How Magnus Carlsen is using tech to turn chess into a spectator sport

When Magnus Carlsen started playing chess at the age of eight, he grew up in “a hybrid generation,” mainly playing on the board, he tells Euronews Next in an interview.

Fast forward 25 years and the five-time classical world champion, who has been the undisputed number one since 2011, says that the Internet has allowed more people to learn about the game and be entertained. 

Carlsen’s next move is to turn the chess craze into a spectator sport. Last week, he launched his chess app Take Take Take, which he says is not just another chess app. 

Rather than offering users a chance to play, it provides daily tournament recap videos and analyses player performance during major tournaments. Carlsen will of course give his own analysis. 

The platform aims to serve as a “home” for the 600 million people who play chess worldwide and notify users when their favourite players have a game.

“I’ve heard from people that they want to watch me play, for instance. But they don’t know when I’m playing because this information is not so easy to find if you’re not always following the chess scene,” Carlsen says. 

The Norwegian grandmaster already has a YouTube channel with 1.3 million subscribers but said he wanted to build a separate platform as it gives people a way to follow a chess match instead of just offering his own content. 

Take Take Take, named after the back-and-forth exchanges of chess pieces, has a well-known list of investors including Peter Thiel and Breakthrough Initiatives fund.

The app will be free to use but could be monetised with adverts and premium features. 

This isn’t Carlsen’s first chess venture. His first app, Play Magnus, allowed users to play a bot version of him at different stages of his career. It was later sold to Chess.com. 

Asked if the new app would get in the way of his professional matches, he said it could actually help him. 

“I don’t feel like I’m as ambitious as I used to be [about professional matches],” Carlsen says.

“But in general, this is a project I’m passionate about. My main job is going to be to play good chess. And I don’t think this is going to be a distraction. It’s just going to be an addition.

“I think it’s going to be good for my game as well, to be able to create some content and formulate my thoughts,” he added. 

How AI and technology changes the game

But Carlsen’s analysis will also be good for amateur chess players and technology is key to that. 

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“The evolution of technology has made access to chess more even. People have more access to information to a larger degree and the same information can be analysed more and more,” he says.

For him, it has been exciting to see the progression of opening theory, the first few moves in chess, with newer tools, such as stronger chess engines and neural networks. 

“But as a chess player, I don’t think it’s made the game easier overall,” he said, adding that “for the fans, it’s been amazing. As you can follow the games easier and also you can get instant feedback when you when you play and learn faster”.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been used in chess even before the hype of OpenAI’s ChatGPT took off in November 2022. 

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But it is a technology that “isn’t entirely good for professional players”, despite it being a necessity, Carlsen says. 

“AI was extremely exciting at first because it presented a little bit of a different way to play chess, in more of a hybrid human engine way. But honestly, before you could always tell by the style that these were not humans,” he says, adding that neural networks then became more human-like. 

When AI became more human in predicting chess lines, Carlsen says, it was “really fascinating and it opened a lot of eyes”.

“Back in late 2018 and early 2019 … some people, including myself, thought AI tools had a distinct competitive advantage because we were finding out how to use these tools,” he says. 

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“Over the years, these tools have become better and better, but now they’re used by everybody. So it’s harder to gain a competitive advantage from it”.

Carlsen says that the key to using these technologies is to guide them to find lines, the set of chess moves in a game, or opportunities that may be difficult for humans to navigate.

“But I think if you don’t use the technologies you’re going to lag behind. So there is no doubt that everybody’s using these tools now and that you should,” he says.