Magnus Carlsen joins Joe Rogan to reveal how his father introduced chess at age five, but his sister ignited his competitive fire, turning it into a career by 13. He dismisses the "anal beads" cheating theory as absurd yet acknowledges systemic distrust, citing unnatural play patterns in young prodigies and past scandals like a Danish player caught using a phone. Carlsen’s intuitive style—prioritizing pattern recognition over Soviet-era brute-force tactics—clashes with modern engine-driven chess, where AlphaZero reshaped positional play; he adapted faster than peers in 2019 but now avoids engines, calling them tools. Harsher penalties for online cheating and Norwegian rap (Mr. Pimp Lotion, Oral-B) as his Blitzchess focus aid underscore how chess blends creativity, genetics, and culture, even as its technical demands evolve. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, I mean he's not admitted to nearly the extent of his cheating.
But if you sort of take what...
What Chess.com say, then yeah, he cheated a bunch online in a certain period of time, partly in tournaments, but mostly in casual games, as he just set himself to get himself up the standings and play the best players in the world.
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... 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 cannot go too deep into everything.
But what I can say was that there were a lot of factors that made me very, very suspicious.
And I think ever since then, he has become better.
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 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, I don't know, it was...
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 was...
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 trust me or chess.com or Hikaru.
The problem is once someone admits that they cheated a game, especially a game that has a lot of trust in it like chess, you're always going to think, is he cheating now?
Always.
But the question is, what method?
What do people do?
So if you're sitting there, you have no phone, your pockets are empty, what could you be doing?
And then, you know, we had a live tournament in Paris last year when I played him, where there was proper security, where all of these things would be picked up.
And he didn't play to nearly the same level there.
So I think...
Well, I'm not an expert in all of that, but that's what I've heard from people.
That's the most obvious thing that someone could have done.
And it wouldn't be really that hard to pull off, considering the kind of security we have at chess tournaments.
And this tournament had a little bit of security.
A lot of them are open tournaments.
People are wandering in and out of the playing hall.
There are people...
In the playing hall, spectators with their smartphones on and taking pictures or whatever, going in and out, they could make signals.
Yeah, so the anal beads thing, for people who don't know what we're talking about, Theory was that he had vibrating anal beads that would somehow or another through some sort of code Explain to him the moves and I've thought about this for a lot longer than I care to admit like what?
What kind of code are you getting from inside your butt that you like?
No, I actually played an open tournament in Denmark about 20 years ago, where there was a guy who was playing Grandmaster in the first round, like, this was not a very good player, and he came drunk to the table and just literally pulled out his phone and opened a chess program, but of course, he was immediately...
So that wasn't, of course, nearly as nefarious, but yeah.
I think you can be dumb and be fairly good at chess.
I think some intelligence certainly helps, but after all, a lot of chess is about learning patterns, right?
And basically anybody can do that.
So applying them at a higher level, learning how to evaluate and so on, that sort of is what sets really the best players apart from merely good players.
But I feel like anybody could become...
Quite decent at the game.
But I do love the fact that, you know, there are no coincidences, like, there are no outside factors.
Well, if you don't talk other than cheating, of course.
But it's just...
Yeah, you're either outsmarting your opponent or you're getting outsmarted.
The people that I've worked with, they certainly study chess a lot.
But others, I'm not quite sure.
The thing is that chess is always like...
It's still been a bit of a hobby for me that once it starts to feel like work, then it's harder for me.
I had a chess coach when I was little.
I went to have sessions once a week, which I loved.
And then he started giving me homework.
I told him quickly, I don't like homework.
I would still spend a lot of time reading books, playing online, the things that I still do, but I would do them for fun.
And that was the difference between me and the other kids, is that they would go to chess practice, they would maybe even do their homework, but they weren't living and breathing sort of the game that...
I think about it all the time.
I'm thinking about the game while I'm sitting on this chair.
I'm still analyzing a game that I played today.
It never goes completely out of my mind.
