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Countless millions play chess around the world, but ask anybody who is the greatest of them all, and they’ll tell you Magnus Carlsen.

The 29-year-old Norwegian became a grandmaster at 13 after beating former world champion Anatoli Karpov and drawing with Russian great Garry Kasparov, became the youngest chess player in history to top the world rankings at the age of 19, and has been the world chess champion since 2013.

We have already covered how Carlsen could be the man to ‘bring chess to the masses’, with a new wave of players taking up the sport during lockdowns, via online tournaments with sizeable prize kitties.

April’s Magnus Carlsen Invitational had a total prize fund of $250 000, and the Carlsen Tour online tournaments, which ran until last month, had a total prize pool of $1 million.

His dominance of the sport is unparalleled, but it’s his skill in the Fantasy Premier League (FPL) game that has also stunned many.

Millions of players from across the globe pick players in the English Premier League to form a squad of 15 players, using a budget of £100 million, and competition is stiff.

During the season, limited transfers can be made, and special chips used to boost your score, with tactical planning and predicting which players will fire next the order of the day.

This year already, after just one gameweek, there are already in excess of six million players.

If you want to come out tops, you need luck and skill, and Carlsen has both. This from CNN:

What began as a hobby — a welcome distraction from the grueling demands of being a chess grandmaster — has become an activity in which he now excels to a ludicrously impressive degree.

He finished 85,781 (out of many millions) in his debut season, rose to 2,397 in 2017/18 before dropping to 24,105 in 2019 (by his own high standards, just finishing inside the top 200,000 in the world in 2017 was nothing to write home about).

But it was this most recent FPL season where Carlsen picked up global coverage. Just before Christmas — traditionally the time in actual football when the likeliest contenders for the title become tough to dislodge — the Norwegian was in top spot in the fantasy version of the game.

The greatest chess player of our time, and probably all time, was beating millions of people in a completely different discipline.

Entering the final gameweek of a long, COVID-19 affected season, Carlsen was just 12 points off top spot, but ultimately finished in 10th place.

Again, that’s out of millions of players.

He admits there is luck involved, but he also points out the thinking behind the various decisions one must make.

And what does he believe is the ratio is between strategy and pure luck? “I don’t think you can be lucky unless you have a basis of good strategy and tactics,” Carlsen responds. “I think that fantasy is quite similar to poker in that sense. There is a considerable amount of luck in there in the short term, but not so much in the long term.”

…”Most of the time in chess, you’d only think a few moves ahead unless it’s like a very, very small tree of variations,” he explains. “And, to some extent, the same applies in fantasy, that you should plan a little bit ahead, but you should always be very, very flexible when it comes to changing your plans, depending on the new data that that arrives.”

Thinking a few moves ahead is great but if an injury or suspension happens, or one of your more expensive players flops, it’s hard to resist a knee-jerk reaction.

For those interested, here’s Carlsen’s FPL Gameweek One team, which scored him 73 points:

When in doubt, captain Mo Salah, with his score of 20 doubled on the back of being chosen as skipper.

Pretty surprised he went for West Brom’s Sam Johnstone in goal, and Dele Alli in midfield, but can’t fault the rest.

A 73-point score is good enough for 638,110 out of the 6,329,335 who entered a team in time for Gameweek One, so he’s already near the top 10%.

No biggie, but I scored 75, although I have no doubt that Magnus will leave me in his dust by season’s end.

(I must add that this will not be Adam’s year, despite his best efforts.)

So, which would be prefer – chess world champion again, or top spot in FPL?

“In terms of the bigger achievement, of course, it’s world champion in chess. But in terms of what I would appreciate more, that’s a much more difficult question. But it’s very difficult. So if people expect me to finish top 10 again, that’s going to take an extraordinary amount of luck.”

You’d be a brave person to bet against him finishing somewhere near the top of the pile.

[source:cnn]