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

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

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

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The following is a conversation with Magnus Carlsen, the number 1 ranked chess player in the world and widely considered to be 1 of, if not the greatest chess player of all time.

The camera on Magnus died 20 minutes into the conversation.

Most folks still just listen to the audio through a podcast player anyway, but if you're watching this on YouTube or Spotify, we did our best to still make it interesting by adding relevant image overlays.

I mess things up sometimes, like in this case, but I'm always working hard to improve.

Thank you for your patience and support along the way.

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 1 of the greatest, if not the greatest chess players of all time, but you're also 1 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 Cristiano Ronaldo, Pele, Maradona?

I think it's pretty hard to make a case for anybody else than Messi for his all-around game.

And frankly, my Real Madrid fandom sort of predates the Ronaldo era, the second Ronaldo, not the first 1.

So I always liked Ronaldo, but I always kind of thought that Messi was better.

And I went to quite a number of Madrid games and they've always been super helpful to me down there.

The only thing is that, like, they asked me, they were going to do an interview and they were going to ask me who my favorite player was.

And I said somebody else, I think I said Isco at that point.

So for them, it was very important, but it wasn't that huge to me.

Yeah, but I think just like with chess, it's hard to compare eras.

Obviously, the improvements in football have been, like, in technique and such have been even greater than they have been in chess.

But It's always a weird discussion to have.

But just as a fan, what do you think is beautiful about the game?

Is it, you know, with Messi, 1, he's really good at finishing, 2, very good at assist, Like 3, there's just magic.

There's some, it's like Maradona's hand of God.

Is that important or is it very important to get the World Cups and the big championships and that kind of stuff.

I think the World Cup is pretty overrated seeing as it's such a small sample size.

So it sort of annoys me always when, you know, titles are always, 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 statistics a bit and all the statistics say that Messi is the best finisher of all time, which I think helps a lot.

And then there's the intangibles as well.

The flip side of that is the small sample size

You basically train your whole life for this.

You live your whole life for this, and it's a rare moment, 1 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.

I just think that like rising under pressure and breaking under the pressure is often a really oversimplified take on what's happening.

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

I'm biased because I went to high school in Chicago, Chicago Bulls during the Michael Jordan era.

Let me ask the Jordan versus LeBron James question.

Let's continue on this thread of greatness.

So I'll give you a completely different answer.

Depending on my mood and depending on whom I talk to, I pick 1 of the 2 and then I try to argue

Well, can you, what, again, what would, if you were to argue for either 1, statistically, I think LeBron James is going to surpass Jordan.

And so, again, there's a debate between...

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

And you're depending on mood all over the place.

But where do you lean in general with these folks, with soccer, with anything in life, towards the unquantifiable more?

So when you're unsure, lean towards the numbers.

There's something, that's what people say about Maradona, is he took a arguably somewhat mediocre team to a World Cup.

So there's that also uplifting nature of the player to be able to rise up the whole team.

So are you gonna like, are you gonna punish Messi for taking a mediocre Argentine squad to the final in 2014 and punish him because they lost to a great team very narrowly after they missed.

He set up like a great chance for Iguain in the first half, which he fluffed.

And then, yeah, eventually they lost the game.

Yeah, they do criticize Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi for being on really strong squads in terms of the club teams and saying, yeah, okay, it's easy when you have like Ronaldinho or whoever on your team.

It would be very interesting just if the league could make a decision.

And just every single game, just keep reallocating or maybe once a season or every season you get random.

Let's say every player, if let's say they sign a five-year contract for a team, like 1 of them, you're gonna get randomly allocated to let's say a bottom half team.

I bet you there's gonna be so much corruption around that.

No, obviously it wouldn't ever happen or work, but I think it's interesting to think about.

If you break down your approach to chess, when you're at your best, what do you think contributes to that approach?

Is it memory recall of specific lines and positions?

How much of it is messing with the strategy of the opponent?

So the game theory aspect, in terms of what contributes to the highest level of play that you do?

I think the answer differs a little bit now from what it did 8 years ago.

For instance, I feel like I've had 2 peaks in my career in

And in those years, I was very different in terms of my strength.

Strength, specifically in 2019, I benefited a lot from opening preparation.

While in 2013-2014, I mostly tried to avoid my opponent's preparation rather than that being a strength.

So I'm mentioning that also because it's something you didn't mention.

