In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Magnus Carlsen: Chess, Investing and Strategic thinking

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

How can strategic thinking in chess be applied to investing? In this episode Magnus Carlsen and Nicolai Tangen discuss the comparison between business investing and chess. They also talk about risk, how to recover after losses, AI in chess, strategizing against different opponents and how to always explore and stay curious. Magnus also reflects on self-doubt and the power of optimism in achieving success. Don’t miss this engaging episode with the world's greatest chess player. Tune in!In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New episode out every Wednesday.The production team for this episode includes PLAN-B's Pål Huuse and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was conducted by Sigurd Brekke and Patrick Du Plessis.Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everybody and welcome to In Good Company. Today we are incredibly honored to have a guest who needs very little introduction, Magnus Karlsson, the highest rated chess player in history. And today we're going to talk about business, or actually we're going to talk a bit about what we as investors can learn from chess and from you, Magnus. Very welcome. Thank you very much. Now, during the Second World War in Britain, pretty much every chess expert were recruited to the Ultra Project, which was basically cracking codes used by the Nazis. And so there's been this assumption that brilliant chess minds are brilliant at everything and i was just wondering what do you think we in business can learn from chess it's funny you should mention that because my father's parents they were they were born before the war. They were very much into everything that's American and English because those were sort of what they saw as the victors of the war.

But one of the books they had at home, which they recommended to me at an early age, I think I was about 10 or 11. they recommended to me at an early age i think i was about 10 or 11 it was a small book but it was called uh kodultra i think a translation for to norwegian about how they cracked the enigma code but i didn't know until the time of the um imitation game movie that actually chess players were involved in that so that angle i didn't really know um i also know that at some point i don't know exactly which but there was at least one hedge fund on wall street that was actively recruiting chess players and i think at least a couple of people made a really good career from from that But I think playing chess at an early age

certainly teaches you to solve complex problems in a limited amount of time. Continuing to only play chess probably will not get you far in business, but I think it's a good start. Absolutely. Now, when we invest, we use intuition quite a bit, right? Or we typically call it pattern recognition.

We find it useful when the situation is complex, when we have a lot of experience, and when we've seen similar situations before. So pretty much bang in line with what you are doing in Blitz. How do you look at your intuition versus analysis? Just how do you think about the trade-off? Or is there a trade-off? I think chess players,

when you've played chess professionally at a high level, your brain is really trained to narrow the search and to use intuition because you know there is a limited amount of time. So you're trained to recognize patterns and sort of make these quick decisions. And I think I am very much the type of player who uses that more than others. I can certainly calculate, make deeper decisions based on deeper analysis. But it is not necessarily my forte.

Usually when I lose games, it's because people have looked deeply at something that I've intuitively sort of discarded. And I guess that's a way you can get an edge in business as well, for sure. But do you use intuition to figure out which uh kind of uh which directions to analyze more or um absolutely i use my intuition so how many so how many do you end up with so you use your intuition you then think about how many different alternatives i would say as a rule if i think about more than three alternatives, I'm clueless. Then I'm probably not happy with any of them. Usually, I think about two alternatives of what to do.

And I usually have a bias towards one of them. I usually have a bias towards one of them, but I try and cut that out as much as I can and try and look at both alternatives objectively. And then again, if both of them don't satisfy me, I might look at a third. I heard you somewhere say that you felt that you didn't add much value after 10, 15 minutes. I think after 10-15 minutes i think after 10-15 minutes um that's when you first of all

it's hard for our minds to to have the level of concentration that you need for much longer than that but i think you usually start looking pretty widely at stiff at other alternatives and sometimes they can live somewhere but usually they um they don't so yeah i would say for for a fairly deep think about 15 minutes is probably it's probably a good time well we we often see people who overanalyze situations so if you were to go on after 15 minutes, what would happen then? After 15 minutes, I'll probably be widening the search and or just end up going in circles. So I probably would not add too much value after that. And I might end up, because my thought process is not that it's a bit chaotic so I might end up playing a

move that I that I was considering earlier and then I forgot why it was not good because it's it was 20 minutes ago and my brain had just processed a lot of information since that time. So I've forgotten a crucial detail. A lot of things can go wrong if you think for too long, that's for sure. Well, what we see often in investing is that if you spend too much time on it, you become more certain, but the decision doesn't improve. I think that's a very good way to to put it actually um and uh that's true that often if i'm not a perfectionist in chess i am a practical player i wanna um i want to get as good as a result possible. And I know that I have limited time. But you see a lot of perfectionists, they think for 45 minutes

and they end up making an obvious move that they certainly considered from the get-go. So I think there is certainly something in that. I'm just slightly puzzled. You are the number one uh you know player in the world and you've already uh characterized your thinking as chaotic and you're not the perfectionist so how do you how do you tally this so i am i i want to learn and i want to get as good a chess as possible.

