He was the teenage grandmaster who became a global star. So what now for the 34-year-old? Run-ins with the authorities, ambivalence about a game that made him rich – and a glamorous wedding.
What the world didn’t see was that when the game went wrong, Magnus Carlsen – the highest-rated chess player in history, the colossus who has dominated the game for a decade – was killing time in the womenswear section of Selfridges.
In a previous era, this pairing would have been a clash for the ages. In mid-December Carlsen, five-time world champion, faced off against Vladimir Kramnik, three-time world champion. It was the Federer v Djokovic of chess.
These days, though, mobile phone apps have broken down the chief barrier to organising games – the tedious necessity of making actual human contact – and their game was really just another Tuesday.
Even so, as the two former champions faced off online for a quick blitz game – each allowed just three minutes for all their moves – thousands of fans followed along. They saw Kramnik, who at 49 remembers a time when chess only happened in person and stardom came from set-piece tournaments, bring in his queen for a check. They saw Carlsen, who at 34 came of age in a time when mobile phones outplayed grandmasters and having a popular YouTube channel made chess careers, block it.
They saw the Russian apparently sacrifice his bishop, and the Norwegian fall right into his trap.
That was when they also saw Carlsen – still widely considered the greatest player of all time – resign. The old Turk beat the new Turk. Or, more accurately perhaps, the old Turk beat the now middle-aged Turk.
Either way, 19 moves in and Carlsen’s queen was toast. “Yeah, um, I played terrible chess,” Carlsen says when I bring it up a day later. “It wasn’t my finest hour.” But, in mitigation? “I was actually with my girlfriend. She was shopping. I was just, you know, sitting there waiting and playing with my phone.” He was just another bored fiancé, quite possibly dragged along to another pre-wedding shop, pinging open an app to distract himself. And, it turned out, he was indeed distracted. “It goes to show that if you’re not fully on it, even I can miss very, very simple things.”
Days after that girlfriend became his wife, there is, though, a wider question. Is Carlsen “fully on it” more generally these days?
Carlsen’s story has always not merely been about chess. It has been about youth and sudden success. It has been about rising to global stardom at a time when his sport, if one calls it that, was also rising globally. And now it is about what comes next.
A decade ago, aged 24, Carlsen was the young gun who had toppled the titans. A decade before that, aged 14, he was the wunderkind, shifting bored and distractedly in his seat as players three times his age sweated through humiliating defeats.
Carlsen arrived on the chess scene – as all good chess stars should – with an origin story. His had been a childhood of epic childhood feats of concentration, of parents who became worried when, instead of playing like the other toddlers, he just sat and thought, or completed jigsaws.
He also seemed to come, as most chess stars don’t, from a normal family, who lived just south of Oslo, where he is now based, with a father who didn’t force him to learn openings, and with sisters who were protective of their idiosyncratic – and occasionally bullied – brother.
And then he became Magnus Carlsen who modelled for fashion companies, who appeared with A-listers, who gained a different kind of celebrity for a chess player. Today, having earned what’s conservatively estimated to be £20 million ($43.5m) from the game, he has nowhere left to go, no more worlds to conquer. His is the happy yet slightly poignant position of the child actor with an Oscar, the star striker lifting his second World Cup. What is it to be at an age that would normally be the start of your career, yet also have perhaps passed its peak?
What is it like, in fact, to no longer be the world chess champion, not because you lost the title, and not because you would no longer be the favourite – but because you can’t be bothered any more to contest it?
“I’ve become a bit more OK with the fact that… sometimes… I wouldn’t say that I’m mailing it in… But sometimes I don’t give as much effort as other times. I don’t have the motivation or energy for that any more.” A few weeks after we meet, he will be kicked out of an in-person “rapid and blitz” tournament for wearing jeans. He had offered to change them for smarter trousers the next day, but was told that wasn’t good enough – he needed to change them immediately. His decision not to do so, and forfeit instead, would feel less like a flounce than a shrug. “Honestly,” he told reporters, “I am too old at this point to care too much.” But then, almost more tellingly, a couple of days later he was back. The tournament decreed that, as with the Sicilian Defence, so with dress codes: it would allow for “elegant minor deviations”. Carlsen, it seems, was more important to them than the tournament was to him.
