Why I consider Magnus Carlsen the GOAT

As any big fan of any sport knows, the discussion about the Greatest Of All Time is always polemical and full of different opinions and points of view. With very few exceptions, there is always a list of possible contenders who deserve the title, depending on what each person considers more important when analyzing and thinking about this topic. In chess, it is obviously no different, and therefore I have decided to write not only my opinion about it, which is actually no secret if you have read the title of this article, but mainly the reasons why I think that and based on what criteria. Maybe this text will be a bit long, so I hope to have written it in an interesting way to make it readable and to keep your attention.

I have always had these thoughts in my head, but only a few days ago I started to put them all together in an organized and structured way, so I decided to register them here and summarize the information, making it clearer for the readers and also for myself.

If you are reading in the future, I am writing on October 13th, 2023, one day after Carlsen lost to GM Suleymenov at the Qatar Chess Open 2023, so I thought that maybe this was a precise moment to bring it up, since I cannot be accused of being in the heat of the moment after an epic win or a World Cup title, for example. And of course, a win or a loss in a random open tournament with not much relevance does not change any of the arguments I will bring here, which are much more long-term based.

One last point I want to make clear before going to the article itself is that this text is not necessarily related to the one about my favorite players. Although I have chosen Carlsen as my favorite, that one is much more based on personal reasons to like the players, while here I will try to focus on the chessboard itself and factors related to the game. For example, you can say Anish Giri is your favorite player because you like to draw games and I would respect your taste and thoughts 100%, but if you say he is the GOAT, I would certainly have to disagree.

This also means that if Carlsen commits a terrible crime tomorrow or makes an absurd political statement that I condemn, he will naturally be removed from my list of favorites, but it will not really change what I think about who the best player is. The latter is only based on chess itself, which is the aspect from which the debate about the GOAT has to be mainly conducted. I don't think it is difficult to understand what I mean and not to confuse things. 

After such a long introduction, here is the list of the main points that I think should be mentioned. For each of them, I will open the arguments and explain in more detail what I mean. So here they are:

• The distance between him and the other top players of his era.
• How long his reign as the undisputed best of his time lasted.
• The objective level of the chess he plays.
• Versatility and adaptability.
• The conditions and resources available to reach a high level compared to the rest of the world.

1)      The distance between him and the other top players of his era

I think it is clear to everyone who has followed chess since 2010 until today that Carlsen is the best of our time. After reaching the highest rating in the world and becoming World Champion in 2013, there was never any serious disagreement that he was in a shelter above all his opponents. Of course, there were certain moments when perhaps one or another player could play better chess, like Caruana in 2014, but these moments were occasional and never made anyone doubt who the best player really was.

Since the discussion about the GOAT will always be comparable, I think I should mention that other great players like Karpov, Botvinnik, and Anand were in my opinion not so much above their opponents as Carlsen is (I will mention other notable players later in this text, please do not think I have forgotten them). Karpov at his peak had great rivals like Korchnoi and later Kasparov. Botvinnik had Tal, Petrosian, Spassky, Keres, and others playing very close to him. Anand was undoubtedly a deserving world champion, but he always had many opponents of a very similar caliber.

One could argue that Carlsen is somehow "lucky" because the other top players are the ones who are not on the same level as in the past and cannot match him. But here I would like to talk a little bit about statistics and bring an analogy related to one of the animals I love most: whales (yes, I love them, such magnificent and incredible water creatures haha).

Suppose I am an explorer in the year 1950 who somehow manages to catalog and measure all the whales in the world. I will not tell you their sizes, but what I can say is this:

- The largest whale is 1 meter longer than the 2nd.

- The 2nd is 0.5 meters longer than the 3rd.

- The 3rd is 0.7 meters longer than the 4th.

- ...

I do it until the 10th, and the distance between the 1st and the 10th is, let us say… 11 meters.

10 years later, I share the same data about the top 10 largest whales, and the comparison values between them are different, but still similar and with more or less the same average distance. And the same is true 10 years later, and then another 10 years... until today.

