Magnus Carlsen is a chess grandmaster. He is a five-time World Chess Champion, five-time World Rapid Chess Champion, and a reigning World Blitz Chess Champion. www.magnuscarlsen.com This episode is brought to you by Netflix. Zero Day is now playing, only on Netflix. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: How did Magnus Carlsen start playing chess?
think my dad my dad is an avid chess player so i think he uh thought that i might have some talent so he thought he taught me pretty early at around five years old but at that time i wasn't that interested i was mostly into legos and i was into maths and like sports stats and i had my little flag book with all
all the countries in the world their flags and their inhabitants and area and everything and I sort of that's what I did generally just taking in all the stats that I could also with sports reading the sports section every day and I didn't find chess that fun A couple of years later, my older sister, who's a year and a half older than me, she did a lot of chess with my dad.
I started sitting in on them a bit and I started liking it. I really, really wanted to beat my sister as well at generally everything. And yeah, from there on it really just became my thing and it's been my main hobby and eventually work as well since.
Yeah, obviously. It's so funny though, a spark, a competitive spark with your sister is really what ignited you to get going with it.
Yeah, the funny thing is she's not competitive at all. So she hated the fact that I wanted to play, especially when I realized that I could beat her. And she liked chess, but she stopped for a while and only started when I had become good enough that... There wasn't a competition. So it turned out like my dad was right after all. I just needed that extra push.
Yeah, what a call. I think you've got some talent. What a call.
Grandmaster at 12, was it? 13. So actually, the record is 12. But most kids these days, honestly, they start so early. I was at a tournament in India a few months ago, and there's this guy who's like a 1600 rated player, and he's three years old. And I'm seeing... I'm seeing the games, they're actually decent.
And now there's this one kid from Argentina, they call him the Messi of chess, who's going to become a grandmaster soon. I think he's only 10. So they're really, really playing early these days. But it's good to see, though, because information is so easily accessible these days, it takes a lot shorter time to get good at something.
Well, it seems like now chess, because of social media, it's like everything else. It's kind of exploding because there's so many fascinating videos out. And then, of course, there was like the big controversy with that young man who you believe is a big old cheater. That guy. I need to know. The anal beads thing. Is that a legitimate theory?
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Chapter 2: What are Magnus Carlsen's thoughts on the chess cheating controversy?
Interesting, okay. So what made you convinced that he was cheating in that particular game? And by what method do you think he could possibly have been doing this? Could you hear something?
Was it like, brr? You're hearing vibrations? His seat shift. You're smelling something? There's a whiff of something in the air?
Yeah, I mean, that would have been the smoking gun, I suppose. I think there was a combination of things, though, based on the chess level that I thought that he had and that I'd seen from his game, both playing against him, analyzing a little with him and looking at his other games. There were a lot of stories back then
The thing is also there's a Netflix documentary coming in a few months where I'm telling my side of the story. So I kind of go too deep into everything. But what I can say was that there were a lot of factors involved. That made me very, very suspicious. And I think ever since then, he has become better. But there's still something off, both then and now.
That's so fascinating that as an elite chess player, you'd be able to recognize that something is happening that's outside of his capabilities.
Again, I'm not ruling out the factor that chess players are becoming more and more paranoid because we do have chess engines that basically have perfect chess, right? Anybody with their phone can, as I think Elon tweeted to Gary once, like my iPhone can beat you at chess, which is... Which is the truth. And this means that anybody having access to information, it's incredibly dangerous.
And I think top-level chess has been a lot based on trust. And whenever you have outsiders whom there are these stories about, everybody gets a bit jittery. There's like... people who either like they burst onto the scene then they establish themselves and people know that they're legit and so on it's not a problem with him specifically um I don't know it was um
It's just he doesn't seem to be playing or didn't at that point seem to be playing with a particular style. It seemed that he either played kind of eh or he just more or less played any position very well in certain games. Like he could just switch from tactical to positional play very easily. And... It didn't smell good to me. It still doesn't. But to some extent, he had his lawsuit.
We've all kind of moved a little bit on. I think I don't trust him. A lot of other top players still don't trust him. He certainly doesn't... doesn't trust me or chess.com or Hikaru or whomever he felt wronged by.
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Chapter 3: How does Magnus Carlsen prepare for chess tournaments?
