a lot of a lot of puns especially and it was it was a great joy unfortunately it's not so easy to continue to do that people people have found more solid opening lines since that don't allow me to to do that as often i'm still trying both to get those positions and still trying to to learn the art of of sacrificing pieces so uh demis also made a comment that was interesting to my newb 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 um difference between 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's 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 um 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 see you you think power is more fun than like variety no there is variety in chess as well though just but not much more so than like like no no 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 the 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 in 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 chest 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 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 a fisher random chest chest 960s yeah that basically just means that the pawns are in the same way and the major pieces are uh distributed randomly on the 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 and 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 like let's say the king is in the corner um so to to castle this side you have you have to clear a whole lot of pieces no the king would go here and the rook would go there oh okay um and that's happened in my games as well like i forgot about castling uh and i'd be like attacking a king over here and then all of a sudden it escapes to the other side i think um i think fisher chess is is good that it it's the maps will generally be worse than regular chest 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 like what fraction of that creates interesting games at the highest level and this is something that a lot of people are curious about because uh when you challenge a great chess player like yourself to um to look at a random starting position that feels like it pushes you to play pure chess versus memorizing live yeah for sure for sure but that's that's the whole idea yeah that's what you want and uh 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 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 in classical chess no it's it's super interesting and that's why i also i really wish that we uh played more classical chess like long games four to seven hours and in fish random chess chest 960 because then you really need you really need that time even on the first moves what what usually happens is that you get 15 minutes before the game you you're getting told the position 15 minutes before the game and then you you can think about it a little bit even you know check the computer but that's all the time you have but then you really need to figure it out then like some of the positions obviously are a lot more interesting in than the others in some of them it appears that like if you don't play symmetrically at the start then you're probably going to be in a pretty bad bad position what do you mean with the pawns with the pawns yeah why so that's the thing about 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 yeah uh with the e5 and then there's the the real lopez there's the there's the petrov opening and 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 you get more decisive um 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 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 to uh it's a little bit too too dryish and um i guess if you analyzed if you analyzed a lot in in just 960 then um the um a lot of the position would end up be being um pretty drawish as well um but 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 uh interesting manner uh 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 um 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 um 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 sure um it seems like a i think it will be different um 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 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 gonna uh it's gonna make the more games more um uh well less drawish for for sure then you have some weirder variants like where the pawns can move both diagonally and and forward and also you have self-captured chests which is quite interesting so their pawns can or commit suicide or yeah people can why would that be a use a good move no sometimes one of your pieces occupy a square i mean uh let me just set up a position let's put it put it like this for instance like here i mean there are a lot of ways to checkmate for white like this for instance or there are several ways um but like this would be uh would be uh oh cool for people who are just listening yeah basically you're bringing in a knight close to the the whole the the king the queen and so on yeah and you replace the knight with a queen yeah that's interesting so you have like a a front of of uh pieces and then you just replace them with the with the second yeah uh that's cool i mean that could be interesting i think also maybe sometimes in it's just clearance basically it adds an extra element of of clearance so i think there are many um many uh different variants i don't think any of them are better than the one that has been played for uh at least a thousand years but um it's certainly interesting to um to see so one of your goals is to reach the feed a elo chest rating of 2 900. maybe you can comment on how's 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 um 10 which means that if i were to play against um an opponent who's rated the same as me i would be expected to score fifty percent obviously and that means that i would win five points with a win and 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 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 differences yeah and uh my rating is obviously carried through thousands of of games um right now my rating is 28 61 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 to do at least considerably better so what i would need to do is try and optimize even more in terms of the matchups preparations everything but not not 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 so you basically can't lose yeah i basically can't fuck up ever uh if i wanna if if i wanna 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 to play for to have like to have a motivation to actually try and and be at my best when i play because otherwise i'm playing to some extent mostly for for fun these days uh in that i love to play i love to try and win but i don't have like a lot to uh 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 um to to aim for so at the moment i'm quite enjoying that process of um uh of trying to um yeah 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 from winning most tournaments than i do for winning the world championship because then it's mostly been a 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 um i also know that it's you know it's not gonna last forever so every every little win i i appreciate um appreciate a lot more now and and yeah in terms of fear for losing like that's a huge reason why i'm not gonna play the world championship because uh i it really didn't give me 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 a match but like every single position like 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 it's mostly been fine because then i then i'm focused on got it then i'm focused on the game and i know i know that i can play the game it's a time like in between like knowing that you know 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 there's a winner and a loser if i don't win a random tournament that i play then you know i'm usually it depends on the 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 of losing that