Even if he is still capable mentally and physically, I would think the stress of training and competing at that level must get old after a while.
And a lot probably comes with environmental rather than physical issues. Staying at the highest level in chess requires never-ending opening preparation and study. This same is about the time that kings of the game have made their dominance clear to the point that there's just nothing more to achieve, start having families, and so on. It's going to be very difficult to maintain motivation.
The rise of freestyle chess could viably see players extending their dominance for much longer, because there's currently believed to be no realistic way to do impactful opening prep in that game.
I think it's nearly universally accepted that his streak ended on a technicality rather than a legitimate decline/defeat.
Caruana (the guy who lost to Magnus), mused in a podcast that chess960 feels strange as a competitor because he doesn’t really prepare (because there are far too many openings to study) and said it feels like he’s getting paid for much less work.
It's hard to say it's cognitive decline for most of the people who just aren't working as hard at 40 as they were at 25.
No. Multiple world champions have been older than that.
Suffice to say that 50 points is considered a major edge, and it increases exponentially so 100 points is much more of an edge than 2x a 50 point edge. Here [2] is a rating expectation calculator. If Erdogmus and Carlsen played a best of 10 match, Carlsen would be expected to win 97% of the time, draw 2% of the time, and lose less than 1% of the time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ya%C4%9F%C4%B1z_Kaan_Erdo%C4%9...
[2] - https://wismuth.com/elo/calculator.html#rating1=2669&rating2...
Generally speaking it's expected that chess players will peak around their late 20s and slowly decline from there, with sharp declines around age 50. It's unusual but not unheard of for players in their 40s to win major tournaments. 42 year old Levon Aronian won several last year, but it was considered a notable example of longevity every time he won.
In terms of raw numbers, there are currently 30 players in their 30s, 15 players in their 40s, 4 players in their 50s, and no players older that in the top 100. The youngest is 14-year old Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus, who is considered the greatest chess prospect of all time.
In chess there’s a concept of strength, and ELO is used as a rough estimate of this. Further there are FIDE rankings like IM and GM that have certain requirements to achieve.
In most sports, there’s never such an age gap. Think of basketball or football. You don’t see 12 year olds hitting the equivalent of GM in those respective sports (going pro?) and being able to compete with the 35 year olds, do you? In most sports, they wouldn’t even be allowed to enter but in chess they could.
Is your point that young kids have an advantage in chess, making it harder to keep up as an adult? They clearly don't. No 12 year old has ever been able to seriously compete with top players, at best they can hold a few draws or win a blitz game here and there. As far as I'm aware Judit Polgar was the only 12 year old to even break into the top 100, and she's an outlier among outliers. Right now the top 3 players in the world are all in their 30s, and there's only one player in the top 50 who's younger than 18.
And they were right that "a lot of really strong players are 12 years old" doesn't by itself help clarify where they are relative to elite competition at other age bands let alone clarify what age band perform bests at the end of the day. Even now I still don't understand how "a lot of 12 year old are good" is to supposed to answer that even implicitly. If anything the natural reading of that would be an implication that they are among the most competitive, yet your elaboration says the opposite.
There's a lot more wrong with your comment that someone capable of making logical inferences can readily see, so I won't go into them.
The stress of elite competition clearly has a shelf life, but Magnus is not overly old. Cognitive performance typically hits a plateau at 35 years old and begins a sustained decline after 45 years old.
The current youth wave of GMs is likely a function of compressed training efficiency. Modern players reach the 10,000 hours threshold much earlier because they had greater access to better training material and had better practice.
Youngsters like Lazavik during the Speed Chess Championship or Sindarov in Freestyle were the most recent convincing wins against Magnus, but the historical mental edge that Magnus comes into each game after beating the brakes out of everyone is hard to overcome.
Magnus' time will come! But not today.
Carlsen has spent the core of his career mastering two aspects historically underlooked aspects of the game.
The first is the endgame, and there isn't much to say there. He's by far the best end game player by far and it's not even close.
The second are drawish locked positions where most GMs can't but see a draw. Carlsen realized that in order for it to be a draw his opponents still have to play perfect and he focused a lot on accumulating small but convincing advantages in those kind of games.
Another thing that should not be overlook: mental strength, like you point out.
I think that should be a normal part of chess competition. It provides some really interesting metadata for spectators. To some degree it also emphasizes the importance of something people don't normally associate with chess - physical conditioning. When your heart is pounding for hours and the cortisol flowing, you literally get physically exhausted.
The only top-athlete that I see do the same is Max Verstappen, who is know to play competitive racing-sims online even hours before a real F1 race.
You also can't underestimate physical stamina. Kasparov in his 5-3 result against Karpov in 1984-85 was eventually halted due to Karpov's exhaustion and losing 18kg over the match period.
woah that's crazy, I was not aware of this. That's like 36 weeks of aggressive weight loss.
edit: Looks like it lasted 5 months (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Chess_Championship_1984%...).
I'd go further to say I think this is true in many things. For instance if you're into wrestling, you know the name of Alexander Karelin [1] who ended his career with a record of 887 wins and 2 losses (both losses by a single point and both highly controversial). He was winning olympic gold, repeatedly, not only without a single defeat but without his opponents even scoring a single point against him. His ears tell the story - 889 world class matches, and he doesn't even have cauliflower ear.