And I think a lot of very good chess players do that, but casual chess players, no, of course.
So maybe the thing is discipline versus enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm causes obsession and enjoyment, which probably leads to better retention of information.
Whereas just pure discipline for the sake of, like, I have to do the work in order to get better, you're missing this enjoyment.
You're missing this enthusiasm for it that you have managed to, although absorbing so much information and playing all the time, you've managed to keep it playful and fun.
But it's interesting because you've been able to excel above so many.
It makes me wonder like what I always am fascinated by some whether it's a Tiger Woods or whether whatever the the athlete is or whatever the game they play What separates the very best from everyone else like I know in martial arts?
There's a series of factors that have to do with genetics training coaches Sparring partners and then ultimately discipline and drive but With chess, it's all mental.
Physical has nothing to do with it.
So do you think it's a genetic thing?
Do you think you have a unique mind for chess?
Do you think it's this balance that you keep with enthusiasm and obsession?
Like, what do you think separates you from everyone else?
Naturally gifted at the game, otherwise I wouldn't have come this far.
And my dad is incredibly good with numbers.
He started playing chess quite late, but became decent.
My mother was quite smart and my sisters are very intelligent too.
So it's clear that...
You know, there are some good genes.
And I just, you know, I happened to find also an environment early on where I lived near Oslo, which had probably the best Chester environment there was in Norway, at the very least, where I had access to coaches and I had access to a little training group of other ambitious kids.
After that, you know, I think the most important thing that I've done is that I haven't really listened to people who want me to do things like a certain way because that's the way things have always been done, especially with the Soviet chess school that was the dominant one for so many years.
So I've always sort of gone my own way, tried to have as much...
Fun, everything has to be about enjoyment.
And yeah, I cannot tell you why, but I just understand the game better than the others.
I don't calculate necessarily as far as the other, but my intuition for short lines, constantly evaluating is just better.
It's always just such an interesting thing to analyze, like, high performers, you know, and just to wonder, like, what it is that separates high performers.
When you say your father started playing late, how old was he?
We still don't exactly know how much information is transferred between parents to children.
And it seems like there's a lot of talents, whether it's like singing talent or sports talent, that you have to wonder, like, is that coming from genes?
Or is that coming from the environment which this child grows up, which this person?
Or is it a combination of all those factors?
I wonder if someone gets really, a very intelligent person gets very good at chess early on.
I wonder if some information or some proclivity for the game gets transferred.
I think the reaction in the chess community, at least with certain people, was more along the lines of how could such a lousy player have such a good son at chess with my dad.
And the fact is as well that There are practically no, there are many couples of, you know, like both mother and father are grandmasters in chess, but I don't think any of them have had sons or daughters that are grandmasters.
So where is you see anywhere like in the NBA or the NHL or in football or wherever, like it happens all the time.
So I cannot say exactly why that is, but it does suggest that, you know, it's not a given, at least with genetics, that your children are going to do the same thing.
I wonder if you're a child and your parents are absolutely obsessed with the game if it's annoying.
And you're like, fuck this game.
I want to go play in the park and my parents don't even pay attention to me.
This is bullshit.
There's a lot of children of alcoholics that will not drink.
They won't even try it because they've seen the effects of it.
I wonder that.
Because chess is an obsessive game.
I remember when Howard Stern was playing it.
I would listen to him talk about it on the radio and about how he started hiring a coach and he was playing all the time and he's improving his rating.
Like, you don't, like, just get it immediately, and you don't necessarily get enjoyment out of it immediately as you start to play.
So you have to spend time on it, and then I think when you're trying to do something hard, then it becomes much more rewarding, and it's easier for that to become an obsession when you start to get that reward.
I think for any field that's trying to achieve something with publicity, there's always going to be A little bit of a negative with what exactly we're connected with, right?
Because everybody knows chess and cheating.
But overall, I think it's been massively positive.
