STAVANGER – Few chess players enjoy the celebrity status of Magnus Carlsen.

A grandmaster at 13, she refused to play an American caught up in cheating allegations and ventured into the world of online chess games, all of which made Norway’s Carlsen a household name.

Few chess players have produced the magical commodity that separates Norway’s Magnus Carlsen from any of his peers: celebrity.

Only legends like Russia’s Garry Kasparov and America’s Bobby Fischer can match his name recognition, and Carlsen is arguably an even more dominant player. Last month, he beat both men to be named the International Chess Federation’s greatest of all time.

But his motivation to accumulate professional titles is waning. Carlsen, 33, now wants to use his fame to turn the game he loves into a spectator sport.

“I’m at a different stage in my career,” he told The Associated Press. “I’m not as ambitious when it comes to professional chess. I still want to play, but I don’t necessarily have that hunger. I play for the love of the game.”

Offering a new way to interact with the game, Carlsen launched his Take Take Take app on Friday, which will follow games and players live, explaining matches in an accessible way that Carlsen says is sometimes missing from streaming platforms like YouTube and Twitch. . “It will be a refreshing atmosphere,” he says.

Carlsen plans to use his experience to provide recaps and analysis on his new app, starting with November’s World Chess Championship tournament between China’s Ding Liren and India’s Gukesh Dommaraju. He will not compete himself as he voluntarily relinquished the title in 2023.

Carlsen is no novice when it comes to chess apps. Play Magnus, which launched in 2014, gave online users the chance to play against a chess engine modeled after its own game. The company went into a suite of applications and was bought for about $80 million in 2022 by Chess.com, the world’s largest chess website.

Carlsen and Mats Andre Kristiansen, CEO of his company, Fantasy Chess, are betting that a chess game where users can track individual players and pieces, filters to explain different elements of each game, and easy touch analysis will uncover the causality posed by spectators. removed from the sometimes rarefied air of chess. The free app was launched in an attempt to build its user base before trying to monetize it. “That will come later, maybe with ads or deeper analysis,” says Kristiansen.

While Take Take Take offers a different perspective with its streaming services, it’s still launching in a crowded market with Chess.com, which has more than 100 million users, YouTube, Twitch and the site of FIDE, the International Chess Federation . World Chess was worth around $54 million when it listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The affordability of chess engines that can beat any human means that cheating has never been easier. However, they can still be used to shorten thousands of hours of book research and hone skills that would be impossible against human opponents.

“I think today’s games are of a higher quality because the training is getting deeper and AI is helping us play. It’s reshaping the way we rate games,” especially for the new generation of gamers, Carlsen says.

At the same time, he admits that two decades after becoming a grandmaster, his mind doesn’t quite calculate with the tornado speed it once did. “Most people have less energy as they get older. The brain becomes slower. I have felt this for several years already. The processing power of younger players is faster.”

Even so, he intends to be the best in the world for many years to come.

“My mind is a little slower and maybe I don’t have as much energy. But chess is about bringing energy, computing power and experience together. They are still closer to the peak than the decline,” he said.

Chess grew a wave of popularity started by Carlsen himself.

He became the best player in the world in 2011. In 2013, he won the first of his five World Championships. In 2014, he achieved the highest chess rating of 2882 and has remained the undisputed world number one for the past 13 years.

Outside the table, chess influencers such as world No. 2 Hikaru Nakamura are using social media to bring the game to a wider audience. Netflix’s “The Queen’s Gambit” erased the cerebral sex appeal of chess when it became one of the streamer’s biggest hits of 2020.

And in 2022, Carlsen’s refusal to play against Hans Niemann, an American grandmaster who has admitted to using technology to cheat in online games in the past, created a rare advantage in the usually quiet world of chess. There is no evidence that Niemann ever cheated in live games, but the feud between the pair propelled the game further into the public consciousness.

It remains to be seen whether chess can continue to grow without the full professional participation of its biggest celebrity.