Hasn't Magnus' time already come, and isn't it still Magnus' time? He is #1 on all three lists[1] and so long that I have forgotten when he was not.
The ones that specifically come to mind are Lazavik vs. Carlsen, Speed Chess Championship 2025 Semi-Final, Round 3, and Sindarov vs. Carlsen, Freestyle Chess Grand Slam Finals 2025 in South Africa, Round 1 of the Group Stage Finals.
For instance this is why Carlsen was so crushed by his loss to Niemann in 2022 (that led to the cheating claim controversy). Niemann actively avoided a draw and then systematically outplayed Magnus in a very difficult R+N v R+B ending. This is also why players like Erdogmus seem to have so much potential. It's not the tactics - which is basically a prerequisite to high level play, but his ability to just systematically grind down extremely strong players like MVL.
He's 30 something, not 90.
Besides, the age pool of chess itself confirms it.
There's a single player in his 50s in the top 50 of chess and not a single 60+ in the top 100.
Also, even carlsen himself says he's no longer as good as he was years before and his mind isn't as strong.
What ageism ignores is that outside of chess, prescience outperforms other measures of productivity.
Women only categories have been created to give women visibility because they mostly were not able to reach advanced levels in the open format.
Some women choose to compete with men (Judit Polgár being a somewhat recent example) but most go straight to the women only tournaments to have a shot.
The men vs women « bias » is not unproven, they litterally had to create entire categories of competiton to account for it.
You might be right, if we were talking about anything except chess.
Chess, unlike everything else, has a clear ranking system and lots of records for people to analyze. And unfortunately, the record is very clear: chess ability decreases after a certain age.
However, the decrease is more likely due to stamina than mental decline. Chess tournaments take a long time, and stamina definitely decreases with age. However, pro athletes demonstrate that you can probably go until around your early 40s before it becomes a real issue.
Having said that, it will be interesting to see how this generation does in the blitz formats as they age. Those will be less dependent upon stamina and a better measure of mental acuity for chess.
That game they're in at 5:00:00 was great.
I feel sorry for Fabi not winning it, but of course there can be only one winner.
We'll see how well he does in Candidates this year to see if he's still a top contender. Although I do believe this is his last chance to fight for the world title.
- Has won Freestyle WC
- Has won SCC
- Has won 2x Titled Tuesday's
- Has won a Freestyle Friday
Hikaru can snipe a win off Magnus here and there, but I don't think there's any time control or format where he could win a long series of chess matches against Magnus.
A few months ago I was invited to the first leg of the 2026 Freestyle Tour with the same format and prize fund. I let everyone know that I'd be playing there.
Just a few days ago I received news that there will be no year-long tour for Freestyle. The format for the only event to be held will be only three days and only rapid formats. Instead of the tour that was planned, Freestyle has joined forces with FIDE and are now calling it a World Championship. I think it might hold the record for most rushed arrangement for a World Championship title in history.
I truly enjoyed the first event in Weissenhaus in 2025, and it's a shame that the classical length format wasn't continued. Furthermore, this all feels like a hastily arranged tournament with less than 1/3rd the prize fund it originally had, and now it's attached to FIDE, which isn't a positive development in my opinion.
Despite many phone calls and messages from the organizer, I have decided to decline my slot in this event. I have an important tournament in the end of March/April to focus on, and that is where my attention will be.
[0] https://www.chess.com/news/view/freestyle-chess-fide-world-c...
Hikaru is getting older too, and it shows: I don't think he has a freestyle edge at all.
That said, even without that database a modern AI will completely topple the best human at every common chess variant. Humans cannot defeat modern AIs in chess like games.
I'm sure some of those games are actually stockfish v stockfish or something similar. Its pretty easy to run stockfish or lichess locally and copy the moves from each engine back and forth.
Sure, some people are cheaters. Some are not. There is no personal win in cheating against Stockfish. Usually strong players do it for training purposes, or to entertain their watchers when they stream. I actually remember having seen one who did that, and he drew. That was a party.
Evidence given: "There exist some small number of games on lichess.org played against stockfish where the user won."
My counter argument is that games on lichess against stockfish don't imply a human beat stockfish. It could just be that stockfish (or other bots) can sometimes beat stockfish. And some humans surely use bots to play on their behalf in order to cheat in online games.
I don't know if any humans can beat stockfish. But I don't consider that to be strong evidence.
P.S: You should not take this bet. You will lose. You are mistaken if you think you beat stockfish.
Add to that 24 years of hardware development, and you can imagine why no human player is particularly interested in playing full-strength engines in a non-odds match anymore. Even more so in FRC/Chess960 where you have absolutely zero chance of leading the game into some sort of super-drawish opening to try to hold on to half a point now and then.
* 100 games, to have some statistical relevance.
* One move per day, so that being tired is no disadvantage (engine can ponder all day).
* Human has access to endgame tablebases and opening databases, like the engine.
* Human can make notes and has a software like Chess Position Trainer, which can min max, like the engine.