Hopefully, the Netflix thing coming up in a year, even though...
not the White House not the CIA if the public finds out how deep this really is I don't think we survive Robert De Niro is absolutely legendary in his first TV series and you don't really know if he's the good guy or the bad guy till the end zero
Zero Day has an incredible supporting cast including Angela Bissette, Jesse Plemons, Lizzie Kaplan and Connie Britton.
Zero Day is now playing only on Netflix.
Yeah, that would be like psychologically torturous, right?
Yeah, so, like, 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.
And I do...
We used to have these blindfold professional tournaments, actually.
That used to be both fun, but also totally exhausting.
And then we would play on a computer, so we'd have a blank chessboard where we would just click from one square to another, and then whenever your opponent moved, their move would pop up on the screen.
And I've had...
And also the software will tell you if you're making an illegal move.
So I've had people like lose track and then you see them just clicking phonetically.
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.
So I think he tried every single rook move on that file, hoping that the rook was there.
But, like, obviously I knew that it wasn't.
But, yeah.
Overall, I feel like, honestly, like, blindfold chess is...
Is a bit of a party trick in the sense that for the very top players, it's not that hard.
But obviously for non-serious chess players, it seems incredibly hard.
I'm sure that, for instance, solving Rubik's Cube is really, really easy for those who know how to do it quickly, right?
The thing is, I actually got a PlayStation recently, but my wife is playing GTA and all of these FPS games, and I'm playing some chill FIFA or something.
But the thing about that is that I didn't really spend that much time on those things when I was little, which I think was a good thing.
I was doing some sports and I was doing a lot of chess.
Not so much school, but I kind of found time for everything else.
I think it was an important part of my chess education as well that I think some of the kids today are missing, that I actually learned chess on a physical board.
I was able to practice from a fairly young age playing online, but I wasn't allowed to use the computer for more than a couple of hours a week, right?
So I had to spend that really well playing chess.
Otherwise, I would just sit there with my board, with my books, and, you know, try and figure things out.
The thing about video games is the narrative was always video games are a huge waste of time.
And if you do it, you're not going to get anywhere in life.
The problem with that is now people make a lot of money playing video games.
And they've also shown that there's some benefits from video games that leak over into other things.
Like, for instance, they found out that surgeons...
Who play video games regularly make was like 25% less errors 37% 37% less errors That's a bit like I would feel like if there was a factor in medical school and they said well if you do not Do this you will make 37% more mistakes.
They would force you To engage in that, whatever it is.
It's like whatever particular discipline that was.
Like, if you want to be a surgeon, you must do this.
I would say, if you want to be a surgeon, you should fucking play video games.
Because these people are 37% less likely to screw up an operation.
We used to have a whole local area network at our old studio where we'd all play Quake.
And it was a real problem.
I just wanted to end the podcast so I could go play Quake.
And then we'd play for hours.
And it eventually got to a point where I was like, okay, I gotta quit again.
Just cold turkey, never again, leave it alone.
Because they're just too fun, and if you have other things, you have obligations, like chess, like you're an actual professional chess player, Call of Duty or whatever you're playing, Quake, it's going to eat your time.
I remember when I first moved out, I was technically a chess professional, but I didn't have a lot of time to...
I had a lot of time to kill when I was home.
And I got myself a PlayStation, played a ton of FIFA back then.
And there was a GameStop near me that they made a lot of money on me just buying new controllers all the time because I would throw them into the wall.
But I have that same personality that I become obsessed with things.
Well, I can tell you that I always thought, well, I wouldn't say that, but I always thought that I would get into golf later in life, and then I decided more or less a year ago that...
I was going to start and now I am obsessed and it's all I want to do.
I can 100% relate.
But my wife knows that I'm so happy when I come back from golf that it's better if I get to do it quite often.
There's been a lot of criticism in the boxing world, and particularly in some of his promoters and things along those lines, where they've criticized his...
If they do that with him, and I obviously see them do it with Trump, but...