yeah yeah there's uh you're gonna 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 could be bent to the chat [Laughter] 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 big that was the thing that was fun yeah and then everything after is like stressful yeah uh essentially there was certainly stress uh involved the first time as well um but it was nothing compared to uh compared to the others so the only world championship after that that i really enjoyed was the one in 2018 against the american fabiano corona 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 um 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 games themselves were very close uh i i had a winning position in in the first game that i couldn't really get anywhere for a lot of games and he he had a couple of games where he could potentially have won um then in the last game i was a little bit better and eventually there 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 uh at this point equal to me and so losing that would not have been this disaster because all in all the other matches i would know that i would i've lost against somebody who i know i'm much better than and that would be would be a lot harder for me to um 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 uh 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 draw and i can just i 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 um is there anything you would like to see if you had a 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 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 more games and i think to some extent if you're going to have a world champion and call them the best players you best player you got to make sure that the format increases the chance of finding 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 as as a chess player with because you have a lot of time to to think and to defend and also yeah you have deep preparation um so i think those would be for me to play um those would be the the main the main the main things more more games and less time so you want to see more games and uh rules that emphasize pure chess yeah but already less time emphasize emphasizes pure pure chess because um 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 places a bit too fast um to their credit this was suggested by by feed as well for a start to have two games per day and let's say you have 45 minutes a game plus 15 or 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 would be a start also what's what we're playing in the tournament that i'm playing here in in in miami which is um four games a day uh with uh 15 minutes plus 10 seconds per move those were would be um more interesting than than the one there is now and i i understand that there are a lot of traditions people don't want to change the world championship that's that's all fine i just think that um the world championship should do a better job of trying to reflect who who's the best overall chess player so would you 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 it's like a hundred um 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 um and also you have to prepare two sets of openings for each day which makes it more difficult for the teams preparing yeah which i think is also good let me ask you a fun question if uh 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 uh put maybe you can explain to me internet speak opium is something you tweeted yeah but if he if he got second would you uh would you would you just despite him still still play the world championship that's internet question and when the internet asks samus the bide the dude abides yeah uh sure thank you internet so after the last match uh i did an interview uh 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 um what happened was that right before the world championship match there was this young player already furuzia 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 uh and that sort of lit a fire under me um 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 uh 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 best it's like the world championship um yeah and 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 not necessarily wanting to to defend again but i never like 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 no no no players which may or may have 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 um was already made does it uh 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 um also to to be ranked number one in the world i was comfortable with the fact that i knew that i was i was the best and i didn't need a title to to show others um and what happened later is i suddenly decided to play um in 2013 i liked they changed the format i liked it better um i just decided you know it could be interesting let's try and get this um 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 um because it's just a cool tournament yeah it's a cool school tournament it's a good challenge you know why not it's it's something that's 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 uh and 2013 match brought me a lot of a 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 gonna like keep the title for for a long time immediately after the match in 2013 i 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 general uh generally like okay we're good we don't 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 uh i have to ask just in case you have an opinion uh if you can maybe from a fantasy chess perspective uh analyze uh ding vs 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 um what are the strengths and weaknesses of each if you can kind of summarize it um so nepo he's even better at calculating short lines than i am but he can sometimes like a little bit of a little bit of depth uh like his in short lines he's an absolute calculation monster he's extremely uh he's extremely quick but he can sometimes like a bit of depth also recently um he's improved his openings quite a bit so now he um he has a lot of a lot of good ideas and he's very very solid um ding is not quite as well prepared but he has an excellent understanding of dynamics and imbalances in in chess i would uh i would say what do you mean by imbalances um imbalances like bishop bishops against knights and material imbalance you 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 uh especially i think nepal got the better of him and the candidates so what's your sense why ding 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 uh i feel like over overall stress 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 i think about the size of of them of of the match in total 14 games and that generally doesn't doesn't mean much how close were those games would you say in your mind for the previous championship so that game 6 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 you'll get the better of nippo no no larger larger sample size is always good for me so world championship it's 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 oh that's generally for for big for championships or in general yeah for championships like they generally generally win uh 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 six it probably would have been very very close he might have edged it there's obviously a bigger chance that i i would have edged it but this is just what happens a lot in in chess but also in in football that matches our clothes and then they somebody scores somebody scores and things things changed and this gives people the illusion that the matchup was very close yeah which 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 uh um against karyakin there were people who thought before the match that i was massively overrated as as as a favorite and that essentially the match was pretty pretty close like whatever uh 60 40 or some people even stayed 