Back in 2023 in the first episode of the Sjakksnakk podcast hosted by Askild Brun and Odin Blikra Vea, World No1 Magnus Carlsen spoke about his preferences regarding chess time controls.
Carlsen revealed he enjoys blitz and bullet chess the most, and that the rapid time control is the most challenging for him. “It’s a difficult hybrid between blitz and classical“, explained Magnus. He added that classical chess is interesting for him, but he doesn’t enjoy it anymore because of the hard preparations: “Based on my experiences from my last tournaments I find playing classical (chess) interesting from an intellectual perspective. It’s fun to reflect for a long time during games, but the preparation… I am pretty sick of it, to be honest. It is so frustrating every time, trying to come up with new ideas to even get proper games. If it wasn’t for that, classical (chess) would probably be my favorite. But with the way things are, I mostly find it frustrating”.
“Nowadays, people have found forced variations in most openings. Even London needs tons of preparations to be played! I used to have London when I didn’t want to prepare in classical chess or if what I had didn’t work. I always had a London as a backup. But this is not possible anymore. In the World Championship, this was shocking, when Ding played London and was better because Nepo played a variant he didn’t know. What’s up with that? It’s just weird.“
“This is why I have talked about how interesting it would be to try Fischer-random with longer time controls“, explained Magnus. And his dream finally came true this year with a victory in the first-ever classical Fischer-random tournament – the Freestyle Chess GOAT Challenge.
Sjakksnakk’s video with Magnus Carlsen speaking about the time controls can be seen below.
