Has Magnus Carlsen checkmated himself?

The (still) reigning world chess champion is at peace with himself after a difficult year.

"I don't have a lot of ambitions for what to accomplish, but I love the game," Magnus Carlsen told chess portal chess.com earlier this month. The message from perhaps the best player of all time is: I don't have to prove anything to anyone anymore. And I don't want to subject myself to the exhausting preparation required for a World Championship duel.

The Norwegian had already announced his decision in the summer. There will be no rematch for the world title against Ian Nepomniachtchi of Russia. The five-time champion is retiring undefeated at the age of just 32, at least partly because the sporting challenge just isn't there anymore. In classical chess, he is still clearly ahead of his competitors.

World Chess Championship in crisis

"Of course it is a loss for the World Championship and the world federation FIDE when the player everyone thinks is the best decides to stop competing," Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish grandmaster and Carlsen's longtime coach, told DW. In the next breath though, he noted that "the World Chess Championships have a long history and the World Cup has survived bigger crises than this one."

However, in the eyes of Ulrich Krause, president of the German Chess Federation, Carlsen's decision doesn't cast FIDE in a positive light.

"They now have to somehow explain why the world champion no longer wants to be world champion," he said.

But Carlsen did leave the door open for a comeback in the next few years. The question is: What kind of world championship would he be returning to? He's made it clear time and time again that he considers the current model to be outdated. Tournaments lasting several weeks and games lasting hours are no longer in keeping with the times, the champion thinks. His coach agrees.

"Fast games are more interesting for the spectators who are not experts," said Nielsen. "The players love rapid chess. I think it's an unstoppable trend that the chess world should encourage, not fight." 

Chess starting position by lot?

Shorter thinking times is not the only change Carlsen wants. "Fischer random" is a chess variant that goes back to his legendary predecessor Bobby Fischer. At the beginning, the starting position of the pieces is drawn by lot. The opening preparation, which is of great importance in modern chess, is thus bypassed and the players cannot rely on memorized openings. This leads to more mistakes and thus more exciting games. Krause is also a fan. 

"I can imagine us organizing tournaments in this discipline in the near future," he said.

These discussions are driven mainly by the sport's popularity online. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, chess has almost become a mass phenomenon.

"Chess is now big business," Nielsen said. "Click numbers are the priority, online portals and streamers are driving that now."

According to Nielsen, though, the federations are still lagging behind.

"The world federation FIDE is still having trouble attracting global sponsors [...] due to the Russian influence on the organization, they continue to rely on funding from the Russian state and oligarchs," he said.

Nielsen does not believe that anything will change quickly in this regard. Over the summer, he was part of a team that stood against the incumbent Russian FIDE President Arkady Dvorkovich. It was in vain. Despite the international sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine, the FIDE delegates opted to keep the status quo by a large majority and Dvorkovich, who is close to the Kremlin, retained power.

Carlsen's listed company must merge

But Carlsen and his team also learned the limits of the brave new world of online chess for the first time in 2022. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Carlsen had been promoting chess on the internet and had even taken his Play Magnus Group public as a chess company with a valuation in the millions.

Then, in August, the world champion contritely announced that his company was merging with competitor chess.com. It quickly became clear that this was not a merger of equals, but rather a takeover by the financially stronger US company. The deal was finally completed earlier this month.

 The world champion is now effectively working as chess.com's brand ambassador.

Cheating in top-level chess

Whether online chess and the new popular variants of the sport of the mind will be successful in the long run, both in sporting and commercial terms, is an open question. One primary concern is that cheating is particularly easy in internet chess. There is simply no way of knowing whether a player is using a computer to work out the best moves. Carlsen himself put the topic on the agenda in 2022 and thus started an affair that is still not over. 

After a somewhat surprising defeat against rising star Hans Niemann of the United States, the world champion withdrew from the highly regarded Sinquefield Cup in September. The Norwegian first voiced indirect, then direct accusations of cheating against the American. There seems to be evidence that Niemann has cheated on the internet in the past. However, the world champion has not yet been able to present proof that the 19-year-old also used computer support while he sat at the board. Now the matter is before a US court, which must decide whether to award $100 million (€93.8 million) in damages to Niemann.

"Cheating is definitely a problem in online chess," said Krause, head of the German Chess Federation An "anti-cheating team" now monitors official online tournaments in Germany. According to Krause, however, cheating at the board has not yet been an issue in top-level German chess.

Peter Heine Nielsen is not so sure. 

"We don't yet know the extent of the problem," he said. Every sport is based on having rules and judges who detect and punish cheaters. It's an existential problem that many distrust the world chess federation FIDE and we don't know how effectively the federation can prosecute cheaters."

This article was originally published in German