Chess Cook-Off
Dominic Lawson penned an intriguing portrait of the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen for The Sunday Times the other day which didn't tell us too much about the young Norwegian except that switches off easily and occasionally loses his head on the football field.
What I found really interesting is that young Magnus can evaluate a position on the chess board with little any calculation and that he 'knows' what is a good or bad move instinctively, without always being able to explain why.
Now the closest I come to that is when I'm cooking up a storm, rattling the pots and pens; I often know what flavours and spices go together without reference to cookbooks and recipes.
So if I ever get the chance to meet Magnus Carlsen I think I'll challenge him to a cook-off because it seems the odds may be against me when it comes to chess.
Experts say I’m normal. . . I’d have settled for a bit odd
Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, astounds other grandmasters with his mental powers. But the 23-year-old doesn’t know how he does it, he tells this opponent
By Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times
Magnus Carlsen
Perhaps you like to play park football. Imagine how you would feel if Lionel Messi turned up and asked you to join in a spot of competitive keepy-uppy. Or, if you are a club tennis player, how would it be if Roger Federer said he’d be happy to play you, best of three sets?
Well, that is how this club chess player felt, sitting across the board from Magnus Carlsen, the 23-year-old world chess champion (who begins the first defence of his title in Russia in less than a fortnight). Scarier still, I was obliged to interview him for the BBC Radio 4 series Across the Board while playing — and Magnus is not just lethal with the chess pieces. He has developed a similarly unforgiving style as an interviewee. To say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly would be an understatement: monosyllabic would be the most generous way of describing how he has dealt with what he considers stupid questions from journalists.
We are in Magnus’s home town of Oslo and he has just finished a photoshoot for a glossy magazine: not only is he the greatest exponent of the pursuit Goethe described as the touchstone of the intellect; he is also handsome enough to be a model for the clothing company G-Star. I can’t hope to compete there, either.
I’ve done my homework, however, and have read that the five-year-old Magnus’s first chess book was by the only previous Nordic chess great, Bent Larsen. So I open with a move named after that Danish grandmaster, explaining that I would have played a Norwegian opening, if only one existed. “There are in fact a couple of Norwegian openings,” Magnus deadpans. “One is very bad. The other is merely dubious.”
He is a physically intimidating presence — and, after explaining that he sees chess as first and foremost a sport, confides that he is an active football player. “I play for a local team, left back — or so the coach says.” And does he play as hard on the field as he does over the chess board? “Well, I have definitely deserved to have been sent off on two occasions. But the referees have too much respect for me, unfortunately. Occasionally, I lose my head.”
That, presumably, is a reference to the over-competitive rage that sometimes overcomes footballers. Chess at the highest level, however, has over the centuries been associated by the public with a different sort of mental loss of control: insanity. This has much to do with the fate of the American Bobby Fischer, who after becoming in 1972 the first non-Russian since the Second World War to win the supreme title, descended into paranoid reclusiveness.
I ask Magnus if he ever feels worried that intense devotion to such a fundamentally lonely and mentally demanding struggle might send him over the edge at some point. “That crossed my mind only once, when I saw a sad documentary about Bobby Fischer. It made me think: is this going to be me?”
In fact, Magnus is a much more stable character than Fischer ever was, although there are those who claim the Norwegian displays some characteristics associated with Asperger’s syndrome. But this is probably a lazy way of describing someone with extreme powers of concentration — at the age of one, Magnus would sit for hours over complex jigsaw puzzles. In fact, he volunteers: “I have been tested for this sort of thing, and I was told I was normal. But if they had said I was not normal, I would have regarded it as a great compliment. I’m sometimes a bit weird . . . but then everyone’s a little bit weird.”
Perhaps the only weird thing about Magnus is his freakish natural gift for chess. He became a grandmaster at 13 and the world’s highest-rated player at 19. No one else, not even Fischer or Garry Kasparov, achieved that. Kasparov coached Magnus in 2009, reporting afterwards: “I was amazed at how quickly he could evaluate a position, and seemingly without any calculation at all. He sees harmony on the board like a violin virtuoso with perfect pitch.”
