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WHAT MAGNUS CARLSEN’S JEANS HAVE TO DO WITH CHESS  
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Louisa Thomas
January 5, 2025
The New Yorker
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_ The fuss around the grand master’s wearing of denim pants to a
tournament is a reflection of tensions within the game.The fuss around
the grand master’s wearing of denim pants to a tournament is a
reflection of tensions within the game. _

Magnus Carlsen in 2023, Frans Peeters, CC BY-SA 2.0
<[link removed]>, via Wikimedia
Commons

 

On a recent Friday afternoon, Magnus Carlsen
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the best chess player in the world, showed up at the World Rapid
Championships, on Wall Street, in New York, wearing a blazer, dress
shoes, and jeans. _FIDE_, chess’s main governing body, stipulates a
certain level of decorum; an arbiter informed Carlsen that, in order
to be eligible to play in the tournament, he’d have to return to his
hotel and change his pants. He refused. He’d accept the
two-hundred-dollar fine, he explained. He offered to not wear jeans
the next day, but he wasn’t going back to change. Rules were rules.
When _FIDE_ wouldn’t budge, Carlsen withdrew from the tournament.
It was “a matter of principle,” he said afterward, in an interview
on the chess platform Take Take Take. “I’m too old at this point
to care too much,” he added. “My patience with [_FIDE]_ was not
very big to begin with. . . . They can enforce their rules.
That’s fine by me. My response is, Fine, then I’m out, fuck
you.”

Carlsen’s attire made the news, as these sorts of things sometimes
do. The _Wall Street Journal_ called
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a “farce.” Many players seemed to agree. “I don’t think
there’s a single player . . . who’s not going to watch the
event because Magnus is playing in jeans or his underwear or, I
don’t know, a Speedo,” Hikaru Nakamura
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a popular chess streamer and the No. 3 player in the world, said on a
live stream that evening. “They want to see Magnus Carlsen play
chess.” And it was clear that Carlsen hadn’t shown up at the
tournament that day as if spoiling for a fight. He looked like any
other young businessman in the financial district rushing from a work
lunch. But it wasn’t farce, however absurdly or innocently it began.
It was part of a bigger “situation,” as Nakamura put it to Take
Take Take, one that was bound to have “happened one way or
another.” Perhaps it was fitting that it involved jeans. After all,
jeans aren’t just pants. They’ve been a fuck-you symbol ever since
Marlon Brando wore a pair in “The Wild One.”

Carlsen would know: he has appeared in ad campaigns for the denim
company G-Star. His first was in 2010, back when he was chess’s
brash, young bad boy. He has not lost the No. 1 ranking, which is
based on a measure of his performance relative to his peers, since
2011. He’s won the World Chess Championship five times—every time
he’s competed in it, in fact. But, in 2022, he announced that he
would not defend his title. Classical chess—traditionally the most
exalted format, the format that made Carlsen a legend—no longer
interested him. Imagine Roger Federer forswearing Wimbledon.

The classical time controls used in the _FIDE_ World Championship
start at ninety minutes, but games often go much longer. The idea is
to give players time to think, and they sometimes spend thirty or
forty minutes calculating the nuances of a single pawn move. One game
of the 2021 World Championship, played between Carlsen and the
challenger, Ian Nepomniachtchi, lasted nearly eight hours. But it
wasn’t just the drawn-out games that Carlsen objected to. Classical
chess, he said, had become too rote, the preparation too exhausting.
(Players often memorize obscure lines provided by supercomputers.) Too
often the games were bloodless. It was “stressful and boring,” he
said.

So, while the 2023 World Chess Championship was under way, in Astana,
Kazakhstan—the first one held after Carlsen declined to defend his
title—Carlsen was in Los Angeles, playing poker instead. This was
not _quite_ a fuck-you to _FIDE_, and Carlsen continued to compete
in and win the World Rapid and Blitz Championship, which have faster,
and presumably more exciting, time controls. But it sent a message at
a pivotal moment. Chess, after all, has never been more popular. In
2019, Chess.com, the game’s biggest online platform, had thirty-four
million users. A spokesman for the site told me that it expects to
surpass two hundred million members in February. In 2019, there were
around five million active users in a month; now it’s more than
thirty million. The reasons for the surge are fairly well documented
by now: the popularity of the Netflix series “The Queen’s Gambit
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the appeal of online chess during the pandemic; the accessibility of
players on social media and through the rise of YouTube; the ubiquity
of smartphones; and the explosion of chess streaming. But it’s worth
noting why the boom hasn’t subsided.