He made it to the final and then did something strange – with the match tied 3.5-3.5, Carlsen suggested that he and his opponent, Ian Nepomniachtchi from Russia, should share the title. It was almost as if he had something else on his mind, somewhere else to be. That weekend, in a snowy chapel in the hills above Oslo, he and 26-year-old Ella Victoria Malone got married.
We are sitting in the Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane. In a few weeks, he will be in another five-star venue, the Grand Hotel in Oslo, where his wedding reception will be held. Today, though, Carlsen has not a champagne glass in front of him, but a chess board. This isn’t his board – it’s been a while, he says, since he sat in front of a physical board. It is instead a prop for use in photographs. He fiddles with it while we chat.
What I want to know is, what next? Garry Kasparov, the last player to come close to his dominance, shifted in middle age into fighting for Russian democracy. Bobby Fischer, the last player to have comparable fame, moved, famously, into antisemitism, reclusiveness and conspiracy theories. What, I ask, is the Norwegian version?
“These days I’ve started to play golf, so that gets me out of bed,” Carlsen says, without looking at me. “That just gets me in a good mood.” He handles the black pieces one by one, twisting them to align perfectly. Back and forth. Back and forth. From the rook on position H8 to the pawn on A7, he gives each a tiny imperceptible nudge, then starts again.
He had arrived at our interview late, and without apparent enthusiasm. I have two friends who are very keen chess fans and players, happily in the top 1 per cent on the biggest chess apps. Both, separately, tell me he could well get grumpy. “He might do rude,” warns one. “But,” he added, not especially comfortingly, “he might also just go monosyllabic and appear so bored you’ll wonder what you did.”
Still not looking at me, Carlsen turns the knights to face each other, as if they are holding a conversation over the head of the king and queen. Then he returns his finger and thumb to the H8 rook once more. In one interview I watched with him, he told the interviewer he was always thinking about chess positions, even at that very moment.
I don’t know if this fiddling is distracting for him; it’s certainly distracting for me. Would he, I ask, as I push a white pawn to D4, like a game?
He turns towards me, pushes his queen’s pawn, stops fiddling – and for the rest of the interview is utterly charming.
It is an odd day to be meeting. Ostensibly, we are here to talk about his new venture, a chess app called Take Take Take. The app allows people to follow big games alongside helpful analysis and commentary written live by chess professionals. I had used it that morning to watch a game – it was a neat way to follow along without the need to surreptitiously check a YouTube feed while at work.
The game I watched, hours before we meet, happened also to be from the biggest match of the year. And this is why it’s an odd day to meet Carlsen.
While we sit playing chess, the world championships are taking place. Ding Liren, the reigning world champion, is defending his title against Gukesh Dommaraju, the 18-year-old challenger to whom he will eventually lose. They are competing to be crowned the best chess player in the world. Except, everyone knows they sort of aren’t.
Because I’m the one who today is playing the best chess player in the world.
The child star
Carlsen emerged into the chess world – as all proper grandmasters must – as a child prodigy. As the narrative of such tales requires, he displayed satisfying early oddities. Aged four he would sit for hours playing Lego. Before the year was out he had learnt all the flags and capitals of countries of the world. Aged 13, in a story often used as a pivot in his trajectory, he drew a game with Garry Kasparov, then the world champion. He went from being a Norwegian star to a global one.
These days, he finds the emphasis on this moment a little embarrassing. “It opened doors… But it was one game. I had the strength of a decent grandmaster and I was playing as white.” Statistically, especially with the slight advantage of going first, you could expect the occasional draw even if Kasparov was by some distance the better player. “I just happened to be young and people made a big deal out of it.” Five years later, in 2009, Kasparov would train Carlsen. Six months later, in 2010, Kasparov would stop training him (“It was a huge clash of personalities. It was unsustainable”), and he definitely wasn’t the better player any more.