Magnus is as puzzled by this as everyone else: “I just know why a move is bad or why it is good. But I couldn’t tell you how. I find it very mysterious. But if I knew how, it would be less interesting. I’m just fortunate that I’ve found something I love to do, that I can do better than anyone else — and I don’t understand why.” The mystery lies, I suspect, in the subconscious. It is obvious that Magnus is not really playing moves “without any calculation at all”. It’s more that he developed a deep understanding of chess at such a young age that it became his natural language. He “speaks” chess just as many of us speak English — we don’t appear to be thinking about what words to say in a conversation, but the parts of our brain commonly labelled the subconscious select the right words instantaneously. Sometimes Magnus takes longer to find the right words in our interview than he does the moves — but then English is his third language (after chess and Norwegian).
I try to get a sense of the scale of Magnus’s gift by asking him how many chess games he could play simultaneously, blindfold: in America recently he played 10 opponents at once with his back to the boards (winning every game). “Well, I could surely play 25 games at once blindfold. It would take an effort, but I wouldn’t regard it as extraordinary.”
I tell him that it would seem extraordinary to the rest of us. But Magnus modestly dismisses the idea that he is super-bright: “I’m doubtful that I would excel at anything else than chess. I don’t think I’m stupid by any means, but there are a lot of people who play chess who are much more intelligent than me. And if chess were mathematical I probably wouldn’t be any good at it at all.”
He does, however, seem to have an extraordinary command of his mental processes. He tells me he recently entered into a competition with fellow grandmasters in which the object was, while staying awake, to produce the lowest possible brain activity, as measured electronically. He won. “I’m proud to say that I was a beast at that,” he says. “I do have the ability just to switch out.” Perhaps this explains why Carlsen so often seems out of it in interviews: when he is bored he shuts down.
It probably helps my interview that it is conducted over a chess game, something that never bores him. Although at one point — to my immense gratification — he says: “You have just made a move I didn’t expect you to make and one I slightly feared. So now I’m losing interest in the conversation and will focus on the board position . . . you have set me a very concrete problem.”
Needless to say, Magnus found the best solution to this concrete problem, although I treasured the long silence as his unique brain whirred through all the possible permutations: at least I had made him think. But that was the best it got, from my point of view. After that moment of hesitation (“I’m really at a slight loss what to do”) the world champion inexorably ground down my defences, finishing me off with a pretty queen sacrifice.
“An interesting game, a struggle way beyond my expectations,” declared the world champion afterwards. I wasn’t sure whether to take that as an insult or a compliment.
But it was a thrill, just as for a county-standard tennis player losing 6-0, 6-0 to Roger Federer would be exhilarating. There is no greater privilege than a close encounter with genius.
Well, that is how this club chess player felt, sitting across the board from Magnus Carlsen, the 23-year-old world chess champion (who begins the first defence of his title in Russia in less than a fortnight). Scarier still, I was obliged to interview him for the BBC Radio 4 series Across the Board while playing — and Magnus is not just lethal with the chess pieces. He has developed a similarly unforgiving style as an interviewee. To say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly would be an understatement: monosyllabic would be the most generous way of describing how he has dealt with what he considers stupid questions from journalists.
We are in Magnus’s home town of Oslo and he has just finished a photoshoot for a glossy magazine: not only is he the greatest exponent of the pursuit Goethe described as the touchstone of the intellect; he is also handsome enough to be a model for the clothing company G-Star. I can’t hope to compete there, either.
I’ve done my homework, however, and have read that the five-year-old Magnus’s first chess book was by the only previous Nordic chess great, Bent Larsen. So I open with a move named after that Danish grandmaster, explaining that I would have played a Norwegian opening, if only one existed. “There are in fact a couple of Norwegian openings,” Magnus deadpans. “One is very bad. The other is merely dubious.”
He is a physically intimidating presence — and, after explaining that he sees chess as first and foremost a sport, confides that he is an active football player. “I play for a local team, left back — or so the coach says.” And does he play as hard on the field as he does over the chess board? “Well, I have definitely deserved to have been sent off on two occasions. But the referees have too much respect for me, unfortunately. Occasionally, I lose my head.”