In 2023, I tell you that the largest whale is now suddenly 7 meters longer than the second, while the distances between the second and the tenth remain approximately the same on average. What would be your statistical conclusion?

A) The largest whale of 2023 is an anomaly and an outlier, probably larger than the previous ones.

B) The largest whale is as big as the previous ones, but all other whales between the 2nd and the 10th are now smaller.

If we apply the principle of Occam's razor, also known as the law of parsimony, which recommends looking for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements, I think it is much more likely and quite obvious that letter A is the correct answer. Please note that it is not necessary to know the actual size of each whale to infer that the largest whale of 2023 is most likely also the largest whale of all time, especially if you also consider that environmental conditions are more favorable for larger individuals today than in the past (hypothetically, I don’t know if they really are, but I will later explain why I am writing it).

Going back to the chess world and based on the analogy I have just presented; it is very hard for me to believe that Carlsen is above his top opponents just because they are not good enough. Logic and statistics say that Carlsen is much more likely to be above the average for the best than his opponents are below the average for the positions among the top 10. The following picture makes this clearer.

 What do you think is more likely?

A: where only one point is different and above average, or B: where 8 points are far below average?

.

2)      How long his reign as the undisputed best of his time lasted.

Besides being far above his opponents and not being questioned as the best, I think the duration of someone's hegemony is also very important when we are trying to decide who the GOAT is. Carlsen has been the #1 of his era for about 13 or 14 years now, and although he forfeited the World Championship title, there is still no discussion or question that he is the best player in the world, so we do not know how long that will last, but I think at least a few more years.

If we take Bobby Fischer for example, one of the most talented players the world has ever seen, maybe he can even be considered above Carlsen when it comes to being better than his rivals, but we have to agree that his prime did not last as long as we see now. I tend to prefer consistency rather than pure greatness and talent itself.

Using this criterion, I think that Kasparov, Lasker and Alekhine are the ones who compete on an equal footing with Magnus. Of course, they all have their merits and deserve true respect for what they have done, but since I am looking for a person who satisfies all 5 points at the same time, I think none of them has done it. This will be explained in more detail later in the summary and conclusion of the article.

3)      The objective level of the chess he plays.

This point has much more to do with the level of the game itself. Today, there are many more resources that allow a player to gain a good understanding of chess. The use of modern computers, access to books, past great games/players to study, globalization and many other things certainly make the life of chess fans easier if they want to develop themselves.

So, I think it is hard to deny that the level of the game itself is better played today than it ever was, because to do so we must either:

- Assume that the resources available today are not as valuable as they seem to be. I will not dwell on this for too long, because frankly, it sounds ridiculous.

- Alternatively, we must assume that the players in the past were for some reason more talented at chess than the best of today, and therefore could play a better game with fewer resources.

Returning to my analogy with the size of whales, we can see that this second explanation is statistically absurd. There are many more chess players in the world today than in the past, so we have no reason to believe that the gods of chess somehow gave more talent to all other players in the past and decided to simply stop giving people such talent in this century.

Basically, if we have a pod of 10,000 whales in 2023, another pod of 1,000 whales in 1980, and another pod of 100 whales in 1950, the largest of them all is not necessarily, but very likely, the largest of the 10,000.

And not only because of the numbers... Besides that, as I wrote earlier, we can say that the environmental conditions are more favorable to creating larger individuals today. Staying with this example, it is as if the use of modern resources is comparable to having more food, better water temperature, fewer predators, and so on. So, this would be another reason to become even more obvious who is objectively the largest individual even without having the size measurements themselves.

4)      Versatility and adaptability

I confess that this point is not as objective as I would like to bring it into this text, but I thought it was important to mention it anyway. Carlsen is a very versatile player who can play anything. It is even difficult to define exactly what his style of play is. If we think about other great players, for almost all of them it is possible to look at their games/moves and try to guess who they belong to. Kasparov, Karpov, Fischer, Tal, Alekhine, and others had what we could call their signature, while Magnus seems to be a master of all styles, like a mixture between them.