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 that in the way that everything went wrong and i i still i still won which probably means 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 politics that 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 you know these big nations playing each other competing against each other almost like fighting out you know 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 is is a russian like i like him personally uh for sure but he is quite connected to the kremlin like and it's quite clear that the kremlin considers it at least a semi-important goal to bring the chess crown home to to russia so it's still 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 uh asses 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 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 um maybe you'll disagree with us 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 um even if you hate each other yeah for sure i think for every every match that spin 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 uh and kasparov i mean he was quoted like one somebody in his team asked him like why why are you talking to the carp of 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 uh 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 i felt like morally i have to renounce the world championship title you know because it doesn't mean anything yeah as long as you're not the best player so the ratings really tell a bigger a clearer story i think so at least just 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. uh i'm a lot more proud of of that than than the world championships how much anxiety or 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 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 um i have been i have been at times i think the most nervous i've ever been was game 10 of uh the world championships 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 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 can't remember much of it just that when it was over i was just so relieved because then it was clear the position was probably gonna figure out and um 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 yeah 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 our people are scared of you i i would love to 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 would be that's an interesting question you know like there's these like 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 like from the style of play do you think um or from the strength of play if there was a decent sample size sure uh and what about you would you be able to tell uh others in like one game very unlikely what what sample size would you need to tell accurately i feel like that's the science yeah i 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 um which is quite fascinating [Music] 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 yeah 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 a hybrid of those because you got both the you're good in every position the middle game and the end game yeah and also i can i can think to some extent both rapidly and deeply which a lot of people they can't do both um 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 if it's something that i don't understand fully and i do think especially when i'm playing while 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 um i always try and try and find that balance to shake them up a little bit yeah what what's been the toughest loss of your career that you remember would that be the um the world championship match oh yeah for sure uh can you take game aids in 2016. and who was it against against karjakin in in new york uh can you take it through the story of that game um where were you uh before that game in terms of game one through seven yeah so game one and two not much happened uh games three and four i was winning in both of them and um 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 that at that point um so for game eight 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 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 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 in 2021 as well like when i won the first game against napo 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 can you elaborate innocuous get him out of the book no but basically i i set up pretty defensively i was watching 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 chest in the middle game yeah without any of the the lines the 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 um 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 uh mentally yeah mentally what happened i realized that i mean 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 like face transition in your mind no it was one thing or no it was just a position on the board like realizing like there was one particular move he played that i missed and then like and then i i realized that this could potentially not go 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 that's the the worst i've ever felt after um 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 um at the time like i was all in my own head that was 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 happening um in the world championship during the match so yeah i just tried to forget uh 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 and then only game ten game ten i was still i wasn't in a great mood i was really really tense um 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 like i was thinking during game like how i'm gonna play for win with black in the next game like what what am i doing and then you know eventually it ended it ended well i didn't find the right line i ground him down actually i played at some point pretty well in the end game and um after that game like there was such a weight a little bit lifted no i i after that there was like no thought of losing the match whatsoever i knew that okay i'd basically gotten away with um not with murder but get gotten away with something what can you say about the after game a 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 i think about quitting every time i lose the class 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 i'm 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 a bunch of times and i 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 and it also lit the fire under me that i think my performance after losses in 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 yeah what's the perfect day in the life of magnus carlson on a day of a big chess match it doesn't have to be world championship but if if if it's a chess match you care about what uh 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 um i'll probably wake up uh pretty late at about 11 then i'll go for 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 uh then i'll i'll get back i'll have a 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 the things that make me the happiest at tournaments is just having a good routine and uh feeling feeling well um i don't like it when too much is happening around me so the tournament that i came from now was um the chess olympiad which is the team event so we were team norway we did horribly yeah i like i did okay but the team in general did did horribly uh italy uh no no italy beat us but uzbekistan won in 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 yeah 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 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 uh that's fine as long as it's not too much but i have to admit when i'm at home in norway like i rarely go out with like without um big headphones and something uh oh look at this guy on my no not just black guys just to block out the world yeah otherwise um 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 like bother me also when i have the headphones