So, I mean, saying I'm not a perfectionist is slightly inaccurate, but it is in the sense that I will not sort of widen my search in order to make sure that I don't miss anything from the get-go. to make sure that I don't miss anything from the get-go. Or at least I will rarely do that because I know it's not an effective usage of my time. I think for everything in life, if we had unlimited time to make decisions, we would make them quite differently.

But there's always this element of, yeah, I have to make a decision at some point. In investing, it's about long-term strategy and so on. How long-term can you be? How far ahead do you think? So when you start out, how many moves have you thought about? So the thing about openings, you usually have something prepared. openings you usually have something something prepared but after that you have a general idea of what plans you want to you want to use what plan structures are good what pieces would be

good in those structures so with these patterns you can you can plan quite far ahead um in in terms of what what do you want to achieve and where you eventually think you might um win the game so you always look far ahead but then you also have an opponent who constantly tries to ruin your plans so you have all the time you have both things in mind short term and long-term planning. When do you find chess easy and when do you find it hard? I find chess easy when I can sort of play with flow. When the first thought that comes into my head is usually the right one then that's that's when it's that's when it is when it's easy when I'm always when I'm not when I'm on the front foot when I'm not reacting to what bad form is that you see your opponent's threats

sort of before you see your own response because they should sort of come at the same time. But yeah, chess is just easy when I can play with intuition. That's a simple answer. Now, in chess, you have perfect information. What do you think would have happened if you didn't have perfect information, like in business? So chess is unique in the sense that you have perfect information,

but it's still very difficult. So I sort of think about it in the way that we are well-informed. We all sort of have the same tools, but it's about how you use those tools and the information um that you have so yes we do have perfect information but i i i sort of i i don't see it that way because uh you still cannot you still cannot calculate every um every possibility but you also play poker a bit uh i also yeah i i've played a bit of poker for sure yeah um where there is an element of chance uh yeah that's annoying part that's the annoying part of playing playing poker um i think they're games like poker are different uh are interesting in a different sense but what i feel is that the best players now they play in a different way so they play in a less uh exploitative style so they

sort of treat the game as if everybody has the the same information rather than um they try and sort of create their game as something that doesn't really depend on their opponents. In the end, the gameplay is not that different, I would say. Moving on to risk. So when do you decide to play conservatively and when do you play more risky my level of aggressiveness risk taking in a game uh depends a lot on the tournament situation but my opponents against more passive opponents, people who play solidly, who are risk averse, I will naturally take more risks and vice versa. If I know I'm playing a very aggressive opponent, very aggressive opponent i might take a more cautious approach why um because i think that i don't need to create imbalance in the game my opponent will create that balance imbalance and

i generally believe that imbalance in the game in the long run is is good for me of course in the short term it can be it can be dangerous but um in the long run it's it's going to yield me uh the best results because they they will fail uh because um because if the games are more imbalanced they will there will be more decisive games fewer draws and since i will generally make better decisions in those situations i will i will come up out on top um if you see another scenario where people play really really solidly then i probably will have to take more risks in order to get chances to win and then I might sometimes overstretch. So I feel like people who are really solid but also are good at counterattacking,

taking their chances, like you cannot be solid without the threat of counterattack. And it's a surprising amount of people who are solid but with little counter-attacking threat. But the counter-attackers, those I feel are the most dangerous for sure. How can you calibrate this before the game?

