A chess star emerges for the post-computer age.
By D. T. Max
In many ways, tournament chess is still played very much as it was a century ago. Players land their pieces with the delicate thump of baize on wood, then jot their moves on scoresheets and tap the clock forcefully, or gently, depending on the mood they wish to communicate to their opponents. Flanking attendants, called arbiters, make sure that nobody cheats. It’s still quiet enough at a tournament that, among the spectators, you can hear your neighbors’ breathing. But the game has changed in at least one fundamental respect: it is now monitored, and even shaped, by computers. Chess pieces are embedded with magnetic sensors that transmit their location on the board to a computer, which relays this information to the Internet. Online, chess programs provide running commentary, evaluating which player is ahead and whether the move he or she is making is brilliant or a blunder. In a modern tournament, just about the only people who don’t know precisely how well they are doing are the players.
But by the sixth round of the London Chess Classic, in December, Magnus Carlsen, the Norwegian phenom, knew that he was behind. If he lost the game, having already been defeated in two earlier ones, he would probably lose the tournament. He was No. 2 in the world rankings, and a victory would give him a good shot at recovering the top spot; he had played inconsistently in recent months, falling from No. 1. There was talk that he was distracted, underprepared, and overexposed. Chess players trying to get out of trouble act a lot like students taking an exam that they haven’t studied for. Carlsen, who had turned twenty just two weeks earlier, often gives off a vibe of someone who is too cool to do his homework, but now he looked a bit panicked. He cupped his head in his hands, rocked his body, and stared at the board, trying to reboot his brain. At one point, it took him twenty-seven minutes to move a piece.
Carlsen’s problems had begun on his second move. Playing black, he had sent out his queen-side knight beyond his pawns—an unusual decision, given that his opponent, the thirty-five-year-old Russian champion Vladimir Kramnik, had already placed two white pawns in the center of the board. So Kramnik had a nice line of pawns where they would do the most good, and Carlsen had a poorly placed piece that threatened to block any attack he might want to mount. A database of nearly five million games indicated that, when these moves were made, white was twice as likely to win as black; Carlsen was already at a significant disadvantage.
Kramnik, one of the last players trained by the old Soviet chess machine, was eerily steady before the board—at times nearly motionless. Carlsen’s eyelids fluttered in a trance of concentration. He looked boyish in a crisp white shirt and a pair of slim-fit pants that had been given to him by G-Star RAW, the Dutch fashion company, with which he has an endorsement deal.
On the eleventh move, Kramnik traded a knight for one of Carlsen’s bishops—an exchange that Kramnik loves. Kramnik’s game is formidable, and his confidence in the endgame is particularly admired. Carlsen, who is largely self-taught, can play various styles; most often, he works toward gaining over-all control of the board, instead of trying to capture prized pieces. The Russian champion Garry Kasparov describes Carlsen’s style as “strangling pressure, not direct hits.”
Kramnik and Carlsen traded queens, then a pair of rooks. With many of the high-value pieces off the board, the real contest began: the march of the pawns. While Carlsen had been experimenting with his knight, Kramnik had been able to wipe out Carlsen’s center pawns and push his own forward. When a pawn reaches the opposite end of the board, it becomes any piece the player wants, usually a queen. Computer programs now gave Kramnik a commanding advantage. Carlsen had to forfeit his knight to stave off Kramnik’s pawns.
Meanwhile, west of London, Kasparov, who had flown from Moscow to sign autographs at the competition, landed at Heathrow. He turned on his smartphone, examined the game’s positions on the screen, and pronounced Carlsen’s situation “impossible.” Kasparov trained Carlsen for most of last year; Carlsen found him too intense, and ended the arrangement. Kasparov still seems to look out for Carlsen, though, as if worried about a careless nephew.
Chess is played on the board and in the head. As the game continued, Carlsen skirted disaster again and again, and Kramnik’s confidence appeared to fray. After taking Carlsen’s knight, Kramnik could have reasonably expected a quick win, and now it was clear that he’d have to settle for a slow one. Kramnik is said to resent the attention that Carlsen gets, and to take special pleasure in beating him. It must particularly rankle Kramnik when Carlsen adopts a blasé pose—declaring, for example, that losing at Monopoly upsets him more than losing at chess. Carlsen’s dislike of Kramnik might be even stronger. He blames his former tutor Kasparov, whom Kramnik dethroned in 2000: “Kasparov really hates Kramnik. And so by listening to Kasparov . . . it’s really hard not to get some of these thoughts myself.”
