World Champion Magnus Carlsen is a long time Real Madrid fan. He has multiple interactions with the club, including the time when he celebrated his 23rd birthday with 68,000 people at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium as he took a ceremonial kick-off in the La Liga match between Real Madrid and Valladolid.
In a podcast talk with Lex Fridman from this August 27th, titled “Magnus Carlsen: Greatest Chess Player of All Time,” Magnus reveals the impossible for any hardliner fan of Real Madrid. Carlsen chooses Messi ahead of Ronaldo for the greatest of all time football players.
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“I think it’s pretty hard to make a case for anybody else than Messi for his all-round game,” said Carlsén. “My Real Madrid fandom sort of predates the Ronaldo era – the second Ronaldo, not the first one [Ronaldo Nazario]. I always liked Ronaldo but I always kind of thought that Messi was better. I went to quite a number of Madrid games and they’ve always been super helpful to me down there,” says Carlsen. “The only thing is that they were going to do an interview and they were going to ask me who my favourite player was. I said somebody else, I think it was Isco at that point, and they were like: ‘Okay, take two, now you say Ronaldo’. So for them, it was very important, but it wasn’t that huge to me.”
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Topics from Lex Fridman’s talk with Carlsen
0:00 – Introduction
0:51 – Greatest soccer player of all time
7:57 – Magnus’s approach to chess
17:10 – Game 6 of the 2021 World Chess Championship
21:12 – Chess openings
33:35 – Chess960: Fischer random chess
38:37 – Chess variants
41:22 – Elo Rating
49:48 – World Chess Championship
1:14:00 – Losing
1:21:22 – Day in the life
1:28:12 – Drunk chess
1:32:43 – Chess training
1:40:37 – Garry Kasparov
1:49:54 – Greatest chess player of all time
2:03:06 – Advice for chess players
2:04:49 – Chess YouTubers
2:08:20 – Henrik Carlsen
2:13:55 – Lessons for life
2:17:19 – Queen’s Gambit
2:19:10 – Poker
2:25:24 – Loneliness
2:28:45 – How does the knight move?