on i don't notice as much people like turning around and yeah and all of that so i can be more of in my own world so i like that yeah uh what about after the 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 i've never been very structured in in that sense um i know that it was always recommended that you analyze your your own games but i 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 almond and salad and so on i heard in your conversation with the uh with the other magnus magnus number two about your do you had like this bet about meat when are you gonna go vegan if you lose i forget which vegetarian though uh vegetarians and uh you both have an admiration for me is there um is there some aspect about optimal performance that you look for in food like maybe eating only like 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 um 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 before so you you do eat before the tournament though you don't you don't play fasted no no no um 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 mistake that your your energy levels just suddenly suddenly drop and they don't necessarily mean need to be too high as long as they're pretty stable yeah have you ever tried playing fasted like you know like uh intermittent fasting so oh playing without having eaten i mean the reason i asked you know uh i've especially when you do a low carb diet when i have done a personally low carb diet i'm able to fast for a long time like you once a day maybe uh twice a day but i just the mind is most focused and like really difficult thinking tasks when it's fasted it's an interesting 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 energy the energy stable no that is true maybe that would be interesting to try so what's happened for me if i 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 yeah and what i've found is that it makes me to some it makes me very calm of course because i don't have the energy and it makes me super creative like interesting being sleep deep probably i think in general makes you creative just the first thing that goes away is the ability to do the simple things that that's that's what if it affects you the most like you cannot be precise so i'm that's the only thing i'm worried about like if if i'm faster that i won't be it won't be [Music] precise when i play but you might be more creative it's an interesting trusted yeah potentially what about you have been known to on a rare occasion play drunk is there mathematical formula for sort of on the x-axis how many drinks you had and then the y-axis your performance slash creativity is there like an optimal for like uh one of the would you suggest for the feeding world championship that people would be required to drink would that change things in interesting ways yeah not at all um maybe for rapid but for for blitz i think if you're playing blitz you're mostly playing on on short calculation and intuition and i think those are probably enhanced if you've had a little bit of a little bit to drink can you uh explain the uh the physiology of why that's why it's enhanced or the you're just you're thinking less you're more confident oh yeah i think 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 yeah i think that it's it's a little bit of the same in inches in 2012 i played the world bliss championship and then i i was doing horribly for for a long time i also had food poisoning there i couldn't play at all for for three days so there before the last break i was like in the middle of the pack like in i don't know 20th place or something and so i decided like as the last last gasp i'm gonna go to the mini bar and just have a few drinks and um what happened is that i came back and i was suddenly relaxed uh and i was playing fast and i was playing confidence and i thought i was playing so well i wasn't playing nearly as well as i thought but it still helped me like 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 i was second so generally i wouldn't recommend that but maybe as the last resort sometimes like if you feel that you have the ability like obviously none of this is remotely relevant if you don't feel like you have the ability to begin with but if you like if you feel like you have the ability there are just factors that make it impossible for you to um to show it like numbing your mind a bit can probably be a good thing yeah what's interesting is especially during training you have all kinds of sports that i've interacted with a lot of athletes in 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 yeah a lot of people um in at least in brazilian jiu jitsu they'll they'll smoke weed you know it does 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 one of those things too much but it's cool to throw in like a few drinks every once in a while to uh 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 uh what about supplements do you uh you a coffee guy oh no um i quite like the taste of coffee uh i've but the thing is i've never had a job so i've never needed to wake up early yeah so my thought is basically that if i'm tired i'm tired that's fine yeah then i'll you know then i'll work it out so i don't want to ever um make my brain get used to get used to coffee like if you see me drinking coffee that's that probably means that i'm massively massively hungover and i don't i just want i want to try anything to 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 enjoy you know so no i know that i would enjoy it a lot yeah though you don't want to rely on it yeah i also like the taste so there's no problem there what about exercise so how does that what like what what you know a lot of people talk about the extreme um stress that chest puts in your body physically and mentally how do you prepare for that to be physically mentally is it just through playing chess or do you do cardio any any of that kind of stuff this is kind of it up and down like as i said in 2013 i was in i was in great shape like i mean generally i was exercising doing sports every day either playing football or um tennis or even other other sports otherwise if i couldn't do that i would try and take my my bike for for a ride i had a few training camps and i played tennis against one of my 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 um and that was like that was a that was the perfect exercise because i was running around enough to make the games pretty competitive uh and it means 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 uh the differential between skill results in good cardio yeah yeah but it is it's just that um so in those days i was i was pretty uh i was pretty fit in that sense i've always liked doing sports but at times you know i i think in winter especially like i never had like a schedule so at times i'll let myself go a little bit uh and i've always kind of done it more for for fun then like for a concrete benefit but now i'm at least after the uh pandemic i was not in great shape so now i'm trying to to get back get better get better habits and and so on but um 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 it's 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 just love playing sports so that i think people confuse that because i'm i'm not like massively athletic but i but i do i am decent at uh at sports and that's that's sort of helped build that that perception even though others who are top level chess players um they're more fit like karana for instance he's really really um 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 that's them that's the difference and the thing about sports is also is just uh it's an escape it helps you forget for for a brief moment about like the the obsessions the pursuits of of the main thing which is chess yeah for uh for sure and i think it's it also helps your main pursuit to feel that you're um even if not mastering but