Kramnik kept advancing, and Carlsen stayed one step ahead of him. Kramnik drank his tea; Carlsen sipped orange juice. Carlsen managed to move a pawn down the board, forcing Kramnik to send his bishop to block it. On the sixty-second move, more than six hours after the game started, Kramnik erred. He likes to clean up the board before finishing off his opponent, and so he initiated an exchange of knights and rooks when he ought to have dealt with Carlsen’s pawn.
The two players were now down to only eight pieces: their kings, five pawns, and Kramnik’s stuck bishop. The computer programs still favored Kramnik, but they do not take into account momentum and fatigue; complex endgames confuse them. (Kasparov, who had just arrived at the tournament, looked at the game on a large screen in the V.I.P. lounge and said, “The computer is useless.”)
Eight moves later, Kramnik had a chance to make a move that would soon lead to checkmate—the computer programs saw it and Carlsen saw it.
Kramnik did not. He moved his king to the side. Carlsen immediately boxed it in with his own. Kramnik tested the boundaries of the prison, but he could not get out. The new reality dawned on him; the computer programs now called the game even. The two players jockeyed. Kramnik assayed with his bishop, and Carlsen countered with his king. They did this three times, resulting in an automatic draw.
Customarily, the players go from the auditorium to a nearby “analysis room,” where they discuss their game with the tournament’s commentators. When Carlsen ambled in, people put down their phones and laptops and applauded. His recovery had been more dramatic than many of his victories. Kasparov was amazed. “It happens,” he said, happily. Carlsen, with a lopsided grin, sat down to discuss the game. Kramnik never showed up. I saw his pretty wife rushing toward an exit, as if the building were on fire. Later that night, Carlsen sent out a tweet: “Good thing I didn’t resign.”
“At the time I started to play chess, I was a pretty much normal kid,” Carlsen recalled. We were sitting in an outlet of Costa, a British coffee chain, off the lobby of the Hilton hotel in Kensington. It was two days after his match with Kramnik. (Carlsen had won the next day’s match and therefore the tournament, regaining his No. 1 ranking.) He had arrived in London on December 5th and was scheduled to leave on the 20th. He has essentially been a full-time chess player since he was fifteen, and spends more than a hundred and sixty days on the road each year. When he is not travelling, he lives with his family in a house in Baerum, an affluent suburb of Oslo. He rents the basement from his parents. For this trip, some friends from the chess club at his high school had come with him to play in the open part of the tournament. Carlsen, who left school two years ago without formally graduating, had gone out with his old friends for pizza and bowling, but at most tournaments he is either alone or with his father, Henrik, who helps manage his career and, to an extent, his life. If Carlsen plays in a tournament in less than clean clothes, chances are that Henrik did not come with him. Carlsen spends evenings in his hotel room, streaming TV shows on his laptop—“The A-Team” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are favorites—and going on Skype and Facebook. Sometimes, he works out at the gym to relieve the tension of a match. When he is at home, he plays Wii Sports Resort and Mario Kart, and with his family he plays SingStar, a karaoke game; he also likes to tease his three sisters. I asked Carlsen if he wanted to go to college. “I have no interest,” he said.
The first time I met Carlsen, last May in New York, he had seemed even more introverted than you’d expect a chess pro to be. Henrik sat by his side, and Carlsen let his father do nearly all the talking. Carlsen barely made eye contact with me. By that time, Kasparov, among others, had called him the most promising player of his generation, but Carlsen’s reputation was limited to the chess world. In the months since, he had become a minor celebrity, thanks mostly to advertisements that he had made for G-Star. Carlsen has a baby face that is quickly solidifying into that of a young man, and he has the same loose sandy locks as Justin Bieber. Carlsen now makes more than a million dollars a year in endorsements and fees.
We met up again four months later, at the Cooper Square Hotel, in the East Village. It was Fashion Week, and Carlsen’s face—turned tough through strenuous furrowing of his eyebrows—glowered from billboards and magazines. An event called Magnus Carlsen Against the World had been put together by G-Star. He played against a team of three grandmasters. Each member of the trio suggested a move, and an online audience chose which one to play against Carlsen. Not surprisingly, Carlsen won. Many people in the chess world considered the contest vulgar. Simen Agdestein, who trained Carlsen as a boy in Oslo, and who remains an admirer of his playing, said, “The only point of that was to make Magnus more famous.” At the trophy presentation, the actress Liv Tyler, another G-Star endorser, gave Carlsen, who wore a G-Star cardigan and jeans, a silver plaque, and TV interviewers lobbed softball questions at him.