You have to golf to understand what golfing does to you.
It appears from the outside that people are drinking and smoking pot and having a good old time out there and giggling around, farting around with their friends.
But the touch grass meditative element, it truly is.
Like he was saying, I'm in such a crazy good mood after golf.
I would want my president golfing a couple times a week, knowing the effects that it gives you.
A much clearer mind, a big burst of energy.
You would think it would be exhausting walking around the woods or grass for four hours, but for some reason it's totally the opposite.
Whether it's the sun, the grass, the this, the that, the differential, going from a powerful thing to a mid-range thing to the delicate touch and accuracy of putting, these repetitive things.
For some reason, it's a mind clearer and kind of an energy giver.
Whereas video games and other things make you depressed.
It's almost impossible to be down or depressed after golfing.
Because it's hand-eye coordination, calculation, managing the lay of the land, the way the rolls of the hills are.
And all those factors, I think like this is something that I think people genuinely need in life.
And I think it's one of the reasons why people respect chess so much is because they know how difficult it is and they know that all this is going on and that they see you two just staring at the board, looking at these pieces and calculating this insane number of possibilities that could emit from each individual move.
It's like that stimulation.
When someone gets good at a game, I think it's very valuable for you.
And I think that can apply to all sorts of things in life.
So I agree with you.
I'd want the president to play golf, too.
I'd want him to find something, whatever it is.
Find a thing that you can excel at other than just being the president.
Well, I mean, they literally used PlayStation fucking controllers when they were using drones.
I don't know if they still do it now.
I think now they have more sophisticated setups.
One of the reasons why they were using them was because so many people were accustomed to those.
You get kids that have been playing Madden 10 hours a day for 15 fucking years, and then you give them the same controller, and they're like, oh yeah, I could fucking drop some bombs on people.
At best, surgeons, just whatever hand-eye coordination that they have is probably so intricate that they could probably excel at anything.
They'd probably get good at video games.
Like, a very good surgeon who's never played video games would probably get really good at video games really quickly because the communication between your hands and your mind.
Tricky part of that stat where the younger people are the ones playing the video games that probably wouldn't slip up with their hands as easily as an older surgeon that has never played video games, right?
Yeah, we're very lucky that it has this unique position.
Whether that's deserved, I don't know.
But there's just something about the fact that it's a very, very simple game.
But it's still so infinitely difficult.
The thing now, though, is that we're trying to actually make it a bit more difficult for a classical form of chess because now computers are so strong.
Preparation has gone so far that...
The thought of sitting down at the board and just thinking on your own from the very get-go, it's not there anymore.
Anybody who's really good at chess, anybody can learn the best openings very quickly.
Even if you go 10, 20 years ago, you could play...
You could play, for instance, in the Chess Olympiad, which is the biggest team nation tournament in the world.
And you could play against the best player from, let's say, Colombia.
And, you know, you would know that they have certain skills, but they might not have the same set of openings, right?
Now, all of these, like, there are kids everywhere.
And they just, like, they know their stuff so well.
So now we're, like, testing out new formats.
One that we call freestyle, which is basically, there are 960 starting, possible starting positions if you shuffle the pieces on the first rank.
And basically, like, you start out, you just draw the position 10 minutes before the game, no preparation whatsoever.
And you basically start with, like, in gaming, a new map every single game.
So that's sort of for the traditionalists.
That's not the same game.
So there are some people who don't like it.
But for the professionals, it's a chance to use their skills.
Because otherwise, chess is moving.
It's becoming faster.
Chess used to be an art, science, everything.
With the way things are now, it's just very fast and it's all games, sports and so on.
I feel like with thinking from the very first move, you're bringing some of the other factors back as well.
Yeah, and you see there are such different approaches as well, even with the kids.
I had a training camp a few years ago with a kid called Alireza Firouza.
He plays for France now, but he's from Iran originally.
I think he was about 14 then.
My chess coach had recommended that we bring him in because he said that this is the most talented kid out there.