Some of the enduring interest surely has to do with the insular world
of top chess, and the way it lends itself to drama. There are
rivalries and strong personalities, and the intrigue and tension are
accessible even to those who don’t know the difference between the
Tarrasch Defense and the Caro-Kann. More than two years ago, Carlsen
abruptly quit a tournament and insinuated that a young American grand
master, Hans Niemann, was cheating
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Niemann sued Carlsen, among others, for a hundred million dollars.
Niemann has admitted to what he described as youthful indiscretions,
more or less, in online games as a teen-ager. The dispute was
eventually settled. The incident was probably good business for chess,
if not exactly for Niemann’s reputation. A24 is teaming up with Emma
Stone and Nathan Fielder to produce a movie about the controversy,
based on an upcoming book by Ben Mezrich, the author of “The
Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook
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from which “The Social Network
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was adapted. Niemann himself sometimes seems like a method actor
appearing in a psychodrama, whether by temperament or by a recognition
that the mad villain is the only decent role available to him now. He
once told
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York_ magazine that he planned to be his doubters’ “biggest
nightmare for the rest of their lives.”

But at least some of the allure has to do with the addictive,
puzzle-like qualities of the game itself, and the adrenaline of
competition, particularly under intense time pressure. The average
chess player turns out to be a little like Carlsen. They can be
impatient, too.

Carlsen is probably even more dominant at speed chess than at
classical chess. He prefers knockouts, too, even though it likely
disadvantages him. (Plenty of grand masters can draw or even beat
Carlsen in a few games; his advantage emerges the more they play.) He
is a fantasy-sports obsessive. (At one point, he was the No. 1-ranked
Fantasy Premier League player in the world, though he attributed his
performance to “luck.”) He plays online, even when the stakes are
low. He’s been known to log on under a pseudonym and play speed
chess while drunk. Some all-time great athletes spend their careers
competing against the record books and themselves. But, as Danny
Rensch, the chief chess officer of Chess.com, where Carlsen is an
ambassador, told me, Carlsen relishes competing in real time.

If anything, Carlsen’s decision to relinquish the world champion
title probably strengthened his hold on his crown. Everyone seemed to
understand this. Hans Niemann excepted, few seemed to begrudge him. In
December, Gukesh Dommaraju, an eighteen-year-old Indian prodigy,
became the youngest-ever world champion, after defeating China’s
Ding Liren. In his press conference afterward, Dommaraju was emotional
about the historic moment, but said that winning did not mean he was
the best player in the world. “Obviously, that’s Magnus,” he
said.

In 2022, Carlsen sold his chess-training app and company, Play Magnus,
to Chess.com, for eighty-three million dollars. Since then, he’s
been lining up venture-capital money for things such as fantasy chess,
and launched a new app for following chess players and tournaments,
called Take Take Take. (The chess platform he appeared on in New York
was that of his own company.) And he’s spearheading a
freestyle-chess startup, which features a format in which pieces on
the back rank are lined up in random order. (The version is more
commonly known as Fischer Random, after Bobby Fischer, the eccentric
genius who popularized it; Carlsen and his financial backers are
rebranding it.) The Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Tour will use the
longer classical time controls, but players won’t be able to prepare
by memorizing long lines of opening moves. Competitors will have to
rely on their intuition, tactical vision, and calculating abilities.
Last November, Carlsen played a freestyle match against Fabiano
Caruana, the No. 2-ranked player in the world, on a yacht in
Singapore, days before the World Chess Championships were set to
start, also in Singapore. The battle for the future of chess
couldn’t have been more clear.

Top players have criticized _FIDE_ in the past, for all sorts of
reasons. In the nineteen-nineties, Garry Kasparov and his championship
rival Nigel Short even briefly tried to create an alternate
world-championship structure. More recently, Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine has led to unrest around the organization, which is led by a
Russian politician. Carlsen seems to have some of the usual
objections, too. But the challenge he represents to them is different.
He doesn’t just want to change the organizational structure. He
wants to change the sport.