“There are lots of pretty girls in New York,” an interviewer said. “Any you’d want to meet?”
“I’m sure there’ll be some at the G-Star show,” he said, awkwardly.
Fresh from his comeback against Kramnik, Carlsen was a lot more relaxed. Well built, he was wearing a checked shirt over a T-shirt—both his own purchases—and he looked like a European college kid on holiday. Indeed, his next stop was a Manchester United soccer game. Most grandmasters start chess extremely young—the great Cuban José Raúl Capablanca, with whom Carlsen is sometimes compared, was four years old when he first played—and I assumed that Carlsen had begun at a very early age, too. He hadn’t. As a little boy, however, he had shown unusual mathematical aptitude, which is often found in chess talents. “He would be thinking ten to the second, ten to the third power, and he would go on and on,” his grandfather Kurt Carlsen, a retired chemist, recalled. Before Magnus was two, he could complete a fifty-piece jigsaw puzzle. By four, he had memorized the names and populations of most of Norway’s four hundred and thirty municipalities. He built elaborate models with Lego bricks. “My parents tell me I used to weigh them,” he recalled.
When Carlsen was about five, his father, who was then working as a supply manager for Exxon, brought out the chessboard. Henrik had played the game well as a young man. He wanted to teach his oldest child, Ellen, and Magnus, who is a year younger. But neither paid much attention, and Henrik grew frustrated and gave up. “I said to myself, ‘Maybe chess is not for them. It doesn’t matter—they can do something else.’ ” During these years, Magnus was more engaged by soccer and skiing, and the family already played hearts, bridge, and Monopoly; in those contests, Ellen and Ingrid, who is three years younger than Magnus, ganged up on him.
When Magnus was almost eight, Henrik made another attempt to interest the kids in chess. Magnus liked games, and this time, he recalled, he found it “just a richer and more complicated game than any other.” He soon beat Ellen, who quit playing. Magnus began consulting his father’s small collection of chess books. He read “Find the Plan,” by Bent Larsen, a standard introductory text, and more advanced books, like “The Complete Dragon.” (The title refers to a form of defense in which the pattern of pawns resembles a dragon’s tail.) He was the sort of child who studied what interested him and ignored what didn’t. School, which bored him, was quickly supplanted by chess. “During the whole third grade, I think it’s fair to say, I didn’t do my homework once,” he recalled. At breakfast, he sat down at his own table and tested chess moves on a board. He recalled, “I found it natural—I didn’t really have the need to socialize with my family over meals. Dinner I, of course, ate with them.”
After playing for a year, Magnus beat Henrik for the first time, in a game of “blitz chess,” in which each player has five minutes to make all his moves. Magnus began to play in local junior competitions. Henrik picked him up after ski-jump practice and ferried him to the chess tournaments. Carlsen’s family was not unlike those American families in which the parents are careful not to tell their children that they have to excel but the children sense it anyway. Håkon Åmdal, a friend of Carlsen’s from school, says, “My impression is that Magnus chose to play chess by himself, but he has this feeling that he satisfies his dad by it.”
In March, 2000, Henrik arranged for Magnus, now nine, to spend a few hours every week with a chess teacher, Torbjørn Ringdal Hansen, a former Norwegian junior champion. Carlsen liked Hansen’s casual style; the classes were more like spirited bull sessions. The teacher, in turn, was struck by his pupil’s gifts. “Everything I said he understood so easily,” Hansen told me at the Sjakkhuset, or Chess House, in Oslo, where a biography of Carlsen—the second one—was for sale. “It didn’t take long before it got more and more difficult for me to win.” Hansen was particularly impressed with Carlsen’s prodigious memory for board positions and moves. Last year, when Hansen and Carlsen played together in the Siberian Olympiad, Carlsen pointed to a game that they were both watching and said to Hansen, “That’s a variation you showed me.”
Soon after Carlsen began instruction with Hansen, other kids stopped playing chess with him on the board in the school library. “It very quickly became pointless,” he said. He was so good that it was easy to forget that he’d been at it for only a few years. After he finished poorly in one competition, Hansen had to explain to him that it was permissible to get up and go to the bathroom. Carlsen was small and cute, with candid eyes and uncombed hair. He brought along HobNobs and comic books. The combination of his cherubic face, dangling legs, and Donald Duck lulled his opponents. It felt like competing against the boy in “The Red Balloon.” Henrik recalls that, at a 2002 championship, one player exclaimed in disgust, “I lost to that little prick?”
