- Hi, I'm Magnus Carlsen from Norway.
I'm the World Chess Champion.
I've been that since 2013.
I watched "The Queen's Gambit" with great interest
and I'm here to take you through some of the clips
and some of the chess from the series.
The chess stuff is incredibly well done.
It's also a captivating series in general.
Just by the fact that I was watching it with my girlfriend
who doesn't actually play chess,
and she found it so captivating.
And she was the one who was sort of pushing for us
to binge it rather than I was,
and she doesn't play chess, so.
(dramatic music)
I don't have that particular memory
of buying a chess board when I was little.
The one instance that I do remember of buying a chess board
about two and a half years ago where I simply realized
that I don't have a chess board at home (laughs),
and so what I did is
that I just went down
to the local billiards shop,
which was about 200 meters from where I lived in Oslo
and I bought some chess board that they had there,
and they were obviously pretty surprised that I needed that.
- Are you sure you want to do this?
- I'm sure.
- We don't have a women's section.
- [Magnus] Especially in places where there haven't been
too much history of women playing chess.
There is certainly a tendency
for women not to feel all that welcome,
and it's been male dominated
for so long,
and I think a lot of men like to keep it that way.
Girls are just excited about chess
and just as good at chess as boys.
The imbalance comes partly comes a bit later
and it's probably also more of a case
of parents pushing boys
more into chess
than maybe parents of girls they don't want
to push them into chess because they think that
this will not be an environment
that is good for their child.
So, I think there is definitely a lot to work on there,
but I think that in principle
their sort of the preconditions should be very equal,
but unfortunately it has not happened that way at all.
I understand the sort of skepticism
in that you can't just waltz in,
tell'em you never played a rated game,
you don't have any rating
and your expected to beat them all,
like male or female
that would sound ludicrous coming from anyone?
Yeah, I think telling her there's no women's section
is uncalled for it's like your here
you should be treated like anybody.
(soft piano music)
This is definitely the case for most tournaments
still that they're held in fairly low-profile locations.
I think chess definitely has a way to go there
in the way it's being presented.
- Highest rated players in the whole (beep) country,
and yet here we are in some second rank university playing
on cheap plastic boards with cheap plastic pieces.
- Certainly I sort of new world has opened up
in terms of
online series, online chess.
The only thing I would be worried
about long-term is the future
of sort of classical chess.
The one that Beth Harman is playing,
and that has been considered the most prestigious,
where you play games over several hours,
because online people don't really practice
for these very long games.
So longterm, we might be
sort of raising a generation
of players who are much more used
to playing speed chess than the slower chess,
and for the future of the game,
I'm not quite sure how
that will pan out,
but I think overall chess has done well
in these very difficult circumstances that have been.
[Magnus] I cannot stress that enough
that I love the way that she respects the game.
She never stops studying.
She never stops learning.
She never stopped thinking that she can do better.
I'm somebody who has never been great
at dealing with defeats.
If you take a survey of the best player
to ask them who the worst loser is,
my name is going to come up (laughs)
From my own experience, along the time of my career,
there definitely have been opponents
that I struggled with,
and I would say that the best example is Anand,
who used to be World Champion between 2007 and 2013.
So, when I started out playing at the top level,
I struggled a lot against him.
It's very, very relatable.
The despair she feels towards the end of the game,
where, you know, you've been outplayed.
You know, there are no chances.
You're just desperately
looking for something, anything, any chance
that you can possibly find.
Whenever you lose, like,
you start questioning
everything, basically.
It's really so unpleasant,
it's such an unpleasant feeling
to lose, especially like, if you feel like you
made mistakes that you could have avoided.
For me personally, I just try to channel
that anger into the next game.
I do like the fact for her that losing is not normal.
It's not something that just happens,
like you accepted it then you move on,
when you lose, you have to make sure
that it doesn't happen again,
because it's an awful feeling,
and the motivation has to be,
to avoid feeling that again.
- Don't tell!
- [Magnus] Mr. Schaibel was certainly an important mentor,
but most of all,
I think he was just encouraging her
to study and that
she would be the best teacher herself.
My father taught me the rules,
and as I progressed,
he certainly taught me a bit.
Although still mostly I was studying on my own,
but later on, we were at the tournament
and we were going through one of my games
and my father made a comment
about one of my moves,
he suggested something else instead.
And one experienced player there
he was just passing by,
he just told my father
that what he was teaching me was wrong.
My father was kind of spooked by this, and after that,
he pretty much just left it all up to me.
He felt that it was much better
that I figured it out on my own,
then he will give me poor advice.
- The truth of it child,
your astounding.
- I hope you guys enjoyed the clips,
and me talking about it.
Hopefully you are more ready now than ever
to go out beating your friends,
or whoever you are playing at chess.
So take care and enjoy the game.