So we have this camper.
Typically, everybody has their laptop and there's a chessboard in the middle where you sort of look at your own thing and then some things together on the board and you throw out ideas, mostly for openings, but also sometimes other little exercises and so on.
And this kid, he would have his laptop where he would analyze a certain position and then he would...
Play games, like, for money on that same site at the same time so that he could buy cloud engine times because, like, the very best engines, they're stronger, like, if they're in the cloud than from your own laptop, generally.
So he would buy time for that by playing games, like, one-minute games on that server.
He would play...
Five-minute games on another server, and he would analyze with us on the board, and he was still following everything.
He had no problems whatsoever just being there.
That's one way of doing it.
He basically became one of the best players in the world by just...
He's not good at Rabbid Chess.
He's not good at Blitz.
He's not good at other forms.
But he has made all his studies about Classical chess.
He didn't even own chess software on his computer before he was like 13. Wow.
Human beings' capacity to excel at things and that you really only know when someone pushes it a little bit further, like this guy playing all these games simultaneously.
You know what I mean?
If everybody's doing it one way, if everybody's only playing a few games a day and hanging out, you'll probably all stay at the same level.
But if you've got one fucking psychopath in the group that's online and is playing and is reading books, that guy's going to pass everybody.
And then everybody else realizes, oh, that's possible.
You'd have two hours for 40 moves, then you'd have an hour for the next 20 moves, and then half an hour for the rest of the game.
So a maximum of seven hours.
And that form is still being played.
And then you have faster forms of chess, which is blitz chess, which is usually five or three minutes, and rapid chess, which is somewhere from 10 to 30 minutes.
It's funny though that my dad and my sisters, two of my sisters, they played a bit of competitive chess as well.
I think at some point in time, They wanted to learn a couple of openings, so I taught them a couple of openings, and I think all of them just never played anything else, basically.
So they certainly didn't have the same kind of passion to study, but I'm glad I was able to push them into some decent lines.
Yeah, creatine is something that everybody should take.
Men, women, children, everybody should take creatine.
It's a really good supplement, super safe, and it aids in strength and muscle recovery and stuff like that, but it also has a lot of cognitive benefits, which is generally just like a very good, safe supplement to take.
What does it say here, Jane?
Cognitive function.
Studies suggest that creatine supplementation may improve cognitive function, including memory, attention, and reasoning.
It may increase brain energy levels by boosting endosine triphosphate production, ATP, which is essential for brain function.
Creatine has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that may protect brain cells from damage caused by oxidative stress and neurotoxins.
It does a lot of different things.
If you Google it, there's a ton of different benefits.
And it's frustrating, especially if you've got a big game and you know that you're starting down to zero because your brain is not working the way it's supposed to be.
And the real danger is if I do that, if my brain's not on full tilt and I'm talking to a scientist, and I'm like, oh, we have to talk about quantum physics.
Have good questions.
You have to be able to follow what you're saying because it's so esoteric.
You know, it's weird that the brain just doesn't always work exactly how you want it to.
Have you ever consulted a mental coach or, you know, someone who works with people on mindsets to try to capture what is happening when you are in that complete total flow state of laser-focusedness and try to recreate that?
Because there's a bunch of different mind coaches that will tell you for a bunch of different pursuits that...
What you have to do is when you get to that state, whatever that state is, recognize that you're there and then try to get a map of the territory and try to will yourself back into that thing.
But then there's another school of thought that says, no, it just has to happen organically.
And that you just need to be obsessed and focused and take care of yourself and meditate.
When it comes, it's going to come, but you have to accept that it's a gift and it's just not always going to be there.
So I feel at some point I'm just more or less content with the way things are.
That most days that I'm playing, I'm going to be fairly good.
On some days I'm going to be at my very best.
Other days I'm going to be very far from my best.
Yeah, it's sort of the way it is.