Chess is no sexier in Norway than in America. Carlsen would rather have become a sports star than a chess champion. In London, he told me that, during his most recent visit to New York, he had gone to Washington Square Park and, unrecognized, played against the chess hustlers, beating them all. The story reminded me of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” and Carlsen said that he had seen it once on TV but had not paid much attention: “The Olympics in Salt Lake were also on, and that was more interesting to me.”
Åmdal, his school friend, said of Carlsen, “It was easy to mock him for playing chess—it was easy to call him a nerd.” But Carlsen enjoyed being extraordinary at something. Once, when the boys were in their early teens, they went online and joined a beginners’ chess group; Carlsen handily beat everyone, playing so well that his opponents accused him of using a computer program to choose his moves. In fact, he was less interested in computers than most players his age. He liked to go online to find human opponents, but he resisted playing against the programs themselves. Computer chess struck him as mechanical—the machine always won, and he did not like being told that there was one “best” move. “It’s like playing someone who is extremely stupid but who beats you anyway,” he said.
Carlsen’s early style was enormously aggressive; he liked to press the attack as hard as he could. He had a remarkable instinct for where to place his pieces, and his study of strategy books gave him an unusually varied repertoire of moves. “He was playing every opening that ever existed,” Hansen said.
In 2001, Carlsen began studying with Simen Agdestein, a top Norwegian grandmaster. Agdestein told me that Carlsen was “the best natural player I had ever seen. He would play with almost perfect form. You would just say, ‘Whoa!’ ” Going online to play others certainly honed the boy’s skills: Agdestein estimates that, during the four or so years that he was Carlsen’s tutor, Carlsen played more than seven thousand games online. Agdestein emphasizes that he taught Carlsen only sporadically, while the boy continued with school, soccer, and other ordinary pursuits. “The main job he’s done himself,” Agdestein said. The training ended when Carlsen was thirteen. (Agdestein was once on the Norwegian national soccer team, so they also kicked the ball around. Carlsen, Agdestein recalled, “has a nice left foot.”)
In 2003, Henrik took a break from his work, and he and his wife removed their children from school for a year to tour Europe, much of the time in a minivan. “We went on a ten-thousand-kilometre route through chess tournaments and cultural places and nice vacation spots along the seaside,” Henrik said. The object was to broaden the children’s horizons and to get Magnus to the sorts of high-level games that you could not consistently find in Norway. The children did their homework in the back of the minivan or in hotel rooms at night. Carlsen was playing constantly—about a hundred and fifty major tournament games a year—and he did well. He was hard to intimidate, and his interest in the game was prodigious. After a chess match, he went to his computer and played more chess online, especially if he had just lost. He still does this, now under pseudonyms. “I do it to blow off some steam,” Carlsen says. “It might have the positive effect just to show myself that I can actually win a game of chess.”
At a 2004 tournament in Reykjavik, Carlsen beat Anatoly Karpov, the former champion, in a game of blitz chess. The next day, he played Garry Kasparov in two games of “rapid chess,” in which each side is given twenty-five minutes; he played the first to a draw and quickly lost the second. “I played like a child,” he said afterward, in disgust. Kasparov, though, remembers knowing immediately that Carlsen “was an outstanding player.” A month later, Carlsen became a grandmaster—the second youngest in history. These two events made international news, but his parents remained uncertain whether to think of their son as a future professional chess player or as someone who happened to be very good at chess. One night, Henrik Carlsen recalled, the family was gathered at dinner when “60 Minutes” called to discuss the possibility of an interview; he told them to call back when the family was finished eating. They never did.
Carlsen had now risen to the level of players who have full-time coaches or employ “seconds” who help them work with databases so that they can test openings against future opponents. But he continued working mostly on his own. Carlsen wasn’t thinking about being the best, he recalled: “I was just enjoying the game, really. I don’t think I’ve ever really been much into setting myself these goals. It hasn’t been necessary. I mean, just playing the game has been enough for me. I’ve always really been positively surprised by how well I did.” Henrik Carlsen told me, “For years and years, people have told us, ‘Magnus is very promising, but how does he work on his chess?’ And we tell them, ‘He does what he likes.’ . . . It’s curiosity as opposed to discipline.” Carlsen himself is unsure of the roots of his talent. “Maybe I’ll be able to say in twenty years,” he said. “Right now I just cannot pinpoint it.”
