On a recent Friday afternoon, Magnus Carlsen, the best chess player in the world, showed up at the World Rapid Championships, on Wall Street, in New York, wearing a blazer, dress shoes, and jeans. FIDE, chess’s main governing body, stipulates a certain level of decorum; an arbiter informed Carlsen that, in order to be eligible to play in the tournament, he’d have to return to his hotel and change his pants. He refused. He’d accept the two-hundred-dollar fine, he explained. He offered to not wear jeans the next day, but he wasn’t going back to change. Rules were rules. When FIDE wouldn’t budge, Carlsen withdrew from the tournament. It was “a matter of principle,” he said afterward, in an interview on the chess platform Take Take Take. “I’m too old at this point to care too much,” he added. “My patience with [FIDE] was not very big to begin with. . . . They can enforce their rules. That’s fine by me. My response is, Fine, then I’m out, fuck you.”
Carlsen’s attire made the news, as these sorts of things sometimes do. The Wall Street Journal called it a “farce.” Many players seemed to agree. “I don’t think there’s a single player . . . who’s not going to watch the event because Magnus is playing in jeans or his underwear or, I don’t know, a Speedo,” Hikaru Nakamura, a popular chess streamer and the No. 3 player in the world, said on a live stream that evening. “They want to see Magnus Carlsen play chess.” And it was clear that Carlsen hadn’t shown up at the tournament that day as if spoiling for a fight. He looked like any other young businessman in the financial district rushing from a work lunch. But it wasn’t farce, however absurdly or innocently it began. It was part of a bigger “situation,” as Nakamura put it to Take Take Take, one that was bound to have “happened one way or another.” Perhaps it was fitting that it involved jeans. After all, jeans aren’t just pants. They’ve been a fuck-you symbol ever since Marlon Brando wore a pair in “The Wild One.”
Carlsen would know: he has appeared in ad campaigns for the denim company G-Star. His first was in 2010, back when he was chess’s brash, young bad boy. He has not lost the No. 1 ranking, which is based on a measure of his performance relative to his peers, since 2011. He’s won the World Chess Championship five times—every time he’s competed in it, in fact. But, in 2022, he announced that he would not defend his title. Classical chess—traditionally the most exalted format, the format that made Carlsen a legend—no longer interested him. Imagine Roger Federer forswearing Wimbledon.
The classical time controls used in the FIDE World Championship start at ninety minutes, but games often go much longer. The idea is to give players time to think, and they sometimes spend thirty or forty minutes calculating the nuances of a single pawn move. One game of the 2021 World Championship, played between Carlsen and the challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi, lasted nearly eight hours. But it wasn’t just the drawn-out games that Carlsen objected to. Classical chess, he said, had become too rote, the preparation too exhausting. (Players often memorize obscure lines provided by supercomputers.) Too often the games were bloodless. It was “stressful and boring,” he said.
So, while the 2023 World Chess Championship was under way, in Astana, Kazakhstan—the first one held after Carlsen declined to defend his title—Carlsen was in Los Angeles, playing poker instead. This was not quite a fuck-you to FIDE, and Carlsen continued to compete in and win the World Rapid and Blitz Championship, which have faster, and presumably more exciting, time controls. But it sent a message at a pivotal moment. Chess, after all, has never been more popular. In 2019, Chess.com, the game’s biggest online platform, had thirty-four million users. A spokesman for the site told me that it expects to surpass two hundred million members in February. In 2019, there were around five million active users in a month; now it’s more than thirty million. The reasons for the surge are fairly well documented by now: the popularity of the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit”; the appeal of online chess during the pandemic; the accessibility of players on social media and through the rise of YouTube; the ubiquity of smartphones; and the explosion of chess streaming. But it’s worth noting why the boom hasn’t subsided.
Some of the enduring interest surely has to do with the insular world of top chess, and the way it lends itself to drama. There are rivalries and strong personalities, and the intrigue and tension are accessible even to those who don’t know the difference between the Tarrasch Defense and the Caro-Kann. More than two years ago, Carlsen abruptly quit a tournament and insinuated that a young American grand master, Hans Niemann, was cheating. Niemann sued Carlsen, among others, for a hundred million dollars. Niemann has admitted to what he described as youthful indiscretions, more or less, in online games as a teen-ager. The dispute was eventually settled. The incident was probably good business for chess, if not exactly for Niemann’s reputation. A24 is teaming up with Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder to produce a movie about the controversy, based on an upcoming book by Ben Mezrich, the author of “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook,” from which “The Social Network” was adapted. Niemann himself sometimes seems like a method actor appearing in a psychodrama, whether by temperament or by a recognition that the mad villain is the only decent role available to him now. He once told New York magazine that he planned to be his doubters’ “biggest nightmare for the rest of their lives.”
