magnus carlsen

Magnus Carlsen is arguably the greatest chess player in history. Carlsen won five world chess championship titles — beating opponents like Viswanathan Anand (twice), Sergey Karjakin, Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi — before walking away from the 2022 world championship battle, thus abdicating his throne. He first won the world title in 2013, then continued to defend it four times in 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2021.

Carlsen has often spoken about his lack of motivation to play in classical chess tournaments, the longest format in the sport and the most prestigious. However, Carlsen constantly competes in other chess events, frequently winning them. Recently, he won the inaugural chess event at the Esports World Cup in 2025.

Carlsen is still the world no 1 in all three formats. In fact, Carlsen has been world no 1 in every monthly rating list published by FIDE since July 2011. He first became world no 1 in 2010, but Anand dethroned him soon.

Carlsen touched a rating of 2882 in classical chess twice — 2014 and 2019 — which is the best rating ever recorded by any player in chess history. He's also set records in other formats: his rapid rating hit 2919 in July 2017 and his blitz peak was 2986 in December 2017.

Born on November 30, 1990, at the age of 13, Carlsen had two significant results in the same tournament against two former world champions: he held Garry Kasparov to a draw and defeated Anatoly Karpov at the same event in 2004.

While talking about those career-defining games in an interview with The Indian Express, Carlsen had said: "I was massively intimidated while playing Kasparov at the age of 13. You can see that from the fact that in the game which I eventually drew with Kasparov, I spent oceans of time checking and double checking lines that I could have played a lot quicker. If I had done that I could have won the game instead of drawing it. They say your appetite grows with the more you eat. That definitely happened for me: the stronger I got, the more ambitious I got as well. Those days I had a lot of respect for older and stronger players… I sometimes accepted draws when I was in a better position and so on. But I learnt to be more confident with age and experience."

Praggnanandhaa R recently explained what makes Carlsen so good in an interview.

"Carlsen has this intuition in every position which is just amazing. When you actually see his game — even in shorter formats — he usually plays the top three choices of the computer every single time. That intuition is something that he developed over a period of time. He’s one of the players who knows a lot of classics from the past. He has read a lot and I think that’s one thing he has that helps him. Mentally he’s really strong. You can never see him collapse in a tournament completely. Even when you actually make a mistake when he’s lost, he’s there fighting every chance he’s getting and he pushes till the end. He tries every resource that’s possible," Pragg said.