Yeah, especially if I'm playing somebody who is a little bit of a rival, it's like, yeah, no, that's not going to happen. No chance. Because every time I lose games, it's a little bit of a story in the chess world, so I prefer to happen as seldom as possible.
I played a little bit of chess when I was young, but I never really got into it. But my real introduction where I got fascinated with chess was actually at a pool hall. Because people in the pool hall would play chess sometimes, but there was this one guy who went to jail. And in jail, he learned how to play chess with his head, in his mind.
And then there was a young kid who was a grandmaster, who was like 16, 17 years old, somewhere around then. Really, really good chess player. who kind of like lost his way and started hanging around in pool halls and gambling and being a weirdo. And I watched these two guys play chess with just words. And I was like, what are you doing? I think I was 22 or 23 at the time.
And I was like, what are you doing? And they were explaining to me that they're playing chess, memorizing the board in their head. And I'm like, that's fucking crazy. And then I saw a video of you blindfolded Playing how many people? How many people did you play? What's the most people you've ever played blindfolded?
I think I've played 12, but the world record is something like 50. That's crazy.
12. You've played 12 people blindfolded.
Yeah. For me, that's... As long as the people I'm playing are kind of decent at chess, that actually kind of makes it easier because it's easier to store the games when I recognize the patterns and so on. When people start making weird moves, I kind of really recognize... So here you are. Oh, so this is another one, actually. This is a blindfold timed...
There are fewer games, but what's difficult about these is that the moves do not come to me in a sequence. The presenter will tell me on board two, E takes D5, and then all of a sudden on board one, E6, and then on board two again, and so on.
So that makes it a bit... Oh, so you have to jump back and forth. So in the other games, there's a sequence where the player, even though if they know what move they're going to take, they must wait until their turn.
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Chapter 4: What role does obsession play in mastering chess?
So you assign their face and you think of their face as they're playing.
Yeah, yeah. Face, like number one, it's that position. Right. Yeah, and so on.
And are you – what are you seeing in your mind when you're envisioning the table, when you're looking at the board? Are you merely thinking of positions? Are you actually thinking of the pieces? Like how are you breaking it down?
No, I just see the chessboard in my head. You just see a completely 3D chessboard in your head? Yeah. And then when I'm playing a simul, I just really think about one at a time, and I kind of store the others away.
But that's so crazy. Like when you're five, six moves in, and you're thinking of all these pieces moving around, and you've got it remembered. You've completely memorized each position of 12 different boards. Yeah.
Yeah, so the difficult part of it where things sometimes go wrong is that So generally, I remember all the games that I've played, but I don't remember every move. I remember in broad strokes what happened. And this is what can happen in these blindfold games as well sometimes.
I can remember everything that's going on, but maybe there's a pawn on the side that I cannot remember if it moved one square or not. That's the thing that can be difficult sometimes.
and i i do we used to have these blindfold like professional tournaments actually um that used to be like both fun but also totally exhausting um and then we would play on on a computer so we'd have like a blank like a blank chess board where we would just click from one square to And then whenever your opponent moved, their move would pop up on the screen.
And also the software will tell you if you're making an illegal move. So I've had people lose track. And then you see them just clicking frenetically, trying to figure out what the position was. Like, there was one guy whom I played, like, he thought his rook was on a certain file, and if it was on that file, he would be able to save a draw.
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Chapter 5: How does Magnus Carlsen view the evolution of chess in the digital age?
Back then, it was really like... My style has become a bit more dynamic over time, but back then, I really, really lacked understanding of more dynamic positions in chess. You can have more static or more dynamic pawn structures if there are a lot of...
possible pawn breaks for both sides and both kings are under attack then it's sort of more dynamic and tactical or it could be more about gaining some minutes positional advantages and that's sort of what I was excelling at the latter and working with him it just improved sort of the more dynamic part of my game A lot. And that helped me very much short term.
And also it's helped me later because it improved my understanding of the game. My main strength is still more in the more static structures. But... That work made me so much more versatile and I still definitely profit from that.
What is a coach for you today? What benefit is a coach today?
A couple of things. The main benefits that I have from my chess coach is opening work. That's the low-hanging fruit. That's That's really what you can get the most out of from game to game. A couple of other things. My coach is also an old friend of mine. He's Danish, so we can communicate in the same language. And he's also just as obsessed with golf as I am.
as i am so that every every time like we have like a chess training camp there's always also a lot of uh a lot of golf being played so um um yeah those are a few things but chess wise it's it's mainly about the the the opening work and so it's essentially he's obviously very good at chess as well but it's essentially bouncing things off of each other and going over positions
Yeah, and then he's very good at using chess engines to get slightly different results than maybe others do.