I think my intuitive understanding of chess has over those years always been a little bit better than the others, even though it has evolved as well.

Certainly there are things that I understand now that I didn't understand back then, but that's not only for me, that's for others as well.

I was younger back then, so I played with more energy, which meant that I could play better in long drawn out games, Which was also a necessity for me because I couldn't beat people in the openings.

terms of calculation, that's always been a weird issue for me.

I've always been really, really bad at solving exercises in chess.

Like that's been like a blind spot for me.

First of all, I found it hard to concentrate on them.

I mean, 1 thing is mate, but find the best move.

That's generally the exercise, like find the best move, find the best line.

And then when I get these lines during the game, I very often find the right solution, even though it's not still the best part of my game to calculate very, very deeply.

But it doesn't feel like calculation you're saying?

me, it's more like I'm at the board trying to find the solution and I understand like the training at home is like trying a little bit to replicate that.

Like you give somebody half an hour in a position like in this instance, you might have thought for half an hour if you play the game.

1 thing I know that I am good at though is calculating short lines because I calculate them well.

I'm good at seeing little details and I'm also much better than most at evaluating which I think is something that sets me apart from others.

So evaluating specific position, if I make this move and the position changes in this way, is this a step in the right direction, like in a big picture way?

Yeah, like you calculate a few moves ahead and then you evaluate, because A lot of the times you cannot, the branches become so big that you cannot calculate everything.

Yeah, so you have to make valuations based on, based mostly on knowledge and intuition.

And somehow I seem to do that pretty well.

When you say you're good at short lines, what's that?

That's usually like lines of 2 to 4 moves each.

Okay, so that's directly applicable to even faster games like Blitz, chess and so on?

Yeah, Blitz is a lot about calculating force lines.

So those, you can see pretty clearly that the players who struggle at Blitz who are great at classical are those who rely on deep calculating ability.

Cause you simply don't have time for that in Blitz.

You have to calculate quickly and rely a lot on intuition.

Can you try to, I know it's really difficult.

Can you try to talk through what's actually being visualized in your head?

My interpretation is that it is two-dimensional.

What about when you do the branching, when you have multiple boards and so on, how does that look?

And that's what when people play, or at least that's what I do.

When I play blindfold chess against several people, then it's just always 1 board at a time and the rest are stored away somewhere.

So like you went down 1 branch, you're like, all right, that's, I got that.

I understand that there's some good there, there's some bad there.

Like, how do you store away the information?

Sometimes I have to sort of repeat it because I forget.

And it does happen frequently in games that you're thinking for, especially if you're thinking for a 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.

So that's obviously what happens when you store the information and you cannot retrieve it.

minutes, like how do you break that down?

Like, what's the algorithm here that takes 30 minutes to run?

30 minutes usually means that I don't know what to do.

Yeah, I'm trying to find something that isn't there.

I think 10 to 15 minutes things in complicated positions can be really, really helpful.

Then you can spend your time pretty efficiently.

Just, it just means that the branches are getting, getting wide.

There's a, there's a lot to, to run through, both in terms of calculation and lots you have to evaluate as well.

And then based on that 10 to 15 minute thing, you have a pretty good idea what to do.

I mean, 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.

It mainly to the middle game because when you get to the end game, it's usually brute force calculation that makes you spend so much time.

So middle game is normally, it's a complicated mix of brute force calculation and creativity and evaluation.

Well, you're good at every aspect of chess, but you're also, your end game is legendary.

So can you linger on that then, try to explain what the heck is going on there.

Like if you look at game 6 of the previous world championship, the longest game ever played in chess, what it was, I think his queen versus your rook, knight in 2 pawns.

And it's kind of not obvious that it wouldn't be a draw.

So how do you escape it not being a draw and you win that match?

No, I knew that for most of the time it was a theoretical draw.

Since chess with 7 or less pieces on the board is solved.

So you can like people watching online, they can just check it.

They can check and they can check a so-called table base and they, it just going to spit out win for white, win for black or draw.

So and also I knew that I knew that didn't know that position specifically, but I knew that it had to be a draw.

So for me, it was about staying alert, first of all, trying to look for the best way to put my pieces.

But yeah, those endgames are a bit, they're a bit unusual.

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,

even for the end game, short variations matter.

It does matter in some simpler end games.

