Magnus Carlsen: ‘Had complete collapse of my nervous system… didn’t enjoy not talking to wife Ella’

“I think it started well yesterday. I felt all right, relatively rested at least compared to other days. And then I don’t know, I didn’t enjoy the whole process of just being pretty isolated there for many, many hours and not being able to talk to Peter or Ella in between rounds and not being able to to use my devices and so on. What happened then was just kind of a complete collapse of my nervous system,” Carlsen told the YouTube handle of Freestyle Chess after his win over Vidit. “I could have scraped through of course with some help but it would have been completely underserved. So, it was a complete collapse and yeah, sometimes you have one bad day and I’ve had that in Freestyle before in the preliminaries, but then there’s been a bit of a wider margin to get through. This time it wasn’t. It’s not an excuse. I should make it regardless.”

He said he wanted to talk to his wife Ella and his longtime second Heine Nielsen to “get out of the bubble”.

“I just wanted to get out of the bubble, especially when things start going south a little bit. I feel like I’m just kind of left in my own head a little bit and it would have been probably a little bit easier to shake off if I could talk to somebody very familiar,” Carlsen explained.

Carlsen said that after being eliminated from title contention, he was playing chess for the “love of the sport”.

“It’s been a thing recently that when things are going well, I play really well and then I’m not really able to sort of change bad trends. And when sort of my nervous system starts collapsing, then it’s all quite bad. I have bad days in pretty much every tournament. It’s just, you know, sometimes they happen at inopportune moments,” Carlsen said.

“I haven’t felt — in Zagreb (at SuperUnited Rapid and Blitz Croatia tournament) or here — at the top of at the top of my game, but at
least, now that there’s zero pressure that I don’t have anything to play for, at least I can maybe enjoy the games a little bit more. Today more than anything else, I was just trying to play fun chess and play dynamically from the start and that worked out well. So that’s the advantage of playing Freestyle Chess that even if you don’t have anything to play for, it’s
kind of a little bit easier to play kind of for the love of the game than in some other forms of chess,” Carlsen concluded.

Carlsen slams other players’ tactics as ‘utterly ridiculous’

Carlsen also slammed the other players for not thinking for themselves and just following moves discussed with other players before games. In Freestyle Chess, players learn about the opening position just 10 minutes before their games and then they can sit with other players who share the colour and discuss tactics for the 10 minutes.

“I’m under no illusions that everything that I did was correct and so on, but I enjoyed the process of working up the games from early on. And that’s kind of what Freestyle Chess is here for, right? Just putting pressure on from the start. I see the others as well, they’re following — like they’re doing better than I am so I shouldn’t (comment), you know it’s working — they’re all playing kind of the same setup that they’ve discussed for 10 minutes and I find that utterly ridiculous. I like to imagine people sit at the board and they will think for themselves as well.

“Like in the last game for instance the setup that everybody chose immediately led to a very fine position for black which I mean it’s kind of
mindboggling to me and I don’t think that’s the intention of what we are trying to do (with Freestyle Chess). But yeah, what can I say that strategy has worked better than mine has for sure.”