Do you occasionally, or do you at all, analyze other people's games and break them down together?
Not really. When it comes to analyzing other games, it's more useful for me to look at what the engine is saying. Because the engines are just smarter than you. Yeah, they are. And I'm good enough that I can interpret what the engine is saying to understand why a certain thing a certain thing happens.
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Chapter 6: What unique training methods do top chess players use today?
Then AlphaZero came along, which is a neural network that just learned chess on its own. And it became... more or less as good or maybe slightly, slightly worse than the best traditional chess engines. What's interesting is that the neural networks played chess a lot more like humans.
They were much less concerned about material factors, they were more about positional play and long-term thinking and so on, because it was not based on brute force in the way that traditional engines would.
You would see funny like they have computer tournaments as well with the best engine in the world and you would you will still see like Leela zero that's sort of the clone of alpha zero because they discontinued that Alpha zero project after a while It will make like elementary tactical blunders almost That's crazy
Because, I don't know, it doesn't have... It just thinks about chess differently than traditional engines, but it will also do things that just confounds the very best chess engines in the world still. So that's very interesting to see, and all the best...
Coaches and players now, when you work with chess computers, you always have both a neural net and a traditional chess engine running, as well as some others who are now hybrid, who have a little bit of both. It's just fascinating that it would make blunders. Yeah, well, I don't know if it's something about its search. I really don't know. But it would also make some fascinating decisions like...
When you promote a pawn, you usually promote to a queen because that's almost always the best, unless you sometimes want to promote a knight specifically to give a check or sometimes to avoid stalemate, but that's less frequent. But then what Lila and AlphaZero would sometimes do is that they would promote to a different piece.
Because if it's a piece that's anyway going to be captured, just to give your opponent like a slight chance of making a mistake by making another move, which is something like a human would never ever do. But it's really funny. A little bit of a parallel to what's going on in Go, I think, with this gamesmanship that is going on with the new neural nets. That's crazy that it would just trick you.
Yeah, it would try and trick you. It probably wouldn't trick a human because a human would be like, That's weird. Okay, I'll just take it, whatever. But another engine... Oh, okay. Well, I have another alternative that seems equivalent, more or less. Maybe I'll go for that. Wow. It's very strange.
So what are the best programs that people play on?
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Chapter 7: How does Magnus Carlsen approach chess openings and strategies?
Yeah, are you better now than ever before?
No, I think my peak level is close to the best because chess level or proficiency at anything, it's about making use of the knowledge and making it into skill, right? And I definitely have more knowledge now than I've ever had. But I think probably the best combination I had of knowledge and energy that translated the best into skill was probably in 2019, like first half of the year when I was 28.
And when I was... More like a young Kasparov than I'd ever been before. Very dynamic. Well, what is the difference between you and 2019 and you today? A few things. First, I couldn't play the same openings as I played then because they have been worked out to a point where they're basically, yeah, they're just too analyzed and unplayable. So that's one thing.
Apart from that, I think I could do, like, my average level would probably be a little bit lower because I'm a little bit older and my brain is not quite as fast. But I could do, I think, most of those things. What I don't think I could do is, like, the other sort of best version of me, which was 2013, 2014.
When I was in the best shape of my life and I was just a relentless beast at the board, grinding down my opponents in very long endgames, never giving them any respite whatsoever. Like, purely skill-wise, that was far from the best version. Sorry, knowledge-wise, that was far from the best version of me. But I was just...
Yeah, it's just like the average level of my game definitely was higher than because I barely played really bad games at all because I was always sort of on. I had so much willpower and energy.
Well, you're saying you were in the best shape of your life. Do you mean physically or do you mean just physically? Physically, yeah. Well, there's two factors you're talking about, like physical fitness and nutrition and exercise. These things you don't really take too much into consideration, but they obviously played a huge factor in the most successful period of your life.
Yeah, it did, but then... Because you're only 34. It's not like you're an old man. No, no, no. That's true, but I just feel it with these kids. Their brains are just so much faster than mine. I mean, I've felt it for years as well that... No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not old, but I can I can I can never be at that level of pure like computing power.
But is that generally accepted with chess that there's a certain age where it just drops off? Who has won the world championships at like the oldest age?
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