How can you calibrate opponents' risk tolerance? It comes down a lot to opening choices, it comes down a lot to opening choices um whether you want to steer the game into more quiet waters sometimes how long you want there to be an element of computer preparation maybe if you're if you're playing a risk averse opponent you will take them out of book so to say from from the from the opening stage to force them to make difficult higher high leverage decisions as early as possible has your attitude to towards risk changed a lot with age a lot with age i think uh my attitude hasn't changed changed that much i've probably gotten better in general at assessing um sort of what is what is the appropriate amount of risk to take at times, but then you also counterbalance that with sort of youthful spirit,

which makes it take a bit more risk. And I think it's sort of ended up more or less in the same way. I'm certainly more conscious of these things now. I try and balance them more, but I think I end up in more or less the same spot. Moving on to teams. So you have a team who helps you prepare, right? How does a team work? So right now I don't have a big team. I've had different people working for me in the past, but now I have my main coach, Peter,

who's been helping me. I've known him for 20 years and he's been my main coach now for 11 um for him it's mainly about computer preparation finding new ideas which is becoming more and more difficult um and basically providing me with a bit of a choice so i can i can decide what to do against um certain opponents and and that i i could sort of take it in and um in different directions so what happens so let's so a work day when do you when do you go to work i honestly i don't do very much these days in terms of preparation. I mainly play and prepare for the games. I look at chess all the time in the sense that I'm always studying the newest games and playing for practice,

but I don't sit down in the morning and think i'm gonna do this this and this that's sort of what my my coach does that he works on something new every day um does he find that out himself or you steer him uh sometimes i steer him sometimes he will start out working on something and then I will look at it see whether I like it or not but generally he's a lot better at this than I am and he also knows my preferences in general

so he generally has an idea of how to do this. But honestly, I find the analysis, opening analysis bit, I don't find it that interesting. It's more of a necessary thing to be able to get new positions and to get situations where you can sort of prove your playing strength. But I don't find it particularly interesting in itself,

so I'm really happy to sort of delegate that in general. But when you say he's better at it than you are, better at what? He's better at using computer engines to find new ideas, basically using different engines and comparing them, trying to go sort of a bit deeper in directions that the computer doesn't necessarily show at first um trying to find ways that i can play where i sort of increase my opponent's risk more than than mine like where i can take risks but not not unacceptable risks but it is is really getting it's really getting much more difficult if we're

talking about this 15 years ago his he was doing the same job 15 years ago but for anon who was a world championship back then and i think he'll tell you that his job was a whole lot easier then um it's getting very, very difficult. What's getting more difficult? To find new alternatives? Yeah, basically you can look at it in the way that you have a market that's much better informed now.

And the people are using more or less the same tools. So it's much, much harder to find an edge. Did you train differently and prepare differently, let's say 10, 15 years ago? From about 14 to 11 years ago, I didn't really have a coach. I was generally, I didn't really have a coach. I was generally, I had training camps with people, but I was mostly doing this stuff on my own,

but it was not nearly as deep as what is being done now. And I think also back then, And I think also back then, it was easier to get by with playing worse openings. Basically, now everybody sort of knows everything. There have been new ways that have been discovered that makes it so much more difficult to get a game. So I think I could get by then, I could not get by now without proper analysis. Was it more fun in the past, the game? Yeah. So I think for improving chess players, having access to all this information at an early age at an early stage is great it's great to get you at a higher level earlier um they used to say that

back in the day like in order to learn a new opening that takes a month now even top players can just turn on their computer engine um by an opening course and within five hours like you can know like if of course if you like if you have the understanding and so on like you can you can pretty much know these things pretty well so um yeah it's just a it's just a different different it's just a different age i think computer engines have been great for spectating chess but for the players yeah it's made it more difficult other um do does that mean that there are different types of personalities which will do well in chess going forward you think so for now i consider myself kind of a hybrid generation since i did grow up with computers but i wouldn't i was not reliant on them i was still using a lot of time with the chess board and chess books as well um i think we're seeing the first

generation now of like pure computer kids uh and they play chess in a less pragmatic, sorry, less dogmatic, more sort of computer-based way in that they are less intuition-based and so much more sort of brute force calculation. So it's going to be interesting to see if this sort of new type of chess player beats the older ones that are more, like me, that are more based on feel. Do you think it would have implications

for which countries dominate the game? I think we're already seeing a generation now of Indian players. Obviously, there are huge individual differences, but what most of them have in common is that their calculation is extremely good even those players who have zero understanding of the game and their intuition or in zero understanding i'm generally mean that their intuition is not that good. They calculate so well that with longer time controls,

they can still get by and give even people like me a really, really hard time. What about China? Chinese players are a bit different. It's hard to say. I feel like there's a bigger variety within Chinese players. You have some players who are a bit of the same as the Indians, but you also have others who have completely different styles.

