And Now For My Next Number I 39;d Like To Return To The Classics

[Slikk Huisenga]

Ina fresh podcast interview released Monday, GM Magnus Carlsen talked about his two favorites for the Candidates Tournament that begins in Toronto on April 4, his future in classical events, his new motivation, the Chess960 tour, and much more.

The former world champion has frequently appeared on podcasts over the last few years, mostly in his native language, but the latest episode of Sjakksnakk ("Chess chat"), run by his Norwegian friends Askild Bryn and Odin Blikra Vea, was released in English on Monday.

"Nakamura and Caruana are the best and most consistent players there. If anybody else wins, it would be a bit of a surprise. If Alireza wins, it would be surprising, but not shocking. If any of the other four wins, that would be a shock."

"Nakamura has always been a very difficult opponent for Ding specifically. Ding has always done quite well against Caruana. But again, these things may change. I also think that if Ding plays the way he has played recently, he will obviously have no chance. If he plays the way he played against Nepomniachtchi, I also don't think he will beat either of these two guys. That's obviously a huge factor there."

The five-time world classical champion thinks there are a couple of players missing in the Candidates this year, in particular GM Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who shot up to world number-four with an impressive series of results.

"The Candidates is unusual in the sense that there are normally a lot of decisive games, because usually only first place counts. Compared to other super-tournaments with similar strength of the field, you are going to see more fighting chess."

The former world champion abdicated his world championship title in 2021, saying he would not return to the cycle under the current classical format. FIDE included him in the lineup for the Candidates Tournament as he qualified by winning the 2023 FIDE World Cup, but in January Carlsen formally declined the invitation to take part.

Carlsen says he is happy about not having to prepare for a grueling match, and he is not eager to return to the world championship cycle, noting: "I haven't retired. I chose to step away, and that's fine, but it's always going to be slightly weird. But I also think... good for the others!"

Carlsen has long been clear that he intends to focus less on playing classical chess, and more on speed chess and Chess960/Freestyle Chess, in the future. This year he skipped the traditional Tata Steel Chess for the first time since 2014, and only the second time since 2004.

While the 33-year-old will play the 2024 Norway Chess that takes place on home soil in Stavanger for the 12th time from May 27 to June 7, the former world champion reveals he "rarely found classical chess exciting" in the last few years and we may have seen him play a traditional classical super-tournament for the last time.

"Honestly, I am not sure I am actually ever going to play just a normal round-robin classical chess tournament again, like the types they have in St. Louis and Bucharest for the Grand Chess Tour. Having the Armageddon, also the time control where the games are likely a little bit shorter, is important to me."

Honestly, I am not sure I am actually ever going to play just a normal round-robin classical chess tournament again, like the types they have in St. Louis and Bucharest for the Grand Chess Tour.

Despite having two "disastrous tournaments" with Qatar Masters and Norway Chess, events that cost him 35 rating points, Carlsen remains the world number-one in all three formats. However, he has this to say about his current 2830 classical rating:

"My classical rating sucks right now. Or comparatively. I don't know if I am actually better than that at the moment. But generally I want it to be high enough that I don't have a problem with it remaining the highest in the world."

Instead, Carlsen has found a new motivation with Chess960, rebranded Freestyle Chess by German entrepreneur Jan-Henric Buettner. The Norwegian won the inaugural event in Germany in February, and last week the duo unveiled an extravagant Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour across five continents, with the first event taking place in India in November.

Carlsen is clearly excited: "I talked to Buettner for quite a while, my dad did as well. I do think the other players are quite enthustiastic about this. Some more than others, Aronian for example. That's why he was invited to the tournament. He is extremely enthustiastic about it, and has been for a while. But it also feels like a lot of players like the format. For now, I am definitely trying to push it as much as I can."

Chess960 has the advantage, or perhaps disadvantage, that you can't prepare as the pieces on the first and eighth rank are shuffled almost randomly. The number 960 comes from the number of possible positions for how the game can start.

