How to Become the Best Chess Player in the World

Skill Development Expert Profile — Magnus Carlsen

13-year old Magnus has just finished his Donald Duck magazine and is eagerly waiting to play Garry Kasparov, the best chess player in the world for the last 20 years.

Kasparov is ranked number 1 in the world, Magnus number 786. He is the youngest opponent Kasparov has ever faced. There is a 28-year age difference. Surely, there can only be one winner.

Garry starts confidently but soon gets rattled when Magnus finds a clever way to win one of his pawns. Winning a pawn at the highest level can often be enough to secure a victory. Magnus has a winning position, but runs low on time, gets a bit nervous, and the game ends up with a draw. Kasparov storms out of the event, clearly dissatisfied.

Magnus celebrated the draw with an ice-cream at McDonald’s.

Chess is easy to learn, but impossible for a human to master completely. After only four moves, there are a billion different alternatives. And there are almost infinite opportunities as the game goes on. What does it take to become the best in the world in such a complex game?

Growing up

From a young age, it was clear that Magnus was a gifted child with impressive intellectual abilities. He could sit quietly with things from the age of 1, sometimes sitting a day in a stretch just building Lego. At the age of 2, Magnus could finish 50-piece jigsaw puzzles, and at age 4, he could build Lego constructions intended for 12–14-year-olds. By the age of 5, his father introduced him to chess, but he showed little interest at the time. Instead, he applied himself to memorising the areas, population, flags and capital cities of all the countries in the world.

Magnus started with chess from rivalry. His older sister started playing, so he wanted to beat her. And he quickly did. He then went on to beat his dad as a 9-year old and at this time he also started winning against several strong players (he doesn’t regard his father as a strong opponent). His improvements happened extremely fast. He was a master learner.

His family noticed his potential, but they didn’t want to push him into learning chess with rigid and strict teachers. They fully supported him, but let him keep his playfulness, curiosity and fascination for the game. All this contributed to the development of Magnus’ highest strength as a chess player, his intuition. When he was 13, he became the youngest chess grandmaster in the world.

Develop your intuition

Magnus has been called the ‘Mozart of chess’, due to the incredible harmony in his games. He is a very creative player that often comes up with new ideas at the table. This is extremely difficult and rare in a game that has been played and analysed for centuries. Much of this is attributed to his intuition, which he developed by studying the game intensely in ways he enjoyed, rather than following strict chess education, where you have to memorise techniques and patterns in a rigid way.

Magnus developed his intuition by using his curiosity to learn about chess. He was so fascinated about how things were working, that rather than study what other people told him, he sat down and genuinely tried to understand how the mechanisms of the game worked. This contributed to developing an intuition for the best moves, even though he cannot always explain why it works. He sometimes makes moves based on intuition, where he is not able to fully calculate the outcome, but he senses that it will give him an advantage later in the game.

“I know but I don’t know why I know. And I think but I don’t know why I think it. Because at some point it all becomes very, very intuitive.” — Magnus Carlsen

Have ambitious goals

Already when Magnus was 13 years, he had the ambition to become the best in the world. And this sort of drive is essential to fuel your determination to improve. If you don’t have high goals, you are not likely to work as hard as is required to reach world-class level. And the only way to find out if it’s possible to become the best in the world is if you put in the work.

Most of us have the potential to become extremely good at almost anything. But as we never put in the practice, it is impossible to find out exactly how good we could become. If we started out from an early age and kept practicing in a field for decades, all of us could probably become great tennis players, musicians or mathematicians. We may not become the next Federer, Mozart or Einstein. But it’s impossible to know with 100 per cent certainty, as we never really tried. So, the only way to find out if you can become the best in the world at something is to set the bar at the highest level and work with dedication to see if you can reach it.

Learn from the best — then move on

After Magnus played against Kasparov as a 13-year old, they started working together. He coached Magnus for several years and gave him valuable insight into the thought processes of a chess genius.