like doing well in something um in something else like i found that if i just juggle a ball that makes me feel better before a game so juggalo football yeah yeah skilled activity that you can improve on over time it's like flexes the same kind of muscle but on the thing that you're much worse at yeah uh it focuses you relaxes you that's really interesting what uh what's the perfect day in the life of magnus carlson when he's training so like what's a good training regimen in terms of you know daily kind of training do 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 very little deliberate practice i've never been that guy at all like i've i could never force myself to just sit down and work so deliberate practice just to maybe you can educate me for some grand masters 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 just books that go over different games yeah um 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 chessboard 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 blog i mean it could be just floating there and nothing is happening but like i i often do it parallel to some other activity though and what 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 at the 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 you know to the end game and those are actual games or you conjure up like fake games no they were often based on real games uh and then i'm 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 uh 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 to do at home sometimes but he realized at some point uh 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 it's just like yeah pick pick up books you can have anything you can have anything you want uh just pick up books you like and then you give back the next time so that's kind of what i did instead yeah i just absolutely rated the and then my next tournament i will try out one of the openings from that book if it was an opening book and so on so does it feel like a struggle like challenging like to be thinking 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'll go on change it so that's easier to figure out there was a point in your life where cause probably was interested in being your coach or traily's training with you why why did you choose not to go with him that's pretty bold move was there a good reason for this no um the first like homework exercise he gave me was to analyze like he picked out i think three four of my worst losses and she 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 yes i just felt like from the start it was 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 i 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 my main reason so 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 i don't think i thought of it that way i just thought this is not for me i'm going 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 uh and he wasn't able to beat you can you go through that match what did that feel like how important was that was that how epic was that we played three games uh i lost two and i drew one right but one draw no the one draw um 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 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 rap yeah and classic chess i guess is like very super long yeah uh yeah basically bullet just 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 for both and then classical is it's like the blitz tournament which didn't go so well uh 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 and but everybody else had noticed it but him um 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 would be playing pretty fast in those days and then at some point i calculated better than him he missed a crucial detail another much better position i couldn't convert it though i knew what line i had to go for uh 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 caspar 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 i thought i could be able to to do so to me yeah i was proud of that but it was a gimmick that was like a very strong i am but had gm strength i was like it can't happen that a player of that strength makes a draw against gary once yeah but okay for people but i mean i understand i'm 13 but like still i've felt a bit more gimmicky than anything i mean i guess it's it's a good thing that made me noticed uh but apart from that wasn't yeah and for people who don't know i am as international master and uh gm was grandmaster and you were just on the i guess on the verge of becoming a young youngest grandmaster 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 no but uh but i was the youngest scrum master at the time uh in the world yeah yeah so there is a you know you say it's gimmicky but there's a romantic notions the 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 don't i think he's embarrassed the fuck he's still bitter you think no i don't think he's he's bitter but i i think the game in itself was was a bit embarrassing for him uh so even he can't see past like i think he's completely fine with that i think like in retrospect it's a good story he appreciates 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 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 it in in a way it's the passing of the baton from like one great champion to another yeah right but like you you still just don't like the fact that you didn't play a good game from gary's perspective like he still was just annoyed probably that yeah he could have played better and we did so we did work together in 2009 quite a lot and that corporation ended um 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 up playing me quite a bit but i was i was fighting well so it was it was pretty um pretty even then um so i mean i appreciate those games a lot more than some random game from when i was 13. and i maybe i just don't know what i'm talking about but i always found it at least based on that game you couldn't tell that i was gonna take his that i was gonna take his part like i made a horrible blunder and lost to an uzbek kid in the world rapid championship in in 20 18. and i mean granted he was part of the team that now won gold in the chess olympia but he wasn't a 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 uh 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 uh 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. um but hasn't that happened with other players though yeah but i i pers i just had a personal experience he did look different than there's like magic there you maybe you can't tell he would be uh one of the greatest ever but there's there's still magic but you're right most of the time we're trying to project we see a young kid being an older person you just 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 maybe or maybe some people are just so good at seeing these patterns that they can actually 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 no you you make a lot of a lot of long shot bats 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 gary kasparov i don't know who else bobby fisher mikhail tall anyone else um for uh hikaru nakamura just kidding yeah uh i i think i'll i can make a case for um myself for for gary and for fisher so i'll start with fisher uh 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 opposition there so he had just a peak that's been better than anybody like the gap between the infrastructure and others have was greater than it's ever been in history at any other time uh and that would be the argument for for him for gary 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 has done in at least in recent time and the longevity that the longevity for sure also at his peak he um was not quite the level of um of fisher in terms of the gap but it was similar to or i think even a little bit better than than mine as for me i'm of course unbeaten as a world champion in in five