Because Carlsen has spent less time than most of his cohort training with computers, he is less prone to play the way they do. He relies more on his own judgment. This makes him tricky for opponents who have relied on software and databases for counsel. Most of all, Carlsen keeps trying out fresh stratagems. He can look at an opening once and remember it. These are some of the reasons that, at an age when many prodigies peak, Carlsen kept getting better, winning tournaments and beating the game’s élite. He went from No. 700 in the world in 2004, when he played Karpov, to No. 6 in 2008. “The trainer of the Russian juniors is a former top player—I think he was third in the world at some stage,” Henrik Carlsen said. “And he said at some point, ‘Of course, we are doing our best in Russia, but we don’t have talent like Magnus’s.’ ”
In 2009, Carlsen hired Kasparov to train him. Kasparov had long had his eye on Carlsen and was eager to take on the job. The Web site Chessvibes declared that it was a “dream team.” Kasparov was an expensive coach—his annual fee was set at several hundred thousand dollars—but Carlsen and his family thought that the tutelage was worth it. With Kasparov suggesting openings and helping him prepare for his opponents, Carlsen went on a tear through the major competitions, playing his best chess ever. One year after the collaboration began, on January 1, 2010, Carlsen reached the No. 1 spot. “It was not, like, a great struggle,” he recalled. Two months later, his Elo rating—the chess world’s official measure of a player’s skills, based on his tournament results—was the second highest in history, behind that of Kasparov.
Around this time, the collaboration came to an abrupt end. Carlsen was playing in a tournament in Wijk aan Zee, in Holland. Kasparov, who was in Moscow, was communicating with him via Skype, and he proposed a substitute opening less than an hour before a game against Kramnik. Carlsen went to the board and sat immobilized, trying to wrap his mind around the new moves. He lost the game (though he won the tournament). Carlsen decided that he and Kasparov were just too different. “I felt like every day I just had to build up my energy to be able to face him,” he told me. Kasparov hugely admires Carlsen’s talent, but thinks that he threw away an opportunity out of a fear of hard work. Carlsen, he thinks, could have surpassed Kasparov’s own Elo rating, one of the most storied records in chess. He told me, “I was not in the position to make him change his personality.”
Chess was brought to the West from India by way of Persia, sometime between the eighth and tenth centuries. European aristocrats adopted it and adapted it. Chess fit into their idea of a world with clear distinctions between the privileged and the poor. The game emphasized that society was bound by rules that even royalty had to obey: the Magna Carta made pastime.
The Russian Revolution changed how chess was played. Lenin, an enthusiastic player, made the game a priority for the new nation. In 1920, Alexander Ilyin-Zhenevsky, a commissar of Soviet chess, wrote that chess, “in some ways even more than sport, develops in a man boldness, presence of mind, composure, a strong will, and, most important, a sense of strategy.” The Soviets set about mass-producing chess excellence. In 1991, the year the Soviet Union broke up, the top nine players in the world were from the U.S.S.R. By then, Soviet-trained players had held the world championship for all but three of the past forty-three years.
The Soviet program emphasized focus, logic, and, above all, preparation. The board was an informational battleground, and work put in before the game allowed you to see chances that your opponent might miss. The Soviets’ foremost chess practitioner, the world champion Mikhail Botvinnik, was also an electrical engineer. “Some experts say my principal strength is my zest, my aggressiveness,” he once said. “I think it’s my scientific training, the logic of a scientist’s search for truth.” The directors of the Soviet chess program accumulated vast archives of opening moves, as well as records of the play of foreign opponents. The data gave them a significant advantage, but decades of Soviet dominance also led to complacency and a reliance on received wisdom.
The Soviets considered idiosyncratic players like America’s Bobby Fischer—the only player to interrupt more than four decades of dominance—the biggest threat to their system. In fact, their reign was ended by unlikely kindred spirits: Western computer programmers. Mastery of chess wasn’t an end in itself for either group. The Soviets thought that training a generation of chess players would compensate for historic flaws in the Russian character; Western coders chose chess as a vehicle for exploring artificial intelligence. Alan Turing, the brilliant code breaker who first proposed a chess-playing computer in the forties, wrote that the goal of such a project was not just to teach a computer to play chess but to teach it to play chess like a human.