Carlsen talks about how different the variant is, compared to normal chess, highlighting how you enter the middlegame already from move one. "You sort of have to unlearn patterns from normal chess, on the fly. It's also easy to get too excited. I wanted to sacrifice pawns all the time!"

Carlsen comes off a particularly good run, having won his last five tournaments. The highlight was his double gold in Uzbekistan, winning both the World Rapid and Blitz Championships for the second year in a row. How long will he dominate these events?

"I've won four events in a row now. It's something you cannot expect. I'd say at least for the next five years, I will be a contender at worst. I mean, let's say I am two years from now... it's very hard to imagine that I won't be the biggest favorite."

Reflecting on the achievement, he says he considered himself a "very significant favorite" in the blitz with more than a 50 percent chance of winning, and with a "decent chance" in the rapid. He noted that a lot of games on the top boards ended with short draws in the final rounds, and highlighted what he considers a problem with how the prizes are distributed.

"He thinks that it suits him to make draws against players he considers very difficult, and then rather sometimes try to counterattack as Black. He has also won a title there before, so getting another one is not neccesarily a big deal for him. It seems like that for some other players as well. To secure the biggest pay-day of the year, they'd rather do that than go for gold. In that sense, I have a huge competitive advantage, since for me first place is all that matters."

"I still love to play. I still play casual online games quite a bit. That is usually a good indicator that you love to play. It's a lot of fun to play and the motivation comes and goes a bit for big tournaments, but I have periods where I absolutely love the game. I think having some lows that I have had now where I hadn't really played tournaments, or haven't thought too much about openings, or which openings to play, is quite healthy to have as well."

Tarjei Svensen is a Norwegian chess journalist who worked for some of the country's biggest media outlets and appeared on several national TV broadcasts. Between 2015 and 2019, he ran his chess website mattogpatt.no, covering chess news in Norwegian and partly in English.

In 2020, he was hired by Chess24 to cover chess news, eventually moving to Chess.com as a full-time chess journalist in 2023. He is also known for his extensive coverage of chess news on his X/Twitter account.

I usually code with the first one since that is the way my brain works while coding, although I think I prefer the 2nd one since it takes care of any error handling right away and I find it easier to read

I prefer the second style. Get invalid cases out of the way first, either simply exiting or raising exceptions as appropriate, put a blank line in there, then add the "real" body of the method. I find it easier to read.

It depends - In general I am not going to go out of my way to try and move a bunch of code around to break out of the function early - the compiler will generally take care of that for me. That said though, if there are some basic parameters at the top that I need and can't continue otherwise, I will breakout early. Likewise, if a condition generates a giant if block in function I will have it breakout early as a result of that as well.

If you have one entry point and one exit point then you always have to track the entire code in your head all the way down to the exit point (you never know if some other piece of code bellow does something else to the result, so you have to track it up until the exist). You do that no mater which branch determines the final result. This is hard to follow.

With one entry and multiple exists, you return when you have your result and don't bother tracking it all the way down to see that nobody does anything else to it (because there won't be anything else since you returned). It's like having the method body split into more steps, which each step with the possibility to return the result or let the next step try its luck.

In C programming where you have to manually clean-up there is a lot to be said for one-point return. Even if there is no need right now to clean something up, someone might edit your function, allocate something and need to clean it up before return. If that happens it will be a nightmare job looking through all the return statements.

In C++ programming you have destructors and even now scope-exit guards. All these need to be here to ensure the code is exception-safe in the first place, so code is well guarded against early exit and therefore doing so has no logical downside and is purely a style issue.

*This can often indicate a design problem. If you find that a lot of your methods need to check some external/paramater state or such before running the rest of the code, that's probably something that should be handled by the caller.

In Don Knuth's book about GOTO's I read him give a reason for always having the most likely condition come first in an if statement. Under the assumption that this is still a reasonable idea (and not one out of pure consideration for the speed of the era). I'd say early returns aren't good programming practice, especially considering the fact that they're more often than not used for error handling, unless your code is more likely to fail than not fail :-)

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