tries i've been world number one for 11 years straight in an even more competitive era than gary i have the highest chest 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 there's the engines have leveled the playing field so much that it's it's harder to dominate and still i haven't always been uh clear number one but i've always 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 for all of them um i've said before and i haven't changed my mind that gary generally urges it because of the longevity in in the competitive era but um 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 or the it's like just the the creative genius of it the yeah but i'm not interested in that in terms of greatest of all time uh i'm not interested in in in questions of style so you so for messi you don't give credit for the style uh for the stylistic i like i like um no i like watching it i just but you're not gonna give points for the so messy no i mean because of the finishing yeah it's it's the um the no it's not because of the finishing it's because of his overall impact on the game is higher than anybody else's okay he contributes he just contributes more to winning than anybody else does what's um so you're somebody who was advocated for and has done quite a bit of study of classic games what would you say is um i mean maybe the number one or maybe top three games of chess ever played that doesn't interest me at all you don't think of the nose no i don't think of it i mean i tried to i find the games interesting i tried to learn from them but like trying to to rank them has never interested me what what what games pop out to you is like super interesting then is there is there things like where idea like old school games where there was like interesting ideas that uh um that you go back or like you you find surprising and pretty cool that that that those ideas were developed like that is there something that jumps to mind yeah there are several games of young kasparov like before he became world champion if you're going to ask for like my favorite player or favorite style that's probably youngest younger can you describe stylistically or in any other way what what yanka's was like that you're that you like uh it was just an overflow energy in his play so aggressive yeah extreme extremely aggressive dynamic jazz 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 never thought about that too much is there uh memories big or small weird surprising uh just any kind of beautiful anecdote um from your chest career like stuff that pops out that people might not know about the stuff when you look back it just makes you smile no so i'll tell you about the um most satisfying tournament victory of my career um 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 i played my first tournament when i was eight and a half and a lot of my competitors had already played for for a couple of years or even three four years at that point and the first time i 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 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 and at that point i thought it was over because i thought he wouldn't he wouldn't give away points to others and then the very next day he lost to somebody so then the rest of the tournament it was just like i was always like playing my game watching his and we both won the rest of our games but it meant that i was half a point i had like the feeling when i realized that i was gonna win um that was just so amazing it was like the first time that i was the best at my age and at that point you're hooked yeah at that point i realized you know this i could actually be very good at this so you you kind of saw where did you think your ceiling would be did you see that did you see that one day you could be the number one no i didn't i didn't think that was possible at all um but when'd you first i thought i could be the best in norway the best in norway at that point one day 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 um it was like going to 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 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 wouldn't 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 on jazz 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 other kids didn't because i was never the the one 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 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 how does that happen no like it means that at some point early you're 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 you're how do you think about that by the way you basically narrow 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 that's it essentially is there some aspect to the patterns themselves to the positions to the elegance of like the the dynamics of the game that you just find beautiful that that doesn't that where you forget about the opponent i 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 yeah when you're thinking about the the harmony of the pieces when you're looking at the position you're evaluating it are you looking at at the whole board or is it like a bunch of groupings of pieces overlapping and like dancing together kind of thing i would say it's more of the lighter that would be more uh 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 the other side so i would um 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 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 for me like i i talked about the 10th game and in the world championship like that's the time i was the most nervous and it was because it was a 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 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 is there something you can it's very 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 it can feel like a grind so you're saying if the less can feel like a grind the better the better yeah 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 talented 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 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 uh cultivating the obsession like really yeah 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 shore and if you don't give me i will spend all of that time on my own without thinking that it's it's work or without thought that 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 uh but do you like any particular youtubers um i could just recommend like stuff i've seen so a good matter the gotham chess cortez live um i really like uh st louis chess club uh danielle naraditsky and uh 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 as a godmother um 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 from start to finish yeah 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 agamatur and he said like i watched one of his videos i wanted to know what what it was all about because i think aguamata is like the same strength as my father or maybe just a little bit weaker like 1900 or something my father is probably about 2 000. and my father has played chess his whole life uh 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 i could give that's the only channel that my father actually enjoys this is hilarious i talked i talked to him before this to ask him if he has any questions for you and uh he said no just just do your thing you know what no he's so careful he wouldn't uh do that he did mention jokingly about uh evan's gambit i think is that a thing evan's gambit is some weird thing he made up it might be an inside joke i don't i don't know but he asked me to well anyway yeah i didn't even get um it's something that you didn't even realize that he placed the evan's camera like he plays a lot of gambits that are wait evans gambit is a thing yeah yeah that's the thing like that's an old opening from the 1800s uh captain evans apparently invented it why would he mention that particular one yeah something hilarious