But how does a grandmaster play? The early computer programmers struggled to solve this puzzle. They took note of the chess adept’s highly developed memory, his understanding of the value of having pieces on certain squares on the board, and his ability to have his moves informed by previous games that he had played or read about. Replicating the thinking of a human chess player was extremely difficult, though. Well into the nineteen-nineties, top grandmasters were still beating computers. But computers eventually got so fast that they no longer needed to be particularly smart to beat humans at games—they could just play out every scenario for the subsequent ten to fifteen moves and choose the best one. Brute force replaced finesse as the favored approach in computer chess. In 1997, Kasparov famously lost a six-game match against the I.B.M. mainframe Deep Blue. In the final game, he was crushed in just over an hour.
In 2007, a computer “solved” checkers—that is, went through every possible move to determine the optimal game. The number of possible moves in a chess game is dizzying, more than the number of atoms in the universe; no current computer can “solve” chess. But processors are now so powerful that no human stands a chance of winning a match. I asked Carlsen if he would be interested in a Deep Blue-type contest, and he said no—it would discourage him. Among the chess élite, the idea of challenging a computer has fallen into the realm of farce and retort. At the London Chess Classic, one commentator quoted the Dutch grandmaster Jan Hein Donner, who, when asked what strategy he would use against a computer, joked, “I would bring a hammer.”
Computers have no skills and they have nothing approaching intuition. Carlsen finds their games inelegant, and complains about “weird computer moves I can’t understand,” whereas in talking about his own game he speaks of achieving “harmony” among the pieces on the chessboard, and even of “poetry.” He told me about watching two advanced computers play one another in a recent match in Norway: “My conclusions were, one, the best computers are stronger than the best players, and, two, the games are not interesting at all.”
Computers don’t need to play interesting chess, however, to have affected the way humans play chess. You can now become a pretty good chess player without ever playing a live opponent. Chess software programs are always ready for a game. For seventy dollars, you can buy a comprehensive database that documents every move your opponents have ever made in tournaments. A beginner can easily have access to more information than a Soviet grandmaster once held.
Viswanathan Anand, an Indian grandmaster and the current world chess champion, said, “Every decision we make, you can feel the computer’s influence in the background.” Among grandmasters, there has been an over-all rise in the level of play; it’s as if all the Olympic athletes in the world were able to train together, year round, with the best coaches and equipment. Mig Greengard, a commentator who blogs at the Web site ChessNinja, says, “You’ve got two hundred guys walking the planet who, with a little tailwind, are playing strongly enough to beat the world champion.” But, in the view of many commentators, the improvement in play has coincided with an impoverishment of style. Speaking of the new generation, Kasparov said, “Everyone looks at the position now from the computer lens.” Carlsen noted that, before computer chess became dominant, an exposed pawn was often avoided by opponents, as it was seen as a possible trap. Today’s players, having analyzed countless games with computers, are confident of being able to distinguish a ruse from an opportunity; they take the pawn. Many top players are so used to running openings by computers that they shy away from the ones that computers rate poorly. Kasparov believes that, as a result, intuition has been undermined. “When we played, it was very clear you couldn’t see everything,” he says. “Now it’s not about the pattern. It’s more number crunching.”
Carlsen is often identified with, as he puts it, the “new Information Age.” Certainly before the age of online play it would have been nearly impossible for someone from Norway—which the British grandmaster Nigel Short has called “a small, poxy chess nation with almost no history of success”—to rise to No. 1 by the age of nineteen. But Carlsen’s casual attitude, Kasparov says, makes him “somehow immune” from the homogenization of modern chess. Carlsen has described himself to Der Spiegel as “chaotic” and said that he had a tendency to be “lazy.” In the lead-up to tournaments, when other players are testing out strategies on their computers, Carlsen is often staying up late playing video games or online poker. Before tournament days, he likes to get plenty of sleep—optimally, ten or eleven hours—waking up an hour or two before the start. “It’s no secret that the best players’ opening preparation is much deeper than mine,” Carlsen told me. In London, he went into some games with only the first move chosen; most players typically map out their first dozen or so moves. He believes that things even out because, as he put it, “I’m younger and have more energy, and it’s easier to adapt.”
Frederic Friedel, a co-owner of the popular software company ChessBase, has invited Carlsen to come to his Hamburg offices to receive instruction on how to get the most out of his programs. Carlsen has declined the offer repeatedly, even though many of his rivals have accepted. Friedel said that he is willing to wait for Carlsen: “I think Magnus is storing this as a backup plan—plan B, if he starts to slip. It’s like a tennis player playing with a wooden racquet: he can always get the graphite one.”