Another year after that, in 2011, he became the world’s highest-ranked player with a rating of 2814. The grading system in chess is not a mere ranking. Appropriately, given the sort of people who get into chess, it involves a complex mathematical formula that takes into account the relative ratings of the players going into each game to adjust them afterwards. Chess players like it. Get them talking and they will argue quite passionately that all sports – and indeed any other discipline that involves ranking people, up to and including dating apps – should use a similar system.
In 2013, Carlsen won his first world championship and his rating, in the chess and in the dating world, continued upwards. By now, he had found gainful employment as a male model. In 2014, he reached his peak, chess-wise. His rating of 2882 was the highest of any human ever.
It was high enough that it was difficult for it to go higher – one of the flaws in the system is if everyone has a significantly lower rating, it gets harder and harder to make yours go up. That was when he won his second world championship. A third, fourth and fifth would follow.
He gained a reputation for grinding away persistently in situations where other players would have offered a draw – and eventually winning. Subtly, something changed. During the 2010s, he moved from being seen as the best chess player in the world at that time, to being seen as one of the best of any time. It gave him a psychological dominance that meant opponents would turn up already expecting to lose.
He continued, though, to enjoy the faster, more ad-hoc rapid and blitz games, where players had 30, 10 or even three minutes to finish their game. A bit like Twenty20 in cricket, they have grown in popularity on the apps that now connect hundreds of millions of players. They are quicker to play and more exciting to watch.
Then in 2022, still with the highest rating in the world, he decided to stop. He was bored with world championships.
Carlsen is still also, naturally, the highest-ranked player in those. He still enjoys these games – games where it is one mind, calculating the best move in the moment, against another.
Competing in a world championship had become a different kind of chess. It involved weeks of study, analysing the form of opponents, guessing and second-guessing their plays and counterplays, memorising your own response. Carlsen found he’d had enough of these big set-piece matches, with all the preparation, the computer work, the learning, the coaches. It wasn’t the sort of chess that could occupy him outside Selfridges changing rooms. It wasn’t, in other words, fun any more.
“I love chess. It’s still my favourite thing to do. I like the idea also of playing longer games. I don’t like that it’s been so thoroughly analysed. In the world championship match, you can see they really have to dig deep to get playable positions at all.”
By “playable”, what he means is that players learn so many variations of game strategies in advance that when they meet, the contest becomes one of memory as much as reasoning. They are playing the strategies they have prepared, rather than calculating from fresh the best move on the board. It is, he says, a “very serious flaw” in classical chess.
We return to looking at the world championship game from that morning, running through the moves on Take Take Take. There is an extremely subtle move, midway through, when Dommaraju throws away a lead – probably without even realising it. Carlsen is sympathetic, although he had spotted it. “It’s an intense situation.”
Carlsen’s absence, as the top-ranked player in the world, inevitably undermines the legitimacy of the world championship. But the world championship’s existence, without him, also undermines his legitimacy. Does he miss it?
‘My goals are not as grand’
“Most professional chess players strive for the world championship – it’s the main goal in their career. But no.” He’s done that, and it’s no longer fun. “There is very little in me that is raring to be part of it.” So he is in London instead, taking time out from a two-day city break with Malone.
Ten moves into our game and nothing catastrophic has happened to me. Neither has anything especially edifying. I move a knight. He attacks and I retreat, pointlessly, to where it came from.
Two months ago, Carlsen had a poker night with Demis Hassabis, the British CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s AI division. Hassabis had just won the Nobel prize for an AI program that solved a grand challenge in chemistry, and this was his idea of letting his hair down.
There is more than a decade between them in age, but it makes sense that they are friends. Hassabis was, at one point, the second-best 11-year-old chess player in the world. It turns out that Hassabis is quite a good poker player too. How did the night go? “He is a very stubborn player. And ambitious. I’ll leave it at that.”
