Magnus Carlsen praises Gukesh for ‘studying his a** off’, but says world champion not good at rapid or blitz

Talking about Gukesh, Carlsen said: “You have the current classical world champion from India, Gukesh. He doesn’t play casual games at all. He just studies his a** off all the time. He’s also not good at rapid chess, not good at blitz, he’s not good at other forms. But he has made all his studies about classical chess. He didn’t even own chess software on his computer before he was like 13. And he was already a grandmaster at that time.”

Magnus Carlsen podcast interview with Joe Rogan

The World No 1 was talking about playing styles of players and made a comparison between Alireza Firouzja and Gukesh. In the past, Carlsen has said that Firouzja is one of the rare players that he would be motivated about playing in a world championship game.

“There are such different approaches (to chess) as well, even with the kids. I had a training camp a few years ago with a kid called Alireza. I think he was about 14 then. My chess coaches had recommended that we bring him in because he said that this is the most talented kid out there. At the camp, typically, everybody has their laptop, and there’s a chessboard in the middle where you sort of look at your own thing and then some things together on the board, and you throw out ideas, mostly for openings, but also sometimes other little exercises and so on. And this kid (Alireza), he would have his laptop where he would analyze a certain position, and then he would play games for money on that same site at the same time so that he could buy cloud engine times because the very best engines, they’re stronger if they’re in the cloud than from your own laptop, generally. So he could buy time for that by playing games, like one minute games on that server. He would play five-minute games on another server, and he would analyze with us on the board, and he was still following everything. He had no problems whatsoever just being there. So it’s just, yeah, that’s one way of doing it,” Carlsen told Rogan.

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Then, he compared Gukesh and Alireza.

“You see that in these guys’ playing style. The guy who has been playing constantly all the time, from when he was little, he has fantastic instincts, especially with the little time, he just knows where the pieces go. He’s the only one of the kids who has that kind of feeling.

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“The Indian guy (Gukesh), on the other hand, from the way he studies, during games, he’s meticulous, he calculates, he sees every position as a problem he has to solve, more than what does my intuition tell me? It’s like, for him, it’s more, this is possible, this is possible. Let me try and see this all the way through. So it’s just very, very different. They call it like the tortoise and the hare sometimes,” Carlsen added.