about that one i don't know i i don't think i've ever faced the evan's gambit and uh in the game i feel like both of you are trolling and trolling me right now but i mean he's played a lot of other gambits maybe this is the one he wanted to to mention so this maybe this is called the evans gambit as well but i just know it as like the two two g4 gambit maybe this is the one like this one he has this one he has played a bunch uh and he he he's been telling me a lot about his games in this line he's like oh it's not so bad and i'm like yeah but you're upon down yeah but i can i can sort of see it i can sort of um i can sort of understand it and he's like he's proud of the fact that nobody like told him to play this line or anything he came up with it himself and there's this uh i'll tell you another story about my father so there's this line that i call that i called the henry carlson line um so at some point you know he never knew a lot of openings in in chess but i taught him i taught him a couple of openings as black it's the uh it's the specialty of sicilian that i've played a lot myself also during the um 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 ragosan defense um and then so the regular defense goes like goes like this it's characterized by um by this bishop move um and so he would play those openings pretty pretty exclusively and as black and the tournaments that he did play and also the svechnikov sicilian is like that's the only two of my sisters play have played a bunch of chess tournaments as well and that's the only opening they know as well so my my family's reporter is very narrow so so this is this this is the system black goes here and then we are from white takes the pawn and black takes the pawn so at some point i was watching one of my my father's online blitz game this game and as white he played this this so this is called the car con defense he took the pawn it was taken back then he went with the knights um his opponent went here and then he played the bishop here so i 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 ragosa with the different colors because if the knight was here it would be the same position i was like i never i was like how am i like one of the best 20 players in the world and i've never thought about that so i actually started playing i started playing this line uh as white with pretty decent results and it results in it actually became kind of popular and everybody who asked about the line it's like 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 this point at some point this line will be uh we'll find it its rightful name and uh yeah it finds its ways into the history books can you uh what what what did you learn about life from your dad what what role has your dad play 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 [Laughter] um i think my especially my father but my parents in general they they always wanted me to get a good education and um find a job and so on um even though my father loves chest and he wanted me to to play chess i don't think he had any plans for me to be professional i think things changed at some point like i was less and less interested in school and for a long time we were kind of going back and forth fighting about that um 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 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 off tournaments and after that you know everything's been sort of easy and like in terms of the family like they've never put any pressure on me or they've never put any demands on me um they're just yeah miners has to focus on chess that's that that's um that's it like i think they taught me in general to be curious about the world and to get a decent general education not necessarily from from school but like just knowing um about the world around you and knowing history and being you know just 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 that you know this world is a lonely place it's good to have people around you there like yeah um they've got your back kind of you know yeah uh 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 like my father is like the only one that's been like constantly in the team that and that he's always been around and it's it's for that reason that i know he has my back no matter what now there's a cliche question here but 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 and involved in chess that's transferable to other things can you can you speak to that in your in your own life and in general the kind of reasoning involved with chess how much is that this transfer to life out there it just helps to make decisions i mean of all of all kinds yeah that would be my main takeaway that you learned to make informed guesses in a limited amount of time i mean does it frustrate you when you know that you have geopolitical thinkers and leaders you know henry kissinger will often talk about geopolitics as a game of chess or 3d chess is that a too oversimplified of a projection or or do you think that the kind of deliberations you have on the world stage is is similar to the kind of decision making you have on the chessboard well i never i'm never trying to get reelected when i play a game of chess there's no special interest you have to get happy yeah that kind of no that kind of helps no i can i can understand that obviously for every action there's a reaction and you have to 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 like a chess player in that sense like trying to make a good decision based on based on limited amount of data rather than thinking about other other factors but it's so tough uh but it does annoy me when 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 that they should know that are wrong and so much politics is like it's um you're you're often asked to do something when you're when it would be much better to do nothing uh like no but that happens in chess all the time like you have you have a choice like i often tell people that in certain situations you should not try and win you should just let your opponent lose loose and that happens in politics all the time 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 it but it was like don't interrupt your enemy when they're making a mistake yeah i think also um patron um the the former world champion said um when your opponent wants to play the 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 you know that's one of the things that really captivated the public imagination about chess people don't play chess or 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 that did the chess while they did it accurately and also they found actual games and positions that i never never seen before which really captivated me like i would i would not follow the um the story at times i was just trying to wow where the hell did i find that game trying to solve the positions so beth harmon the uh the the main character were you impressed by the play she was doing in in the like was there a particular style that they developed consistently but she was just at the end she was just totally universal like at the start she was probably a bit too too aggressive but no she was absolutely universal you know wait what what were the what adjective are you using universal in the sense that she could play in any any style oh interesting and and was dominant in that way so wow they said there was a development in style too throughout the show yeah for sure it's really interesting they did they did that yeah and uh it actually happened with me a bit as well like i started out really aggressive then i became probably too technical at some point taking a little bit too few risks i'm not playing dynamic enough and then i started to get a little bit better at dynamics so that now i'm i would say definitely the most universal player in terms of um in terms of style are there any skills in