I'm definitely much more open to doing things to prevent me from having those very worst days because those are the ones that really hurt you, especially now that we're playing a lot of faster tournaments where there are knockouts where basically if you have one bad day, you're out and it doesn't matter.
Back in the days with classical tournaments, you could have a really bad day, but then you can always bounce back.
One of my better tournaments that I've played, I used to play every year at this seaside resort in the Netherlands, and it's in the middle of winter, so it's not very resort-like.
It's just rainy and windy, and there's basically nothing there except this big tournament that's been there for 80 years, and it's for three weeks every January.
So for me, there's not a lot to do.
So what I would do, like, Every day I'd wake up, I'd go for a walk, and then I would watch like 30 to 45 minutes of NBA highlights from the day before,
look at chess for 15 minutes, whatever my coach has sent me of preparation that we discussed the day before, eat, and then And then go play.
And that worked really, really well.
It's just keeping it as simple as possible, honestly.
Do you ever get to the point where you feel burnout, where you want to just take days off, a week off, and not think about chess, not touch a chessboard?
Or is it just constantly playing in the background no matter what you do?
That's probably why you're one of the best of all time, if not the best.
That's a beautiful approach, right?
If you can find a thing that you love so much, that even though you do it all the time and you've done it since you were a child, you're still obsessing and loving it.
I just take a breath and think about how lucky that I am.
And there are just moments where I just sort of, I wouldn't say rediscover my love for the game, but where I just think like, I'm obsessed with this game and I'm completely fine with that.
If people can find a thing like that in their life, that really is the key to an enjoyable life.
If the thing that you do all the time you're obsessed with, and we talk about it all the time at our comedy club, we're all in the green room, we're like, we are so lucky that this is actually what we do for a job.
And pretty much everybody who's good at it is obsessed with it, and they think about it all the time.
It's kind of the only way.
But I'd need time off sometimes.
Because I think that's different because it's always different ideas and different things you're working on.
Sometimes you need time just to refresh your perspective.
But with a game like chess, I guess you don't really need time off.
That perspective is very important for people to recognize, like the perspective of gratitude, of appreciation that you're so fortunate to have found something.
People go their whole lives and never find a thing that they're truly, absolutely passionate about.
And for a guy like you...
I mean, it's a shiny example for people, I think.
I think that's one of the things that I enjoy the most about super high performers is that they provide an insane amount of inspiration to other people.
When someone sees you play chess at the highest level or sees, you know, Michael Jordan play basketball or whatever it is, you get this feeling of what human beings can do and it elevates your own expectations of yourself and of people around you.
They're very good at and they get recognized for it and when a person like you does it and does it publicly and it's inspiring It's a great gift for other people.
I mean it truly is who's been like Are there particular players that you really enjoy watching play and particular styles that you enjoy?
I think my favorite probably player of all time is It's sort of the young Kasparov before he became world champion.
The thing is, what I find fascinating about that is that he played with a style that was so unique and so dynamic that I know that I could never replicate it.
It's just not the way that I play.
So that's something I admire a lot.
Usually, whatever I'm into, be it soccer or golf or basketball or whatever, I admire what people do, not necessarily like it's about the people themselves.
So that's the way it has been for me in chess as well, that I try to learn from people's games and what they do and when I talk to them.
About that, being able to study with Gary back in the day.
And Anand, who was the world champion before me.
Because it's only then when you study, you talk to them, you understand how good they really are and how much they understand.
For instance, with Anand, I had a training session in 2008 where we had both played a tournament where...
I'd done reasonably well, and he had sort of, towards the end, he had mailed it in, but he was preparing for the Classical World Championship.
So, I think I had two days off, and he was living outside Madrid.
And so I went to Madrid for a couple of days, because the other tournament was in the north of Spain.
Then I went to his house, and as soon as that training camp started, it's like something just switched with him, and he was...
He was just so focused.
We played a bunch of training games, and from being this guy who seemed completely disinterested in this other tournament, all of a sudden he was crushing me.