It’s impossible to measure the value of being coached by the best player in the world. But it probably contributed significantly to Magnus’ development as a player. At the time, Kasparov understood the game better than anyone else, and it must have been precious to get access to his ideas around the game.

While cooperating with Kasparov, Carlsen reached the number one ranking in the world, as the youngest player in history (19 years). Only a year later, Magnus stopped working with him. After many years of cooperation, Magnus had reached the highest level of the game and wanted to take back control of his practice. This is a typical breakup seen by many world class performers. When you at one point see that you don’t get that much out of working together anymore, you’ve got to split, even though it got you to the point you’re currently at. You always have to keep developing and improving, to stay at the top.

Use technology

When Carlsen played against Vishy Anand in his first world championships match, he was not only facing one opponent. Anand had a whole team of grandmasters on his side, who had analysed every game Magnus had played in his career. They were preparing any move that could take advantage of his playing style.

Computers have become an essential tool in preparation for games and to get new ideas on how to play. It’s now possible to check in-depth whether ideas will work or be refuted. The computer can also suggest surprising moves, that it would be difficult for a human to come up with, and this has propelled the level of chess to a higher level. Only by keeping updated with the latest developments in collaboration with powerful computers, can you stay on top of the game.

Nevertheless, Magnus often tries to steer games out of computer analysis, to force his opponents to think for themselves. One of the ways he does this is by deliberately playing a slightly inferior move so that the opponent cannot play the lines they have prepared with a computer. This is precisely what happened in the world championships match against Anand. Despite his meticulous preparation, Magnus at some point managed to turn the games in a way that got his opponent out of preparations and through his intuition and strong end game play, ended up as the world champion in 2013.

Be in good physical shape

A chess game can last for 5–6 hours and requires a lot of focus and mental strength. Your ability to think clearly depends on a healthy body and mind. Magnus exercises almost every day, to stay fit and to rest the mind between games.

A world championships match is played best of 12 games. If you keep forcing your opponent to find difficult and precise moves for 5–7 hours, several days in a row, they may finally crack. Magnus is famous for playing on in games that look like they will be drawn, tiring his opponent until they eventually make a mistake and lose the game.

Hate losing

“Nothing in the world matters as much to him as being good. Because that’s who he is, and that’s who he has always been. So, a loss can be quite devastating for his confidence.” — Magnus’ sister

Magnus is quite a bad loser. He gets very upset when losing a match, and often storms past the press zone without giving any interviews.

This extreme dissatisfaction with losing a game fuels him to do everything in his power not to lose again. And one of his strengths is to come back after a loss and play at a high level the next day.

Luckily for him, he doesn’t lose much. He is currently on a 120-game streak, without a single loss in classical chess, a world-record. It’s almost two years since he lost his last match.

Records

Magnus holds a long list of impressive records, including:

• At age 19, becoming the youngest number 1 rated player in history.
• The youngest player to achieve grandmaster status, 13 years, 4 months and 27 days (has now been passed by three others).
• Won the world championships four times: 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2018.
• The first player in history to simultaneously be the world champion in classical chess, rapid chess (25 min time limit) and blitz chess (3 min time limit).
• Top rated player in the world since July 2011, with a highest rating of 2882, the highest ever achieved in chess history.
• Longest unbeaten streak, 120 classical games in a row without a loss.

Take home message

To become the best in world at chess, you need to develop an incredible intuition for finding the best moves. This can only be developed by studying the game deeply and by having a passion to understand every detail in the mechanics of the game.

Only by having ambitious goals can you find out if you have the potential to become the best in the world.

Study in detail what makes the best in the world so great, try to replicate it and look for ways to improve even what they are doing.

Take advantage of new technology to advance your thinking around the game.

Stay in good physical shape to perform at your best mentally.

Don’t be content with losing. Analyse your mistakes, improve upon them and come back as a better player in your next game.

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