You have the world champion right now, Ding, who's, well, he's not doing great at the moment, but at his peak, he was like an incredible, intuitive, dynamic player. So yeah, definitely very different styles there. Any talent in this country? There are definitely a lot of people who are very enthusiastic about chess

and are talented as well. In terms of whether anybody's going to become the new Magnus, sort of, or world champion one day. That's probably going to be hard, especially since we don't have the numbers that countries like India have. But I don't find that as important. I want people to enjoy chess,

learn it at an early age so that you can have joy of it, your life. And if it can teach you other skills as well, then that's even better. Moving on to learning. So after becoming world champion in 2013 you said uh i'm still far away from really knowing chess really there is still much i can learn and there is much i still don't understand how do you feel about that now well i wish i could say something. No, actually, I don't wish because that would be boring.

I would look at the way that I played 10 years ago and think that I was clueless about a lot of things. I think I play better now, but then also other people play better. So my results are not necessarily better. other people play better so my results are not necessarily better um but i feel like i'm still learning all the time um i don't think i'm at a point in my career where i will drastically change the way that i play um but i do feel that my understanding of certain ideas, certain positions is always evolving. What was the setback you learned the most from?

When it comes to chess, I've always been very optimistic, almost blindly so. almost blindly so um so i've had i think two two like two and a half specific periods of my chess career where i've stagnated or even gone a bit back um they were all before the age of 19. And during those times, I always kept a very positive mindset. I always had pretty much delusional ideas of what was going on.

I always thought that this is going to turn around next game, next tournament. I probably gained a rating that was a bit higher than my actual level. So I was like trying to push really hard to play towards that level. And maybe I was taking too many risks. I was forcing it a bit.

But I always thought like next time, next game, next tournament. And then all of a sudden it turned around. And that's what happened every single time that I just needed like one good moment. And then I believed that everything was going to be going to be great again and ever since then I certainly had bad tournaments I've had like two three months periods where I don't play but I've sort of kept the same mindset most of the time that overall I think I'm really good at this and it's going to turn around.

So I haven't really had that one moment in a big tournament, in a championship where I'm thinking like, this is going to take some time to recover from. It's always gone like remarkably well. Well, it's interesting, this positivism, you know, positive people also make more money. I always think, I've always thought in chess that

the right balance is somewhere between optimistic and delusional. That's where you're going. What do you mean by delusional here? You have people in chess who are absolutely delusional optimists. Like former world championship Kramnik, whenever I played a game he would say afterwards it's a miracle you survived

and he would say it against me and everybody else and I don't know like if he completely believed it but then like he would he's super fast so he would rattle off variation after variation

how he could potentially have won. If he didn't win, it was usually a miracle. So I'm probably more on the side that I'm on the optimistic side, but I keep my feet on the ground at least a little bit more. But it's an interesting kind of survival mechanism yeah i i do think i do think so and if you if you always always have a slightly more optimistic outlook you will take more opportunities you will see more opportunities um you will take more risks you will put more pressure on your opponents

so i think it's um uh uh yeah it's a it's a good thing it also makes you a happier person supposedly at least if it gives good results right but i mean it makes it sort of easier to um uh to to to play the game um often when i play the best i'll make a move based on intuition and then i'll i'll spot a reason right after like oh i missed that one maybe that was a mistake and i'll think no actually it wasn't it wasn't a mistake i missed something but still sort of my optimistic mindset made me make the right decision quickly based on intuition and if you're a pessimistic person if you overthink you will not do that. Does any of this explain the kind of happy streaks? Oh yeah, for sure. I can recall streaks where I just go on winning, winning,

and I think I'm playing amazing. Then I look back and analyze, and it wasn't that great. So what explains the results then? Because I put a lot of pressure on my opponents and my optimism and my confidence makes them less confident how important is psychology this type of psychology in chess i think psychology is very important you have these all these people who have the same tools like they do you have a lot of people who understand the game at a level that is at least similar to what i do um but as long as they don't have the right mindset they will inevitably not take enough risks they will leave chances at the table maybe others um they are too optimistic they will take too many risks so like having having a