He had a massive plus score in our games, and it felt like everything we analyzed, he just had a much deeper understanding of the game.
It seemed that he was faster tactically and everything, and it made me appreciate how good...
It was just a reality check for me because I thought at that point that I was...
I was ranked, I think, third in the world.
I had very briefly been ranked number one already at that point, like for a week.
And I thought before that, I thought I was maybe one of the best two, three players in the world.
And it made me realize that I wasn't.
That maybe I was able to have better results than my actual level because of youth energy and optimism, right?
And that made me just, yeah, it just made me realize that I have a lot to learn and that I should be patient and not expect everything to sort of come that fast.
Because at that point I'd had a year of more or less constant rise.
Yeah, it's just winning tournaments.
Every time I would lose a game, I would just believe that I could strive back immediately.
But having a little bit of a reality check I think helped me later to actually understand the game a bit better.
But I've still taken away that I think in chess the optimal state when you're playing a game is somewhere between optimistic and delusionally optimistic.
Because If you're realistic, you're just never going to be opportunistic enough to sort of exploit your opponent's mistakes.
I think another factor is the way you analyze things, that you were able to say, I was a little delusional, and even though I'm doing very well, I got to trust in this process of growth and development, and that it is a very, very long process.
I was just reading an article about the extraordinary leaps that AI has taken and that one of the more shocking things was that it was able to beat the best players at Go, which they thought was like a long time coming.
Things 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 like a neural net and a traditional chess engine running as well as some others who are now like hybrid who have a little bit of both.
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 a slight chance of making a mistake by making another move, which is something 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.
There was actually one time where I played corporate simul, and there was this guy who said, I built a chess program in my university class.
Can I let that play against you instead of myself?
And I was like, yeah, sure, why not?
And I actually, like, beat it fairly handily because I played some kind of, like...
Anti-computer chess where I just close up the position as much as possible and just let it have as few possibilities as possible to out-calculate me so that it's a purely strategical game.
That doesn't work against very good engines, but it can work against weaker ones.
But no, humans, we don't have any...
There was a Grandmaster who played a match recently against Lila, which is the best A neural network engine now.
They were playing classical chess and he started with a night more.
And they played a 10 game match and he won 5.5 to 4.5.
Yeah, well, specifically the neural nets have improved our understanding of the game immensely.
The AvoZero paper came out very late 2018. And actually, I played a World Championship match late 2018 as well against an American, Fabiano Caruana.
That was the best match, I think, that I've ever played.
We played 12 draws, actually, and then I won in a tiebreak.
But the games were super high quality, and he was very evenly matched.
And then he was actually using...
Lila, the AlphaZero clone, which we didn't have access to.
We didn't even know that was a thing.
But the thing is, after AlphaZero came out in late 2018, there was a period, half a year maybe, early 2019, where you could very clearly see which players have been using these neural networks or knew how to use them and which players didn't.
And my coach, he got into it very quickly.
And we got an advantage of basically everybody but that guy who had been using it during the match.
And it just made us understand the game a lot better.
There were, as I said, a couple of things about long-term king safety.
Pushing pawns on the side of the board was maybe the biggest takeaway.
That often you would push pawns.
And not as an attacking tool, which used to be the way that you would push upon, like trying to break open your king.
What you would do is that you would have a little hook on the side of the board that you could use 20 or 30 moves later to make the opponent's king less safe then.
And this is something that...
Humans didn't really do.
And I still see some people allowing these pawn advances.
And I wonder if they didn't learn their lesson from 2019. But it was very clear to see at a certain time before everybody sort of caught up with the new information.
And that's also when I had maybe my best stretch of chess.
Ever.
Because I just understood these new things better than others.
So there will be certain Possibilities that I will rule out because of my intuition, but it is able to calculate in a very short time that it's possible.
It will never make blunders, like simple tactical mistakes.
The neural networks sometimes do, but traditional engines don't.
I can keep...