Computers are aggressive, directed chess players. This is a by-product of their programming: their software is designed to improve their chances of winning in ways that can be quantified. (A computer never makes a mistake in a game with six or fewer pieces on the board.) Friedel says that a human player trying to deflect a computer’s attack should “do nothing and do it well.” In other words, he should play a counter-game so subtle that the computer’s relentless attempt to “solve” the game is thwarted. As Carlsen likes to put it, computers “are really good tactically and they can’t play chess.” The kind of chess they don’t play easily is called “positional”—a style that focusses less on driving toward checkmate and more on having an over-all sense of the board. Carlsen, as he has matured, has increasingly adopted this approach. In the computer age, the only way to win may be to have no evident plan. As Anand sees it, Carlsen’s main strength is that he is “capable of being many different players. He can be tactical. He can be positional. He can be many things.”
In the Hilton coffee shop, I complimented Carlsen on a set of moves that, in 2004, made his name in the world of chess. He was thirteen at the time, working toward becoming a grandmaster. At Wijk aan Zee, a prestigious tournament on the Dutch coast, he had been in the weakest group of players. In the penultimate round, Carlsen played white against Sipke Ernst, a capable opponent more than ten years his senior. They played evenly for a while, going through moves that top players had used many times before. Then, before his seventeenth move, Carlsen paused and thought for about half an hour. On his eighteenth move, he placed a knight where one of Ernst’s pawns could take it. Three moves later, Carlsen sacrificed a bishop in a similar way. On the next move, he gave up a rook. Seven moves later, however, Ernst found himself checkmated, his king nailed by Carlsen’s queen as Ernst’s two rooks stood uselessly on either side. (The technical term is “epaulette mate.”) The grace with which Carlsen had detonated a bomb in a routine game left the audience amazed. Lubomir Kavalek, writing in the Washington Post, dubbed Carlsen the Mozart of chess.
Carlsen isn’t so impressed with his younger self’s play. “It was spectacular, and it is spectacular, but at the same time anyone could have done it,” he said. “Well, not anyone, but a lot of people. It amazes me that when people talk about my best games these are still the games they talk about.” Such games now strike him as merely clever—and, not incidentally, as the sort of thing that you can get away with mainly as an obscure player. In our era of total information, even a player’s boldest moves soon become absorbed into the realm of shared knowledge. “In former times, you could play a novelty,” Frederic Friedel, the chess-program publisher, says. “Now, as soon as the knight moves to g3, everyone who is interested in this line finds out.”
Carlsen said that, for him, great chess playing is less the “scientific search for the best approaches” than “psychological warfare with some little tricks.” He took me through a few of his best-loved games. The first match that he mentioned was against Vasilios Kotronias, a Greek grandmaster, in the fall of 2004, just a few months after his victory over Ernst. He had not won it—he only came to a draw—but this did not seem to bother him. He was pleased with the way that he had sacrificed a knight, and then a rook, in order to gain a position. “I just thought I’d never seen this combination before, this theme,” he says. “There’s no better feeling than discovering something new.”
He had a similar epiphany, he said, during a match that he had played against Anand this past fall, in Nanjing, China. Carlsen loves playing Anand, who brings out his highest game, whereas Kramnik brings out his street side. In the Nanjing match, Carlsen recalled, play had begun ordinarily, with both competitors moving pawns to the center of the board and sending their knights and bishops out, searching for weakness and advantage. But Carlsen methodically pushed Anand back. “He was putting up really tough resistance, and I was breaking it down,” Carlsen said, enjoying the memory of the “really subtle positional chess” that he was playing. His pieces almost imperceptibly took control of the more important squares on the board; the computer programs didn’t give him any real advantage. But after move 38 Carlsen was clearly ahead, his queen and rook bearing down on Anand’s king. Anand’s pieces were gathered in a huddle, as if preparing for a wolf attack. Soon afterward, the computer programs saw a quick route to checkmate; Carlsen did not, however, and Anand recovered. The game ended in a draw. Nevertheless, Carlsen felt that he had got “the upper hand from a relatively innocuous-looking position.” He had “created something special,” a small legacy of intuition and feeling that no computer or trainer had forecast for him.
In February, I saw Carlsen again at the Cooper Square Hotel; he was in town for another Fashion Week. Liv Tyler was not there, but Carlsen again walked the red carpet for G-Star, and this time he was paired at the event with Gemma Arterton, a former Bond girl. A fashion magazine had asked Carlsen to let his hair grow longer, and at noon, just out of bed, it was still moussed into ringlets from a photo shoot the previous day.