balanced mindset like knowing where to when to go for it when to to not like you're always obviously never going to always make the right decisions but um yeah if you're conscious of these things like inevitably you're going to um to make better decisions than than your opponents do you think um successful chess players deal with failures differently than less successful players is that how much of the winning recipe is in how you deal with failures i generally try to sort of avoid failures rather than rather than um rather than sort of learn how to deal with it. But what I do know is that my best results over the last 15 years, so my rating has probably oscillated,

classical rating has oscillated between 2880 and.20 for many years now. But my performance right after a loss is over 2,900. So apparently I do something really well. I think I am probably likely to take a bit more risk after losing. I think that's one thing that I will put a lot of pressure on my opponents in such a situation. But I think a more interesting situation is not in classical chess, but it's in rapid and blitz tournaments where you have a failure.

You fail to win a winning position or you lose a painful game. And then that's when a difficult part comes, when you have to play a lot more games that very same day. And that's when you can see, even myself, just you try to do the right things, but your mind just cannot be balanced. So you end up sort of spiraling. And that's what I find really really difficult it's interesting

that you take more risks after losing right because in most situations in life people take less risk after losing it will depend on the situation but i think on average yes i will take i will take more risks um investors generally take less risk after losing. Yeah. In my most recent tournament, I did lose a game early on. I made

two draws and then I lost one. So I was minus one. Not a good score. And then I was playing the number two player in the world. And then I actually decided that I wasn't going to take any risks like i wanted to stop the bleeding which is not typical of me and this time it actually worked out great um i sort of managed to steer the game into for fairly quiet waters and then I sort of started not taking risks, but at least I didn't take, like I had so many opportunities

to steer the game towards a draw and I didn't. But I think just in general, like having that little fire in me that I normally have where I really, really want to strike back. In classical chess, I don't know. I think it's just given me a fairly good balance. Also, I'm extremely focused after a loss because I don't want to lose another one. So I probably spend more energy on those games as well.

Do you have the same type of fire as you had when you were younger? Rarely, but sometimes um i had a tournament recently where uh i was um i had a good start but there was um a guy wei yi a chinese guy uh who's ranked number 10 in world now he had a tournament of his life it was a rapid and blitz event and at some point I realized that a good event is not going to be nearly enough for me

I have to win every single game now and that was my mindset I was winning these games purely on will, taking risks here and there, and I ended up winning 10 games in a row, and I won the tournament. But it's, I don't know.

You cannot always do that. That was easier for me earlier. Now I really have to fire myself up. How do you get into that mental stage? I think at that point, you sort of have to treat every game as do or die, really. You're sort of told that, you know,

you shouldn't do anything special. But I think in those situations, these things obviously could go horribly wrong. But if you want to try and get on the streak where you just win every single game, then I think you just have to take risks every single game then yeah i think you just have to to to take risks every single game and be like being like survival like 100 but you do self-talk do you go into the bathroom look yourself in the mirror and say magnus get your finger out sharpen up here

i don't feel like i don't really need to do that because when I sit down at the board, that's what I need to do. But I do know that I need to put every inch of pressure on my opponent and maybe go more from optimistic to delusional, probably. Optimistic to delusional, probably. How do you cleanse your mind after a loss, after a bad game? When I lose, it kind of depends on how I lose. If I feel that I did a lot of things well, but at a certain moment, I sort of didn't calculate deeply enough.

If I did something that I, if I made a mistake that I know that I can make, and it's not a mistake necessarily of negligence, then I'm sort of, it annoys me, but I'm sort of fine with that. And then my mindset is basically, we move on. If I know that I've made avoidable mistakes if my mindset was wrong all these things yeah then i i have to try and reset um completely like just take a minute to myself like focus on breathing try and be somewhere else for for a moment and and see if I can get it back. But at that moment, it's not easy. If you don't have a day to recover, then it's usually hard to get back.

