Cover Magnus Carlsen playing chess at FIDE's 2026 World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships in Hong Kong. (Photo: FIDE Hong Kong)
Magnus Carlsen playing chess at FIDE's 2026 World Rapid and Blitz Team Championships in Hong Kong. (Photo: FIDE Hong Kong)
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Visiting Hong Kong in June, the Norwegian chess grandmaster opened up to Tatler Asia about his approach to handling immense pressure, caring for family, and knowing when to step back
Magnus Carlsen, the greatest chess player of all time, has just finished a “terrible” game. When we meet on the sidelines of the FIDE World Team Rapid and Blitz Chess Championships 2026 in Hong Kong, an event hosted by the International Chess Federation (FIDE) and the Hong Kong China Chess Federation, the 35-year-old grandmaster—who has just passed 15 years as the world No.1—is generous with his time and answers everything at length, but the defeat has not gone anywhere.
He describes himself, sitting there talking to me, as running “more or less two simultaneous processes,” the conversation in front of him, and the lost position still turning over somewhere underneath it. The second one, he is happy to confirm, does not switch off to be polite. “It’s still running,” he says with a wry smile. “I’m really pissed about it.”
There is something clarifying about meeting the best chess player in the world on a bad day. Carlsen became a grandmaster at 13, the world’s top-ranked player at 19, and is now the rare figure whose name means something to people who have never finished a game of chess in their lives. The capacity to function while openly frustrated may be the most useful thing to understand about how Carlsen operates, and about how he has stayed at the top of his game for as long as he has. What he offers in conversation, though, is less a record of dominance than a set of observations about decision-making, identity and the discipline of letting a result go.
“You try and make informed decisions in a limited amount of time, and it doesn’t always work out, and that’s fine,” he tells me. “As long as you’ve made a decent decision, you can live with it.”
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Seeking small advantages
Ask Carlsen what chess has actually taught him, and he resists any flattering answers. He doubts the game has made him cleverer or more creative, and suggests the opposite is closer to the truth. A career spent reasoning with precision "within very specific parameters," he argues, offers little to one's wider faculties.
"For the rest of life, there aren't usually such set rules," he says, "so that way of thinking doesn't really help that much." He is comfortable describing chess as a fine instrument for developing a young mind and a more questionable occupation for a grown one. What the game has given him, by his own account, is a way of thinking "more coldly and dispassionately about certain subjects."
It explains how he treats a single move and how he treats a whole career. The same detachment underpins the part of his game commentators tend to admire most. He is credited with the ability to win positions other strong players would agree to draw, grinding small advantages into full points over long endings. The discipline is easy to state and hard to practise, particularly for someone whose errors are recorded, annotated and replayed by a global audience within minutes of being made.
His description of the method is unromantic. He looks for the subtle problem that quietly reduces an opponent's comfortable options, taking them from "four or five choices that are okay" down to two, and then sometimes to one. "Is there any way I can, in a subtle way, pose some little problems where they can go wrong?" he asks, narrating his own process. He is careful to add the caveat that the approach carries risk. "It's a balancing act, because you don't want to overstep the boundaries either." Pushing too hard for a win in a level position is itself a way to lose. He has dropped games he should have held, he concedes, though by his own reckoning the policy of applying steady pressure rather than swinging for a decisive blow has paid out well across a career.
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Carlsen's fame sits a little awkwardly on him. He has become a genuine internet figure, a meme, the subject of clips that travel far beyond chess—Carlsen winning while drunk, Carlsen turning up late and winning anyway—and he is unsentimental about his status. "I know that people are going to be there for my good, but also my bad moments, and that's something I have to live with," he says. It's the cost he keeps returning to. "There's a little bit of a loss of freedom that you never really get back." He tries "to be as normal as possible," and mostly manages it, "but it's not easy." And then, the thing that has reorganised everything: "I'm a father now, and I don't want him, my son, to ever have any issues, because he's my son."
