Chess legend Magnus Carlsen recreates 26-piece position after looking at board for just two seconds

Magnus Carlsen isn’t just the world’s top-ranked chess player at present, he is also widely considered among the greatest to have ever played the sport, alongside Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer and Viswanathan Anand among others. Some even consider him to be the greatest of all time.

It’s not just Carlsen’s chess skills that are incredible though. The Norwegian Grandmaster recently highlighted his exceptional memory by recreating 26-piece position after glancing at a chess board for a mere two seconds.

In a video posted by chess app Take Take Take that Carlsen is a co-founder of, the 34-year-old was given various memory tests by British Grandmaster and commentator David Howell with time limits ranging from two seconds to a minute, all of which had 26 pieces on the board.

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Carlsen perfectly recreates Fischer vs Byrne game from 1956

The position that Carlsen was asked to recreate from his memory in the two-second test was from Fischer’s game against Donald Byrne in 1956, in which the legendary American GM was just 13 years of age. Not only did Carlsen recreate the 26-piece position perfectly, his next set of moves were nearly identically to how the Fischer-Byrne game panned out.

There were a total of six memory Tests with the following time limits (in seconds) – 2, 5, 10, 15 30 and 60. The five-time Classical world champion got all of them right except the 10-second and 30-second tests, getting three pieces wrong in the latter.

According to chess.com, Carlsen could solve a 50-piece jigsaw puzzle when he was as young as two years old, and played with Lego sets that were intended for children aged 10-14 years old.

And by the age of five, he was memorising areas, population numbers, flags and capitals of every country in the world, as well as population numbers, coat-of-arms and administrative centers for nearly all Norwegian municipalities.

Carlsen has been on top of the FIDE ratings continuously since 2011, and also holds the all-time record for the highest peak rating, surpassing Kasparov’s 2851 with a peak rating of 2882 in May 2014. He had won the FIDE Classical World Championship five consecutive times before voluntarily opting out of a title defence in 2022.

More recently, he had won the Paris leg of the Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour after suffering a semi-final defeat in Weissenhaus and registered a perfect 9/9 score at the Grenke Chess Freestyle Open.