If you make a bad move in your personal life, do you manage to put it behind you quickly as well? Or do you make bad moves in your personal life do you manage to put it behind you quickly as well or do you make bad moves in your personal life i think um i think um at times like i will make decisions sometimes like out of negligence i will not do the right thing and that's that can be a bit it can be annoying it can be embarrassing i think i experienced a lot of the same emotions that that everybody i i do as other people like i find it also really hard to change to change patterns completely yeah now um in the fund we have this uh investment simulator where we analyze mistakes investment mistakes and you of course have your famous chess engine what do you what do you get out of that i do find it interesting to um to look at my games with engines after and i like i always do that um but it's very important

to be able to identify what are sort of human mistakes and and what are um what are what are the mistakes that only like computers can identify because you cannot condition yourself to try and play like an engine or at least with my style i cannot um so at certain times like looking at games with engines like you have to be you have to try and understand um what you did wrong even if the reason is non-intuitive, in order to learn. But you cannot base everything on that because your opponents, they will continue to be human and make human errors

and also make good and bad moves as humans, not as engines I've heard you talk about physical health and how that impacts your games and and in a way your mental health just how do you feel that they're interlinked i mean you're a fit guy right i think for anything uh you wanted to um like um yeah if you're um if your body is fit your mind is fit you're going to perform better i've probably been lazier in the last few years when it comes to when it comes to fitness than than i was before uh how many how many times a week do you work out i don't i've like i've never had a schedule much so now nowadays i golf a lot so i do get um like my steps every single day I play a bit of paddle I do when I'm at home I probably do like

once a week strength workout but I don't particularly like that so I was definitely like fitter before when I was in my early 20s i would win a lot of games purely on stamina because i was like physically stronger but yeah nowadays i find it find it difficult to to sort of be in that shape how was your golf i started golf last year uh and i really enjoy it um but i'm i'm not very good but it's um it's a way for me to at least you know uh get some exercise every single day when we go back and look at your uh your history and i think yourself you say that you were at really at the top of your game in 13 and 19 what what stand out with those years i think 13, 14. I was really fit. I just started working with a new coach that helped a bit that I had some ideas, but it was not only that i think it was just at that time i was sort of at my my my peak like

close to my peak physically and mentally and then 2019 2019 i think i just had a period where i had like a lot of leftover preparation from the World Championship in 2018. I couldn't really... 2018, the match was all draws, 12 games, but they were of extremely high quality. So when I came to other games, other tournaments later, I wasn't playing that one guy all the time. So I could use some of the preparation.

Like other people were sort of more forgiving. So I think that was like a very specific moment. And also that was the start of AI in chess. That was the start of people working with uh with neural nets so that gave some people an edge uh because some people learned how to work with them to find new ideas quickly uh and so like in a in a few months time you could suddenly be ahead in the openings in a way you couldn't uh you couldn't be for years before that uh so i think that was like a very specific moment in time whether that would have carried on a bit in 2020 if it hadn't been for everything closing down i'm not sure um but i think that was just a very

specific moment in time because ever since then, I've had ups and downs, but my level has been quite consistently a little bit lower than in 2019. What do you feel about AI's involvement in chess? I think there was a very specific moment when AI was extremely exciting for players and coaches. Now, it's still interesting to see, especially if you compare neural nets to traditional chess engines and also hybrid engines, how differently they think. engines and also hybrid engines how differently they think um but now everybody sort of has their same tools um so they're working with them it's definitely a lot less uh exciting and it's more now they've probably um contributed to evening the playing field even

more what what has it added to your game i think um and the newer neural network engines they've definitely contributed to um the way that i evaluate time and material, I mean, broadly. And also King's safety. My view on the importance of King's safety, short-term and long-term, has changed. And I think my understanding has improved so much since 2019 in what ways i you have more now of an understanding of how both like taking time to build a safe king, sacrificing material to weaken your opponent's king or safeguarding your own king.

These are things that humans are intuitively not very good at. And it's a thing that engines used to be even worse at. And now these neural nets, they understand it. Well, they don't understand, but they do it so well that we're learning a lot from that. And I've had to reevaluate a lot of things for sure. What do you think is the most valuable aspect that humans can still add to this game?

