 "Magnus Carlsen with Sourav Ganguly and chess legend Viswanathan Anand. Image: PTI")
Magnus Carlsen has stated that no opponent or challenge can tempt him to compete in the classical World Chess Championship again. Five-time world champion and world No.1 chess player Carlsen vacated the World Championship title in 2022 , citing a lack of motivation. “ I am not motivated to play another match. I feel that I don’t have a lot to gain, and I will simply not play,” he had said.
Over the years, Carlsen has maintained that he is not interested in returning to FIDE’s World Chess Championship cycle as he feels the classical format doesn’t incentivise creativity and that the moves have become very predictable with the rise of computer engines.
Carlsen had also hit out at the classical format after India’s D Gukesh became the youngest world chess champion in December 2024. The 34-year-old Norwegian had back then said that classical chess was “the worst way” to decide a world champion as it was “too forgiving”.
Carlsen reiterates he won’t return to World Chess Championship
The chess legend is now involved in promoting the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour , which kicked off this year with the first leg in Germany. Carlsen is a co-owner in the organising team and has advocated Freestyle Chess over Classical Chess due to its randomised starting positions.
However, is there any player or challenge that can lure Carlsen back to the World Chess Championship? He was asked about it recently while appearing on the BotezLive Podcast. He replied: “No. I don’t think so. I am not gonna rule out anything, but at the moment, it feels very very unlikely. I love playing classical time control and for that, I have Freestyle, which I enjoy and I also enjoy Rapid and Blitz a lot, so going back to classical world championship feels very unlikely.”
Explaining why he doesn’t like playing classical chess anymore, Carlsen said the overanalysis of the opening moves in the classical format has left very little space for creativity.
“We have come to a point where you can still find playable positions, but you have to reach so far out of what is even close to what was considered optimal tries. All the best moves have been pretty much discarded at this point. It’s clear from what is happening that classical is still playable, but it is becoming harder and harder to find these tries,” he said.
Carlsen explains why he prefers Freestyle over Classical chess
Carlsen also said the room for creativity is why he is promoting Freestyle Chess, which is also known as Fischer Random Chess . “Like this actually allows that players to be creative but essentially you are entering the middle game form move 1 and for fans as well I think, a lot of casual fans they don’t care if it’s a Sicilian or a Spanish, they barely know anything. My wife is about 1100 rapid on chess.com. She plays the Sicilian as black, which I taught her, but people don’t go for the open Sicilian. Like they barely know two moves of theory.”
“From my experience, people find it very exciting that we are as clueless as the others when it comes to starting positions.”
He added that Freestyle Chess is not competing with Classical Chess at the moment, but he hopes it becomes a popular variant in the future.
“It’s not a goal for us to compete with Classical Chess. I do hope over time it becomes more popular and that it will be a variant that people will play at lower levels as well.”