I know that every GM and especially every world champion is capable of playing brilliant positional and dynamic games. To attack and defend precisely and to be a genius no matter what the situation demands. What I think distinguishes Carlsen from them is that he does not just do it out of necessity when the game demands it, but actually feels comfortable with any of these strategies at any time, almost as if he decides for himself how he will play today.

If we make a soccer analogy this time, I would say it is almost as if the same player is a great striker, midfielder, defender, or even goalkeeper, and is capable of not only playing well but actually competing with the best in each of those positions.

Would you rather have him on your team or have the best striker in the world who is only average in other positions? This is a personal decision, and I don't think there is a right answer, but when we talk about an individual sport like chess, it is admirable that someone can be so good that people can't even point out his strongest aspect. Of course, you can point to his endgame technique and his ability to break a tie, but I think that is not really a style of play, but has much more to do with mental strength and also the physical ability to stay focused for so long.

That said, I think this versatility only adds to my opinion that he is a bit above the rest. Magnus seems to have taken the best of each of his predecessors and blended them together to create the perfect player.

5)      The conditions and resources available to reach a high level compared to the rest of the world.

I have already mentioned, and I think it is quite clear, that the resources available in our century are many and much better than other great players have had in the past. But with that in mind, I would like to ask: Is this really an advantage if you want to be the best in the world?

To explain myself further, if you wanted to be the best doctor in the world compared to your colleagues, would it be easier for you:

A) With all the knowledge and modern resources available to everyone today.

B) If the world had only ancient medical books, but you owned them all and the rest of the population had no access to them.

When we talk about being the best in the world in a certain period of time, we have to consider that our competitors are obviously trying to achieve the same goal. With the amount of information that is out there today, I think it is actually harder, not easier, to get to such a higher level than your competitors. They have as much information and resources as you do, and there is very little you can do to be different.

By the way, this is the reason why I can hardly consider any of the great Soviet players as the GOAT in my opinion. They were amazing players and deserve all my respect, no doubt, but we cannot deny that they had a clear advantage due to their access to great coaches, books and strategies that were simply unknown in the rest of the world. To be the best among the Soviets was something incredibly hard, I am not at all denying it nor diminishing what they did, but at the same time, it was almost always enough to be the best in the world simultaneously. 

To go back to my analogy with the size of whales, it is like in the past, only the conditions in a certain part of the ocean were favorable for large individuals to grow, and today the whole ocean, or at least a much larger part of it. Again, if you think logically and statistically, who has a better chance of being bigger? The biggest in a small region or the biggest in a large region?

Conclusion:

I am afraid that even after this long text there are still some points where I could have been clearer and more precise, but it is difficult to put into words exactly everything we actually think about. I have made the following table comparing some of the greatest players in history to show why I think none of them meet the criteria I have used as well as Carlsen does.

Please note that an X or a ~ does not mean in any case that the player doesn’t meet the requirements at all. I am comparing the great with the great, so it is always based on what the others have to show. I would never say that Karpov was not versatile or that Petrosian's level of play was "not that good".

In the end, the most important thing is not the opinion itself, but understanding why you think what you think, and what aspects are important to you (this is valid for life, not only chess). Otherwise, your opinion will not be really valuable and will look more like a mere personal preference, blind ideology, stubbornness, nostalgia... or like you are simply part of a fan club. This can be important, as I wrote in the beginning, when talking about your favorites and personal tastes, but not necessarily if we want to discuss the best.

I have to be consistent with myself, so the same criteria I presented here are the ones that make me consider Messi, Brady, Phelps, and Bolt the GOATs in their sports. In other sports like tennis, basketball or F1, I do not think it is possible to define any, at least not with the arguments I have presented here.

I hope you enjoyed reading and that my thoughts were clear enough and understandable. Naturally, no one has to agree with me, and I would love to know your point of view and opinion about who the GOAT is, if there is one for you.