Written by Mark Lewis
STAVANGER, Norway (AP) — Few chess players enjoy Magnus Carlsen’s celebrity status.
The Norwegian Carlsen shot to fame when he became a grandmaster at the age of 13 and entered the world of online chess games, refusing to play against Americans plagued by cheating allegations.
Few chess players have produced the magic product that separates Norway’s Magnus Carlsen from the rest: celebrity.
His name recognition is rivaled only by legends like Russia’s Garry Kasparov and America’s Bobby Fischer, and Carlsen is arguably even more of a contender. Last month, he defeated both players and was named the best player in the history of the International Chess Federation.
But his motivation to win a professional title is waning. Carlsen, 33, now wants to use his fame to turn the game he loves into a spectator sport.
“I’m at a different stage in my career,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m not that ambitious when it comes to professional chess. I still want to play, but I’m not necessarily hungry. I play for the love of the game.”
Carlsen on Friday released Take Take Take, an application that offers new ways to interact with games. The application is said to follow live games and players, and describe matches in an accessible way that streaming platforms such as YouTube and Twitch sometimes lack. . “It’s going to be a much colder atmosphere,” he says.
Carlsen will use his experience to provide an overview and analysis of the new app, starting with the World Chess Championship tournament between China’s Ding Liren and India’s Gukesh Donmaraju in November. Since he returned the title in 2023, he will not participate.
Carlsen is no novice when it comes to chess apps. The Play Magnus game he started in 2014 gave online users the chance to play against a chess engine modeled after his own gameplay. The company developed a series of applications and was acquired by Chess.com, the world’s largest chess website, in 2022 for approximately $80 million.
Carlsen and Mats Andre Christiansen, chief executive officer of his company Fantasy Chess, have developed a system that allows users to track individual players and pieces, as well as filters to account for various elements of each game. And he’s betting that the chess game, which allows for light-touch analysis, will pick up on the cause-and-effect relationships that viewers have in mind. Chess is sometimes turned off by rarefied air. This free app was released with the purpose of building a user base prior to monetization. “That will probably come later through advertising or deeper analytics,” Christiansen says.
Take Take Take offers a different perspective on streaming services, but it still enters a crowded market with Chess.com, YouTube, Twitch, and the website of the international chess federation FIDE, which has more than 100 million users . World Chess was valued at approximately $54 million when it was listed on the London Stock Exchange.
Access to chess engines that can beat human cheaters has never been easier. But it can still be used to shorten thousands of hours of book-bound study and hone skills that are impossible for human opponents.
“I think today’s games are of a higher quality because the preparation is getting deeper and deeper and artificial intelligence is helping us play. It’s reshaping the way we evaluate the game, especially for the new generation of players. says Carlsen.
At the same time, he admits that in the 20 years since he became a grandmaster, his mind is no longer able to calculate at the tornado speed it once did. “Most people have less energy when they get older. Their brains work slower. We’ve been feeling this for several years already. Young players simply have faster processing power.”
Still, he plans to remain the best in the world for years to come.
“My mind may be a little slower and I don’t have a lot of energy, but chess is a combination of energy, computational power and experience. I’m still closer to the peak than the decline,” he said. spoke.
Chess is culminating in a wave of popularity started by Carlsen himself.
He became the world’s top-ranked player in 2011 and won the first of his five world championships in 2013. In 2014, he achieved the highest chess rating of 2882, and has remained the undisputed number one in the world for the past 13 years.
Off the table, chess influencers like world No. 2 Hikaru Nakamura are using social media to bring chess to a wider audience. The Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit” became one of the streamer’s biggest hits of 2020, honing in on chess’ unlikely intellectual sex appeal.
And in 2022, Carlsen’s refusal to play against American grandmaster Hans Niemann, who has admitted in the past to using technology to cheat in online games, caused a rare stir in the usually serene world of chess. An advantage was born. Although there is no evidence that Niemann cheated in the live game, the feud between the two brought the game into even more public attention.
It remains to be seen whether chess can continue to grow without the full professional participation of chess’ biggest names.