Inquiring about their form wasn’t, though, why I bought up Hassabis. Unlike Carlsen, who was just getting going at 11, Hassabis stopped at that age. He decided that a board game was not what he wanted to devote his quite considerable mind to.
So, I ask, back in early October, as the world’s highest-ranked chess player sat across the baize from one of the world’s newest Nobel laureates, did he feel jealousy? Did he wonder whether… Carlsen finishes my sentence. “Whether I should change the world and stuff?” Well, yes.
He slides his rook, to attack a pawn. I bring up a rook to defend, but with a definite feeling that I’m on borrowed time.
“There aren’t many people like Demis who set out to change things and then actually do it. My goals are not as grand. I think most people do better when they’re thinking at a smaller scale.”
He and Malone, who has a Norwegian mother and American father, are approaching their first anniversary. “I told my girlfriend on the very first date that the only things I really bring to the table are chess and puns.” He argues the two are related – both, really, about pattern recognition. “That’s how my brain works.”
The thing about playing chess is, the genius of your opponent sometimes creeps in and catches you unawares. I could play tennis with Roger Federer and instantly know I was hopelessly outclassed. Chess is not like that. I can see Carlsen’s moves and imagine I could make them. Even with the proviso he isn’t even giving me bored-outside-a-Selfridges-dressing-room levels of attention, most of his moves don’t seem that unexpected.
In truth, they aren’t. What a good player does, often, is at each stage just choose the moves that are just that little bit better. He is known for happily playing drawn-out games, building incremental advantages. Imperceptibly at first, the opponent feels constrained, then trapped, then doomed, but doesn’t know how. Like bankruptcy, defeat comes gradually then suddenly.
That’s not what happens to me. I help him out. I make a mistake, a bad exchange, and Carlsen mutters in a sympathetic Norwegian accent, “Yeah, this is a bit of trouble,” and suddenly I am a knight down.
How will he feel when he too experiences a bit of trouble – when his dominance is tested? “I can very clearly see that I do not think as fast as I did in the past, that I don’t have as much youthful energy. Some of the kids are a lot faster than I am. But I can still compete.”
The day after we meet, the world championship will be decided. Gukesh Dommaraju will be declared the winner, the youngest ever at just 18. Those kids are on the march. Just as Carlsen’s 13-year-old self had his big moment when he drew against Kasparov, so he too has had the occasional loss to up-and-coming teenagers.
Will his rating – determined not just by championships but by all the games played in between – inevitably be toppled? Of course. “I don’t feel like any of the kids are close to being better than I am in classical. They will get better and I will not get better. Somebody will surpass me.”
By 30 moves in, continuing the game is insulting. I am, technically, two moves from checkmating Magnus Carlsen, and I will cling to that fact for the rest of my life. The problem – a not insignificant problem – is achieving that mate would rely on the greatest chess player who has lived not seeing the threat, or realising he could mate me first.
I topple my king and shake his hand. “You play quite well,” he says, in a tone similar to one I once used when teaching my five-year-old.
I ask him where it went wrong. With perfect recall he sets up the middle game, from 15 moves ago. There are clips of him playing chess simultaneously against eight people while blindfolded, and beating them all. So of course he can replay our game without thinking. But it is still impressive.
He says that it’s not that he can remember the individual pieces on a board. It’s more that in a game the pieces for him have a logic. The board is something he can read, just as you read this article. It’s like the difference between remembering a six-letter word and six random letters. Genius versus nueigs.
It must be odd, I say as we reset the board, to be 34 and have achieved everything you could want. It must be a strange if privileged problem to do that and have 30 years of career still left. Where does he hope to be if we meet again in another couple of decades?
His mind is clearly in part on the next phase of his life, on the wedding he has planned and the future that will bring.
“Hopefully, I have a nice family with a couple of nice kids, and I’ll be still a very good rapid and blitz player. And hopefully,” he adds, fiddling once again with the black pieces, “I’ll be a single-figure handicap golfer.”
- Download Magnus Carlsen’s new chess app, Take Take Take, at the App Store or Google Play
Written by: Tom Whipple
© The Times of London