chess that are transferable to poker so as you're playing around with poker a little bit now how fundamentally different of a game is it what i find the most transferable probably is not like letting past decisions dictate future thinking yeah but in terms of the patterns in the betting strategies and all that kind of stuff uh what about bluffing do you because i've left way too much it does seem you enjoy bluffing and uh daniel negrano was saying yeah you're not quite good at it uh but yeah it has very little material to go by sample size is small yeah no i mean i enjoy bluffing for um the more the gambling aspects the 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 um but i do enjoy it on on the chessboard like if i um know that like oh i successfully scared away my opponent for 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 yeah the same kind of like yeah and also like you tell a story you try and tell a story and then they believe it yeah tell tell a story with your betting with your um all the different other cues yeah do you like the money aspect the the betting strategies so it's like it's like it's almost like another layer on top of it right like it's 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 well and all that i just haven't studied it enough how much of luck is part of poker would you say from what 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 or three years in a row without that being being like a massive outlier okay the the 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 yeah they just anything that's non-robotic is interesting also when it comes to trash talking like i have the biggest advantage in the world that i'm the best of what i'm doing so trash talking becomes very very very easy because i can back it up yeah 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 i'm better and also you're even doing it now also being non-robotic or not completely robotic yeah yeah i'm you're not trash talking you're just stating facts that's right have you ever have you ever considered that uh there will be trash talking and over the chessboard and some of the big tournaments like adding that kind of component or even talking you know um that would that completely distract from the gamer chess no i think it could be um funny and when people play off fan games when they play blitz games like people trash talk all the time it's a normal part of the game so you uh you emphasize fun a lot uh do you think we're living inside of a simulation that is trying to maximize fun but that's only happened for the last you know 100 years or so no that's like the fun has always been increasing i think yeah okay it's always been increasing but i feel like it's been increasing exponentially yeah i mean the or at least the importance of fun but i guess it depends on the society as well like in the west we've had such uh christian influence and i mean christianity hasn't exactly embraced the concept of fun over over time so 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 uh um it's 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 has always kind of been been kind of good for comedy no like i heard yes supposedly like in the soviet union i don't know about fun but supposedly comedy like at least underground it's it's right yeah there's a well no it permeates the entire culture there's a dark humor yeah that uh sort of the cruelty the absurdity of life really really brings out the humor amongst the populists plus vodka on top of that but this idea that for example elon musk has that um the most entertaining outcome was the most likely that it seems like the most absurd silly funny thing seems to be the thing so it happens more often than um than it should and it's something that goes viral in our modern connected world and so the fun stuff the memes spread and then we start to optimize for the for the fun meme that seems to be a fundamental property of of the reality we live in and so emerges the met the fun maximizer in all walks of life like in chess in in in poker and everything i think you're you're skeptical no i'm not skeptical uh i'm just i'm just taking it all in uh but i i find it interesting and not at all impossible do you ever get lonely oh yeah for sure um like a chess player's life is by definition pretty lonely um 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 it's in your own mind yeah it's you versus yourself really yeah really but it's uh you know it's um it's part of the profession but i think any like sport or activity where it's where it's just you and your own mind is just by definition only are you worried that it destroys you oh not at all as long as i'm aware of it then it's fine and uh i don't think the inherent loneliness of my profession really affects the rest of my life in in a major way what uh role does love play in the human condition in your lonely life of calculation you know i'm like everybody else uh trying uh you know trying to find love no not necessarily like trying to find love sometimes i am sometimes i'm i'm not i'm just trying to find my way yeah and my love for for the game obviously it comes and goes a little bit but there's like there's always at least some level of love so that doesn't 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 that also makes you more receptive to to love in general so that that has been my approach to to love now for quite a while that i'm just trying to live my best life and then the love will um will come uh when it when it comes and in in terms of romantic love it has come and gone in my life it's not there now uh 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 um 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 uh danielle johnston song true love will find you in the end no it may or may not but but he will only find you if uh oh fuck how does it go if you're looking so like you have to be open to it yeah it may or may not yeah yeah and no matter what you're going to lose it in the end because it all ends the whole thing ends yeah yeah so i i don't think stressing over that like 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 rather whether you're looking or you're not looking or you're in a relationship or marriage or anything like stressing over it is like the blue blue print for being unhappy uh just to clarify confusion i have um just a quick question how does the night move so the knight moves in an l um and uh unlike in shogi you 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 from side to side quickly i am generally more of a bishops guy myself for the old debate i just prefer quality over the intangibles but uh 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 yeah but it's still a great thing so yeah you can still have fun even if there's no me yeah you can still have fun you can try and pursue your your goals whatever they may be but i'm pretty sure there's no special meaning and trying to to find it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me for me like life is both meaningless and meaningful for just being here trying to to make not necessarily the most of it but the things that make you make you happy both short term and also long term yeah it seems to be full of cool stuff to enjoy it certainly does and uh one of those is having a conversation with you uh 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 uh having me uh and uh i wanted to say this at the start but i never get 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 do judge me but i i hope you've enjoyed it i loved it you're a brilliant man and it's it's i love the fact they have imposter syndrome because a lot of us do and so that that's beautiful to see even at the very top do you still feel like an imposter ah thank you brother thanks for talking today thanks for listening to this conversation with magnus carlson 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