After winning the London tournament in December, Carlsen had gone home. He now shared the basement with his sister Ingrid. The Carlsens still gathered upstairs to have dinner, and afterward they played SingStar. They went to the family ski cabin, in Engerdal. All the same, being at home when other kids your age are in college, or working, was a mixed experience. “At times, I’m just sitting there, wondering what to do,” Carlsen said. In January, he was glad to be back in action, at the 2011 tournament in Wijk aan Zee. Some good things happened there. Playing black, he beat Kramnik in another long game; it ended with his forcing Kramnik into a Zugzwang, a bind in which any move a player makes worsens his position. While Kramnik’s bishop was frozen out, Carlsen’s king jauntily moved in to finish off his opponent’s pawns. After the eightieth move, Kramnik resigned. “I don’t often feel the need to pump my fist in the air after a game,” Carlsen told me. “But, well, it was Kramnik.”
That was the high point. The low point was a game on Day Three, when Carlsen played white against Anish Giri, a sixteen-year-old Dutch player. Giri is not yet a full-time professional, though his play has attracted many admirers. Frederic Friedel had joked to me about Giri, “I told Magnus he’s my backup.” In London, Carlsen had said that, as good as Giri was, he doubted he would “ever be stronger than me.” But in Wijk, Giri beat Carlsen in just twenty-two moves—a humiliation. Carlsen let one of Giri’s pawns travel most of the way down the board and lost a knight trying to stop it. On the next move, he resigned. Blogs called the game one of the worst of Carlsen’s career. Carlsen, who had never before lost to such a young player in a major tournament, described his play to me as “just pathetic.”
He had then bounced back, winning three games and playing to a draw in three others, calling up memories of his London come-from-behind victory. Friedel wrote to me, “I have a new theory. Magnus is so strong that he is simply bored. (I know from personal experience that he bores easily.) So he has come up with a new strategy to make things more interesting for himself: play like an idiot in the first few games, move to the bottom of the table, and then try to win the tournament anyway.”
Carlsen might have pulled off such a feat, except that in Round 10 he played Ian Nepomniachtchi, a Russian who is the same age. Carlsen had the opportunity for a draw early in the game, but went for the win instead, trying to catch up to the tournament leaders, and wound up losing. The turnabout hurt all the more because Nepomniachtchi, an uneven player, had just been drubbed in a game and, after beating Carlsen, went on to lose another two just as badly. The tournament prize went to the American Hikaru Nakamura, one of the three grandmasters who had participated in G-Star’s Magnus Carlsen Against the World event.
After the Wijk tournament, Carlsen dropped to No. 2 in the world rankings, behind Anand. Carlsen told me that he felt chastened: “It’s really getting competitive at the top. I realized against Nepomniachtchi, for example, that there were some areas of the game where he could outplay me.” He told me that something odd had happened to him at Wijk, when he was getting ready to play Anand, in Round 7. He was bouncing back from the Giri debacle and had just won twice when he mysteriously lost his confidence. He was checking his preparations, he remembered, “when, suddenly, I started to get these doubts. All of a sudden, my fighting spirit was almost gone.” He began the game with an unusually timid opening and played to a draw.
Carlsen was already thinking ahead to the Amber chess tournament, which is being played this month, in Monaco. The games there do not affect anyone’s official ranking, since the participants play either rapid or blindfold chess; all the same, he said, “I really, really want to win and restore the power balance.” He added, “I just have to improve so much myself now.” He was even willing to let someone help him, if that’s what it took. In the days after Fashion Week, he had contacted Wesley So, a rising seventeen-year-old Philippine grandmaster, and offered to pay his way to Europe if he would train with him. In London, Carlsen had described So to me as his stylistic opposite. “I think his entire training has been with a computer,” he had noted with amazement. When I last spoke to Carlsen, he was in Majorca with So, and they had been working together. Carlsen once told me that if chess ever stopped being fun for him he’d “have to do something else.” He added, “If you have that feeling all the time, what’s the point of playing?” But, for now, he was appreciating the new training: “We’ll see if something good comes of it.” If he wound up playing more like other modern players, so be it. As Carlsen had put it, “I absolutely hate losing.” It was nice to create something special, but it was even nicer to win. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/03/21/the-princes-gambit
Custom Chess Openings 