Knowing when to resign
Carlsen is unusually candid about what has changed in him. The "maniacal drive" of his younger years, the insistence on being "the very, very best version of myself all the time," has gone.
"I find it too exhausting," he says, without a trace of regret. His form now rises and falls, and he makes no effort to hide it. "When I'm super into it, I usually do well, and then sometimes I'm kind of not so much, and then it's a little bit worse."
The decision to walk away from the world championship in 2023 is the fullest expression of the same logic. He had weighed it, he reveals, for as long as he had been competing for the title—not arrived at it in a moment. By the time he acted, the reasoning had hardened into something close to arithmetic: too much of his identity, and of how others saw him, had attached itself to a single contest he had never much enjoyed.
"It was tied up in that one thing, the World Championship, which I didn't really at any point particularly enjoy," he says. The conclusion was simply: "Why would I spend so much of my time on something that I don't like?"
He gave up the classical crown while still, by rating, the strongest player on earth—and calls it one of the better decisions he has made. It cuts against the orthodoxy of elite performance, which treats the summit as a position to be defended at any cost and any retreat as failure.
Since stepping back, he enters only the events he chooses, and is "much happier" for it. He is honest, too, about the limits of that freedom. He no longer organizes his life around one overarching goal, but he describes a portion of the work as obligation—"a duty to my family to work and provide"—which keeps him competing even where the appeal has thinned. Hong Kong, he makes clear, is not a stop he is wholly enjoying, the day's losing streak to lower-rated players included. The point is that the duty holds regardless. "It's still my job, and I'm doing it."
Off the clock
If anything has replaced the old obsession, it is the life Carlsen has built away from chess. He married in 2025 and is now a father, and he locates his sense of balance firmly outside the game. He mentions his wife, who was born in Hong Kong and grew up largely in Singapore, bringing to the household "a little bit of a different approach to Norway," and his young son. During the duller stretches of tournament life, he says, it is the thought of both that he falls back on. He describes much of his current routine, away from the board, as a deliberate effort to stop the game running in the background of his mind, whether by playing golf or simply being at home.
The effect on his relationship with defeat is the part he returns to most readily, and it explains the man sitting across from me. A loss still stings, plainly, and he does not pretend it leaves him untouched.
"When you don't get the release of a favourable result, it's a little bit tough," he says. The difference now is in how quickly the feeling clears. "But it's a lot easier whenever I come home to my wife and kid. It's hard to be too upset."
His ambitions for his son are modest, and he is wary of the parental instinct to project. He wants the boy to be "happy and healthy" and not much beyond that. He credits his own father, who stayed deliberately out of the way once the talent became obvious, with exactly that restraint, recalling with some amusement that his father avoided offering advice for fear of getting it wrong. Chess, in the end, "just kind of became my thing." His own counsel to parents follows the same line. "As long as your kids are doing all right in life, just let them do their thing and figure it out," he says, while allowing that the approach does not suit every family.
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On to the next game
Carlsen has rebuilt his career on his own terms, choosing his events, giving up the title that once defined him, and treating the work as a job to be done well rather than a destiny to be served. He measures himself by the quality of his decisions rather than by their outcomes, and he has arranged his life so that the outcomes matter a little less than they once did.
For a player who spent years as the most dominant figure in the sport, his recent attitude change looks less like a retreat than a recalibration of what he is prepared to give. The competitive instinct itself appears undimmed. Asked what he does after a defeat, he gives the same answer he has presumably given himself for thirty years. He goes and plays the match.
“I don’t get depressed,” he says. “I just get upset, and I try to strike back, to win the next game.”
Cat Wang is an editor at Tatler Asia based in Hong Kong, where she covers business, wealth, innovation, and impact. Previously, she was a Forbes Asia reporter and assistant editor of the Forbes Asia 100 to Watch list, spotlighting startups and small companies on the rise across the Asia-Pacific. She began her career as a trainee reporter at the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s newspaper of record. Born in New York City, she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a B.A. in political science.