But at least some of the allure has to do with the addictive, puzzle-like qualities of the game itself, and the adrenaline of competition, particularly under intense time pressure. The average chess player turns out to be a little like Carlsen. They can be impatient, too.
Carlsen is probably even more dominant at speed chess than at classical chess. He prefers knockouts, too, even though it likely disadvantages him. (Plenty of grand masters can draw or even beat Carlsen in a few games; his advantage emerges the more they play.) He is a fantasy-sports obsessive. (At one point, he was the No. 1-ranked Fantasy Premier League player in the world, though he attributed his performance to “luck.”) He plays online, even when the stakes are low. He’s been known to log on under a pseudonym and play speed chess while drunk. Some all-time great athletes spend their careers competing against the record books and themselves. But, as Danny Rensch, the chief chess officer of Chess.com, where Carlsen is an ambassador, told me, Carlsen relishes competing in real time.
If anything, Carlsen’s decision to relinquish the world champion title probably strengthened his hold on his crown. Everyone seemed to understand this. Hans Niemann excepted, few seemed to begrudge him. In December, Gukesh Dommaraju, an eighteen-year-old Indian prodigy, became the youngest-ever world champion, after defeating China’s Ding Liren. In his press conference afterward, Dommaraju was emotional about the historic moment, but said that winning did not mean he was the best player in the world. “Obviously, that’s Magnus,” he said.
In 2022, Carlsen sold his chess-training app and company, Play Magnus, to Chess.com, for eighty-three million dollars. Since then, he’s been lining up venture-capital money for things such as fantasy chess, and launched a new app for following chess players and tournaments, called Take Take Take. (The chess platform he appeared on in New York was that of his own company.) And he’s spearheading a freestyle-chess startup, which features a format in which pieces on the back rank are lined up in random order. (The version is more commonly known as Fischer Random, after Bobby Fischer, the eccentric genius who popularized it; Carlsen and his financial backers are rebranding it.) The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour will use the longer classical time controls, but players won’t be able to prepare by memorizing long lines of opening moves. Competitors will have to rely on their intuition, tactical vision, and calculating abilities. Last November, Carlsen played a freestyle match against Fabiano Caruana, the No. 2-ranked player in the world, on a yacht in Singapore, days before the World Chess Championships were set to start, also in Singapore. The battle for the future of chess couldn’t have been more clear.
Top players have criticized FIDE in the past, for all sorts of reasons. In the nineteen-nineties, Garry Kasparov and his championship rival Nigel Short even briefly tried to create an alternate world-championship structure. More recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to unrest around the organization, which is led by a Russian politician. Carlsen seems to have some of the usual objections, too. But the challenge he represents to them is different. He doesn’t just want to change the organizational structure. He wants to change the sport.
Carlsen is thirty-four years old, almost double Dommaraju’s age and the age of the World Rapid Championship winner, Volodar Murzin, who, like Dommaraju, is eighteen. It may be that the younger generation has its own vision for what chess will be, and it may not look like Carlsen’s. The World Championship in classical chess is still by far the most prestigious title. But Carlsen’s influence over the game is already being felt. Twenty-five top players, including Dommaraju, Caruana, and Nakamura, have agreed to join Carlsen in forming an élite group, known as the Freestyle Chess Players Club, and a Grand Slam tour has been planned for 2025 across the world, with stops in Germany, Paris, New York, Delhi, and Cape Town. Carlsen and his co-founder, the German investor Jan Henric Buettner, are offering a prize fund upward of four million dollars. Top players already have several tours. But FIDE reportedly had a problem with the scope of the startup’s ambition—it planned to use the term “world championship,” but FIDE insisted that it must approve any use of this title. The details of the argument are in dispute: the organization is accused of threatening players who join the freestyle-chess tour; FIDE denied it. Soon after, tensions eased, and Carlsen came to New York to compete in FIDE’s World Rapid and Blitz Championship. Then he showed up in jeans.
Rather than let Carlsen go, FIDE changed their approach. A new interpretation of their dress code allowed for certain “elegant” modifications, according to a press release. A few days later, Carlsen was back to compete at the World Blitz, wearing jeans again. (G-Star announced that it would feature him in a new advertising campaign this year.) It may not have begun as a power play, but it was clear where power lay, particularly as Carlsen moved through the tournament. He qualified for the knockout rounds, on December 31st. Carlsen beat Niemann in a tense quarterfinals, then breezed through the semifinals and into the final, against Ian Nepomniachtchi.