Carlsen is thirty-four years old, almost double Dommaraju’s age and
the age of the World Rapid Championship winner, Volodar Murzin, who,
like Dommaraju, is eighteen. It may be that the younger generation has
its own vision for what chess will be, and it may not look like
Carlsen’s. The World Championship in classical chess is still by far
the most prestigious title. But Carlsen’s influence over the game is
already being felt. Twenty-five top players, including Dommaraju,
Caruana, and Nakamura, have agreed to join Carlsen in forming an
élite group, known as the Freestyle Chess Players Club, and a Grand
Slam tour has been planned for 2025 across the world, with stops in
Germany, Paris, New York, Delhi, and Cape Town. Carlsen and his
co-founder, the German investor Jan Henric Buettner, are offering a
prize fund upward of four million dollars. Top players already have
several tours. But _FIDE_ reportedly had a problem with the scope of
the startup’s ambition—it planned to use the term “world
championship,” but _FIDE_ insisted that it must approve any use of
this title. The details of the argument are in dispute: the
organization is accused of threatening players who join the
freestyle-chess tour; _FIDE_ denied it. Soon after, tensions eased,
and Carlsen came to New York to compete in _FIDE_’s World Rapid and
Blitz Championship. Then he showed up in jeans.

Rather than let Carlsen go, _FIDE_ changed their approach. A new
interpretation of their dress code allowed for certain “elegant”
modifications, according to a press release. A few days later, Carlsen
was back to compete at the World Blitz, wearing jeans again. (G-Star
announced that it would feature him in a new advertising campaign this
year.) It may not have begun as a power play, but it was clear where
power lay, particularly as Carlsen moved through the tournament. He
qualified for the knockout rounds, on December 31st. Carlsen beat
Niemann in a tense quarterfinals, then breezed through the semifinals
and into the final, against Ian Nepomniachtchi.

 

Carlsen won the first two games, before Nepomniachtchi levelled at two
apiece. The rules called for an indefinite series of sudden-death
games. But, after the first three featured conservative draws, and as
the clock drew closer to the close of the year, Carlsen suggested to
Nepomniachtchi that they share the world championship title at
3.5–3.5. Nepomniachtchi agreed, and Carlsen asked the arbiter that
they be named as co-champions. The arbiter contacted _FIDE_’s
president, Arkady Dvorkovich, and Dvorkovich consented.
Perhaps _FIDE_ did not control the title of “world champion”
after all.

It might have been seen as a show of great sportsmanship: Carlsen, the
great champion, sharing the title he might have persevered to claim,
once again, as his own, with a competitor whom he clearly respected.
It saved everyone, including the players, from another long display of
chess’s draw problem. And there was precedent for it at the high
levels of sport—at the Tokyo Olympics, in 2021, two high jumpers had
decided to share the gold medal
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were praised for it. Inside the hall, when the decision for Carlsen
and Nepomniachtchi was announced, the audience applauded.

Outside of it was another story. Even those who generally supported
Carlsen were shocked, seeing it not as an example of sportsmanship but
as dereliction. On YouTube, Nakamura said he was “flabbergasted.”
On X, Niemann went ballistic. “The chess world is officially a
joke,” he ranted
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top grand master tweeted
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had known that the rules were flexible, I'd have lobbied for all 10
players who tied for first to be included in the knockout. Or, if we
can have two co-champions, why not 10?! Alas . . .” Another
then replied [[link removed]],
“30 is the sweet spot, I think.” But Carlsen didn’t seem to be
paying attention. “I thought, at that point, we had already played
for a very long time and I was, first of all, very happy to end it,
and I thought, at that point, it would have been very, very cruel on
both of us if one gets first and the other gets second,” Carlsen
later told reporters. “So I thought it would be a reasonable
solution. I think people of course understand that we’re both tired
and nervous. Some people are going to like it, some people are not
going to like it.” Kings don’t need to answer to public opinion.
“It’s the way it is,” he said. ♦

_LOUISA THOMAS, a staff writer at The New Yorker, authors the weekly
column The Sporting Scene
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“Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
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_Subscribe to THE NEW YORKER
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