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          Magnus Carlsen's Norway win is just another testament to his greatness

          Magnus Carlsen. Michal Walusza/Norway Chess
          • Aaditya Narayan
          Jun 6, 2025, 11:15 PM ET

          Magnus Carlsen is the best chess player in the world. There's nothing anyone can do about it. It's just a law of this chess universe.

          Classical chess is a format he's admittedly lost interest in. The world's best players were all attempting to win Norway Chess 2025 in the format Carlsen doesn't care much for. The end result? For the seventh time in his career, Carlsen is the winner at Norway Chess.

          This win could just maybe the sweetest, ironic given just how far his contempt for classical chess has gone. In fact, midway through the tournament he even said that he will reconsider his future in the format.

          But he was motivated in a different way for this one. The aim was clear - he wanted to show that the world of chess has one king, that world champions may have come after him, but only because he has allowed them to, in a way.

          His reaction after a loss to reigning world champ Dommaraju Gukesh was as telling as the loss itself. He blundered a winning position into a losing one with one move. He slammed the table, let out a loud "oh my God", and then stormed out of the hall, while apologising to Gukesh on the way out. It was a rare show of such fierce emotion on the board from him.

          Perhaps that rare reaction was fitting, given how rare it is for Carlsen to lose classical games, and rarer still for him to throw away winning positions like that. Carlsen didn't lose another classical game since at the tournament.

          After his ninth-round win against Fabiano Caruana, Carlsen was asked what his feelings about winning the tournament would be. The response said everything that needed to be said.

          "The dream of playing a really good tournament burst with that game (the loss to Gukesh in Round 6)... I wanted a score that reflects the fact I think I'm still significantly better at chess and since I couldn't achieve that, a potential win of the tournament would not mean as much," he told David Howell, Jovanka Houska, and Tania Sachdev on Chess.com's live stream.

          The biggest competition in chess though, world champion notwithstanding, is Carlsen vs Carlsen.

          He's not playing at his very best, he's not motivated as he once was, and yet there is no challenge greater, in any format of chess, than having to defeat Magnus Carlsen. Compete? Possible. Draw against him? Possible. Beat him? Improbable. Gukesh had done the improbable, and Carlsen absolutely hated it.

          It was also telling that in the game after he lost to Gukesh, Carlsen played out a quick draw against Hikaru Nakamura, with both players having way more than an hour left on each of their clocks.

          "It's not that I cannot play classical chess," he would say to Take Take Take after that draw against Nakamura. "But in situations like yesterday (loss to Gukesh), I was wondering, 'why am I doing this? What's the point?'"

          He went on to say that classical chess wasn't fun to play anymore, and that he needed to consider how to avoid it. Maybe stopping playing the format would be the solution. The issue for every other player trying to compete against him is that he was never worried about whether he was the best player in the world, he just wasn't having fun and was gaining nothing from playing classical chess. "I am not worried about my level," Carlsen went on to say.

          And in winning the tournament, in that final round, he showed a glimpse of just why he said he's not worried about his level. Arjun Erigaisi had played an almost perfect game for 34 moves. Within six moves, Carlsen turned it around from a losing position to a winning one, eventually bailing out from putting the finishing touches on the win because he knew a draw would likely be enough to win the title.

          Howell, Houska, and Sachdev were almost lost for words on commentary. They knew it was Carlsen, they knew his genius, and yet he found ways to bind them in a spell with his understanding and coordination of all the pieces on his board. No one does it better.

          And so, there it is. The world's top players tried their hardest. They came close - within half a point, the final standings would say. A man lacking motivation for the format, even questioning the need to play it at all, was still superior to all of them. There lies the greatness of Magnus Carlsen, arguably the greatest chess player ever.