That, presumably, is a reference to the over-competitive rage that sometimes overcomes footballers. Chess at the highest level, however, has over the centuries been associated by the public with a different sort of mental loss of control: insanity. This has much to do with the fate of the American Bobby Fischer, who after becoming in 1972 the first non-Russian since the Second World War to win the supreme title, descended into paranoid reclusiveness.
I ask Magnus if he ever feels worried that intense devotion to such a fundamentally lonely and mentally demanding struggle might send him over the edge at some point. “That crossed my mind only once, when I saw a sad documentary about Bobby Fischer. It made me think: is this going to be me?”
In fact, Magnus is a much more stable character than Fischer ever was, although there are those who claim the Norwegian displays some characteristics associated with Asperger’s syndrome. But this is probably a lazy way of describing someone with extreme powers of concentration — at the age of one, Magnus would sit for hours over complex jigsaw puzzles. In fact, he volunteers: “I have been tested for this sort of thing, and I was told I was normal. But if they had said I was not normal, I would have regarded it as a great compliment. I’m sometimes a bit weird . . . but then everyone’s a little bit weird.”
Perhaps the only weird thing about Magnus is his freakish natural gift for chess. He became a grandmaster at 13 and the world’s highest-rated player at 19. No one else, not even Fischer or Garry Kasparov, achieved that. Kasparov coached Magnus in 2009, reporting afterwards: “I was amazed at how quickly he could evaluate a position, and seemingly without any calculation at all. He sees harmony on the board like a violin virtuoso with perfect pitch.”
Magnus is as puzzled by this as everyone else: “I just know why a move is bad or why it is good. But I couldn’t tell you how. I find it very mysterious. But if I knew how, it would be less interesting. I’m just fortunate that I’ve found something I love to do, that I can do better than anyone else — and I don’t understand why.” The mystery lies, I suspect, in the subconscious. It is obvious that Magnus is not really playing moves “without any calculation at all”. It’s more that he developed a deep understanding of chess at such a young age that it became his natural language. He “speaks” chess just as many of us speak English — we don’t appear to be thinking about what words to say in a conversation, but the parts of our brain commonly labelled the subconscious select the right words instantaneously. Sometimes Magnus takes longer to find the right words in our interview than he does the moves — but then English is his third language (after chess and Norwegian).
I try to get a sense of the scale of Magnus’s gift by asking him how many chess games he could play simultaneously, blindfold: in America recently he played 10 opponents at once with his back to the boards (winning every game). “Well, I could surely play 25 games at once blindfold. It would take an effort, but I wouldn’t regard it as extraordinary.”
I tell him that it would seem extraordinary to the rest of us. But Magnus modestly dismisses the idea that he is super-bright: “I’m doubtful that I would excel at anything else than chess. I don’t think I’m stupid by any means, but there are a lot of people who play chess who are much more intelligent than me. And if chess were mathematical I probably wouldn’t be any good at it at all.”
He does, however, seem to have an extraordinary command of his mental processes. He tells me he recently entered into a competition with fellow grandmasters in which the object was, while staying awake, to produce the lowest possible brain activity, as measured electronically. He won. “I’m proud to say that I was a beast at that,” he says. “I do have the ability just to switch out.” Perhaps this explains why Carlsen so often seems out of it in interviews: when he is bored he shuts down.
It probably helps my interview that it is conducted over a chess game, something that never bores him. Although at one point — to my immense gratification — he says: “You have just made a move I didn’t expect you to make and one I slightly feared. So now I’m losing interest in the conversation and will focus on the board position . . . you have set me a very concrete problem.”
Needless to say, Magnus found the best solution to this concrete problem, although I treasured the long silence as his unique brain whirred through all the possible permutations: at least I had made him think. But that was the best it got, from my point of view. After that moment of hesitation (“I’m really at a slight loss what to do”) the world champion inexorably ground down my defences, finishing me off with a pretty queen sacrifice.
“An interesting game, a struggle way beyond my expectations,” declared the world champion afterwards. I wasn’t sure whether to take that as an insult or a compliment.
But it was a thrill, just as for a county-standard tennis player losing 6-0, 6-0 to Roger Federer would be exhilarating. There is no greater privilege than a close encounter with genius.