Most of the moves that I make will be the same as they do, but they don't make any real blunders at all.
They may make slight positional mistakes, but honestly, most of the time that I think an engine makes a positional mistake is because I don't understand it well enough.
Because one of them is constantly calculating based on sort of what humans have taught them.
What is the value of a pawn?
What's the value of a knight?
And what is the value of a far advanced pawn?
And all of this.
It calculates based on that.
A neural network, you just show the rules of chess and play against yourself a lot of times and get better.
It just has a different approach.
What it does is just based on the games that it's played against itself.
It will have completely different ideas at times.
Imagine in 2019, because of these neural networks, every opening that had been played for 100 years...
Hundreds of years had to be rechecked by coaches because there could be a difference in evaluation because there is this new neural network that just thinks in a completely different way.
It just, I think a lot of it was based on, it just emphasizes different factors than traditional engines do, and that ultimately just leads to different results, really.
But it's, yeah, it was extremely fascinating for a while, but now...
It's just led to really more parity in the world of chess because everybody just has access to that information.
It used to be a thing back in the time that some people would really be ahead of others, not only in 2019, but also other times like they had more computing power, better cloud engines like they had.
Started to use different engines and so on.
But now you could prepare for a world championship, honestly, in two weeks and you'd be completely with just a regular laptop that's connected to cloud.
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.
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...
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.
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 was 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 feel like I generally do the right things when I'm at tournaments, but then in between, I don't know, I want to enjoy life as well.
So I'm generally obsessed with chess, but I'm not always obsessed with compagnies.
Like, certain times, there will be certain days, certain tournaments, where I know that I'm not going to be at my best, and I can feel it, and then I'm not able to take it as seriously.
I feel like I cannot...
I'm not a Michael Jordan type who has to go all out in every...
In every game.
I used to, but now I don't think I have that in me because my main motivation for playing chess is that I love to play.
I don't have concrete goals of what I wanted to do.
Yeah, and also the thing is, I was known for being fit and all of these things, but now I think there are a lot of other players who take these things a lot more seriously than I do.
I think the reason why I got that reputation is that I really like doing a lot of...
I did a lot of sports when I was little and I've always kind of done them for fun.
So I think that was why you don't see a lot of chess players playing soccer or tennis or whatever.
Not that I'm great at any of those things, but I was usually better than a lot of other chess players.
I'm just saying, like, in a game or a sport where it's so computer-involved and analyzed and there's geniuses wearing suits and glasses and things, you're kind of known as a laid-back, intimidating force with a legacy.
Are there special things you do more like a poker player or anything to intimidate your opponents ever?
I've seen you show up late to big tournaments where they're waiting for you and stuff.
My planning is always based on everything going perfectly.
And making a time plan based on that.
And if something goes a little bit wrong, then I'm going to be late.
And, like, something usually goes wrong or often enough that it becomes a thing.
Like, as you talked about in chess, like, there's this video that a lot of people have talked about where I come...
There's a Blitz game, right?
And that's three minutes and I come, like, two and a half minutes late because I've been skiing in the mountains and...
There was an accident on the road that delayed me like half an hour.
Most people would have planned for that, had a little bit of buffer, but I was like, eh, that was probably going to be fine.
Suddenly there's an accident and I'm going to be late and I'm just running into the playing hall in my sweatpants and not even realizing that the game has started.
Thought I was so late that I should be.
And I saw that everybody was there.
And then randomly it turned out that I had half a minute left when I got to the board.
I'm not sure if it's been a conscious choice by my opponents.
I'm sure I've been guilty of it as well.
That's true.
I don't know, really.
I think the only thing is not to bring that up again, but I think when I think that my opponent might be cheating, that's the only time that I'm really off.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, playing Blitzchess, listening to music usually helps me because, like...
Doing tasks that are more intuition-based, then that helps with the flow.
With longer games, you probably don't want that disturbance, but I've definitely played some of my best Blizz Chess, just listening to music and sitting there bopping.