But also like there are these theoretical end games with very few pieces like Rook-Knights and Toupons 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.

It's usually more of understanding and evaluation.

And then I can use my strengths very well.

Why are you so damn good at the end game?

Isn't there a lot of moves from when the end game starts to when the end game finishes and you have a few pieces and you have to figure out, it's like a sequence of little games that happens, right?

Like little pattern, like How does being able to evaluate a single position lead you to evaluate a long sequence of position that eventually lead to a checkmate?

Well, I think if you evaluate well at the start, you know what plans to go for, and then usually the play from there is often pretty simple.

Let's say you understand how to arrange your pieces and often also how to arrange your pawns early in the end game, then that makes all the difference.

And after that is like what we call technique very often.

That it's technique basically just means that the moves are simple and these are moves that, you know, a lot of players could make, not only the very strongest ones.

These are moves that are kind of understood and known.

So with the evaluation, you're just constantly improving a little bit and that just leads to suffocating the position and then eventually to the win.

As long as you're doing the evaluation well, 1 step at a time.

Also, yeah, as I said, like if you evaluated better and thus accumulated some small advantages, then you can often make your life pretty easy towards the end of the endgame.

So you said in 2019, sort of the second phase of why you're so damn good.

Is it to throw the opponent off from any prepared lines?

Is there something you could put into words about why you're so damn good at the openings?

Again, these things have changed a lot over time.

Back in Kasparov's days, for instance, he very often got huge advantages from the opening as White.

He was able to look places others didn't.

Also, he had a very strong team of people who had specific strengths in openings that he could use.

Yeah, and he would also very often come up with them himself.

Also, at the start, he had some of the first computer engines to work for him, to find his ideas, to look deeper, to verify his ideas.

He was better at using them than a lot of others.

Now I feel like the playing field is a lot more level.

There are both computer engines, neural networks, and hybrid engines available to practically anybody.

So it's much harder to find ideas now that actually give you an advantage with the white pieces.

I mean, people don't expect to find those ideas anymore.

Now it's all about finding ideas that are missed by the engines, either they're missed entirely or they're missed at low depth.

And using them to, you know, gain some advantage in the sense that you have more knowledge.

And, you know, It's also good to know that usually these are not complete bluffs, these are like semi-bluffs, so that you know that even if your opponent makes all the right moves, you can still make a draw.

And also at the start of 2019, neural networks had just started to be a thing in chess.

And I'm not entirely sure, but there were at least some players in even in the top events who you could see did not use them or did not use them in the right way.

And then you could gain a huge advantage because a lot of positions, they were being evaluated differently by the neural networks than traditional chess engines because they simply think about chess in a very, very different way.

So short answer is these days, it's all about surprising your opponent and taking it into position where you have more knowledge.

So is there some sense in which it's okay to make suboptimal quote unquote moves?

I mean, you have to, because the best moves have been analyzed to death mostly.

So that's a kind of, when you say semi-bluff, that's a kind of sacrifice.

You're sacrificing the optimal move, the optimal position, so that you can take the opponent.

You take the opponent to something they didn't prepare well.

Yeah, but you could also look at it another way that regardless, like if you turn on whatever engine you turn on, like if you try to analyze either from the starting position or the starting position of some popular opening, Like if you analyze long enough, it's always gonna end up in a draw.

So in that sense, you may not be going for like the objective, the tries that are objectively the most difficult to draw against, But you know, you are trying to look at least at the less obvious paths.

Do you use Leela, Stockfish in your preparations?

Personally, I try not to use them too much on my own, because I know that when I play, you obviously cannot have help from engines.

And I feel like often having imperfect or knowledge about a position or some engine knowledge can be a lot worse than having no knowledge.

So I try to look at engines as little as possible.

So yeah, so your team uses them for research, for a generation of ideas.

But you are relying primarily on your human resources.

Yeah, I can evaluate as a human, I can know what they find unpleasant and so on.

And it's very often the case, for me to some extent, but a lot for others, that you arrive in a position and your opponent plays a move that you didn't expect.

And, you know, if you didn't expect it, you know, that is probably not a great move, since it hasn't been expected by the engine.

But if it's not, if it's not obvious why it's not a good move, it's usually very, very hard to figure it out.

And so then looking at the engines doesn't necessarily help because at that point, like you're facing a human, you have to sort of think as a human.

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