There used to be a thing called anti-engine chess. I don't think that would work anymore. Supposedly, engines did not play well in closed positions that are more strategical less tactical that is less of the case anymore essentially humans can play chess and they can they can explain to other humans what the engines mean but I don't think we can do a lot more than that. I think for training purposes, having a human touch is really good still. But honestly, you can get really good at chess these days

without any human input. And where do you think this will take chess over the next decade? I think chess will get faster and faster at a higher level. I don't know if this is the direction that we're going to go, but I'm very excited about the prospect of playing chess 960 um which is basically that the pieces on the first rank are being

randomly chosen on before the game yeah so you end up with playing without opening theory and i find that extremely exciting to play if you're going to play without opening theory and i find that extremely exciting to play if you're going to play with longer time controls i feel now with longer time controls the game is just a bit too easy and forgiving with all the preparation you have but overall yeah i think everything that's happening in chess with engines and preparation's just going to mean that we have to play faster chess in order for there to be enough room to both make, both show your strengths and weaknesses. Mm-hmm.

Given all the AI interference or involvement in chess, are you surprised that it's still so popular and people find it so exciting I think the thing about chess is that it's complicated but it's also simple enough

I think people like that it's relatively easy to not to understand but but to play also i think it's as simple as the queen is a really strong piece uh people like like that the pieces are relatively powerful compared to other games and uh i i think it doesn't necessarily matter that much that we're so terrible at it compared to compared to engines um it's it's made the game less mysterious for sure chess players used to be magicians on the board we're clearly not anymore uh since everybody can see now what we do right and what we do wrong but that's also the good thing it's made it more accessible uh chess used to be this mystery where nobody understood what was going on. Like humans sort of had to explain that.

But now humans only have to explain why the engine, which basically is very close to the truth, why it's showing the score that it does. And this means that people can follow the score. And honestly, most people watch sports or games for entertainment. They are not that interested in all the technical aspects. They mostly want to watch the score to see who wins. And if it's fast then then better so i think overall no i'm not particularly surprised that chess is still popular would it have been as popular if it was invented now i'm not sure but chess has such a rich historical background as well as modern tool tools to follow it so i think probably a lot of good

things are still in store last few questions here do you have you ever had the imposter syndrome i don't consider myself particularly brilliant genius or or that intelligence so yes i've had times where i've seen people whom i consider to be smarter than i am do worse at chess and it really makes me wonder whether sometimes whether i'm actually this good are people are everybody just fooling me? Less recently, I've sort of accepted it more now, but I've had brilliant people talk to me as if I'm the smartest person in the room. And that really makes me uncomfortable

because I see myself as um an intelligent but not brilliant guy who happened to find the one thing that he can do really really well do you think this mindset is the reason why you're being so successful i think this mindset has definitely kept me grounded. And I think it's been really good for me in chess. But I cannot say that this or that is the reason, because I don't know. Is there a piece of advice from a mentor or coach that has stuck with you forever? I've had a lot of good advice over the years,

but I think maybe the best advice that i got was from seaman like this then i at a fairly early age um he was not my main main coach or anything but we would probably meet up once a week or every two weeks depending on whether i was playing tournaments and so on um and then we would go through some of my games. And once he noticed that for a few black games in a row, I played the same variation of the Sicilian defense. And he said, I don't care whether you consider this to be good or bad opening.

If you're not going to explore explore then you're not going to learn and so he said he just went to his shelf like he's he's like me he's not a very organized person he went to the shelf and he said this book this opening learn this instead and so i learned that opening i tried that in the next game. Then I tried something else. And that thing, like always being curious, thinking about learning rather than being stuck in sort of the same comfortable patterns

has been really important to me. And in addition to golf, what are the other things you're trying to learn and explore in your normal life these days? I'm trying to learn Spanish because I will be moving to Spain after a bit.

Apart from that... Why are you moving to spain because of weather um i've i've had you know um i've had a lot of winters in norway but i feel like i'm privileged enough that i can i can sort of choose more where to live. I still want to spend time in Norway, but I probably don't want to spend six months of winter here. But apart from that, I have fairly simple pleasures in life. in life so um i'm i'm i had times last year where i thought that i was going to try and carve out sort of a new career path that i could pursue at the same time as chess but

so far i haven't really found it and also so far i haven't been any less happy because of it good now last thing what is your advice to young people be curious learn read read and play chess but don't pursue it as a career unless you're going to be the best in the world very good

Magnus you are a real magician big thanks for being here thank you so much thanks