Carlsen to appear in 60 Minutes
On Sunday Magnus Carlsen will appear in the CBS news magazine program 60 Minutes. We received a press release from CBS which includes a preview video.
PRESS RELEASE
It may seem a polite game of quiet wit, but chess grandmasters are really out for blood. The number-one chess player in the world, Norway’s Magnus Carlsen, tells Bob Simon that he especially enjoys making his opponent suffer in a game that is downright war. Simon profiles the 21-yr-old chess prodigy on 60 MINUTES, Sunday, Feb. 19 (7:00-8:00 PM) on the CBS Television Network. What could be more satisfying than playing chess brilliantly? For Carlsen, it doesn’t get much better. The results of brilliant play on an opponent can provide even more fun, however. “I enjoy it when I see my opponent…really suffering. When he knows I have outsmarted him,” Carlsen says with a wicked grin. That’s what often happens to the opponents of the game’s number-one player. They get outsmarted and they get taken down. But Carlsen occasionally loses a game himself. “If I lose just one game…I just really want to get revenge,” he tells Simon. Carlsen is the superstar of the game, a status he demonstrates for 60 MINUTES cameras by playing 10 expert players at once, without ever looking at the boards. It’s a status he has been working on since he was a child. When he was 13 years old, he drew with Garry Kasparov, the Russian many consider the best player ever. Kasparov wasn’t happy. It could have been different says Carlsen, if he hadn’t been intimidated during the game of speed chess. “When I actually got to a winning position, I had little time, I was nervous and I couldn’t finish him off,” says Carlsen, whose prize for this feat was an ice cream at McDonald’s. Nowadays, as the world’s top player, Carlsen gets more than ice cream for his efforts. Though the prize money in chess is not enormous, add to that the money he makes for endorsements and modeling, and he’s making about $1.5 million a year. As a warm-up for Sunday’s story about this grandmaster, 60 MINUTES’ webcast, 60MinutesOvertime, will feature Mike Wallace’s 1972 report on Bobby Fischer, America’s greatest chess grandmaster, who died in 2008. 60MinutesOvertime features originally-produced content and archival material about the subjects and characters in 60 MINUTES stories and the reporters who work on them.
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The segment with Carlsen, which includes some footage shot by our friend Macauley Peterson, will be available to be streamed online after 12 am ET / 5 am GMT / 6 am CET, Monday, Feb 20. The links will be http://www.60minutes.com (where the segment will be accompanied by a print version of the story, extra web clips, and a feature from our web show 60 Minutes Overtime) and http://www.youtube.com/user/
CBS also made available a clip from April 1972, when Mike Wallace profiled 29-year-old Bobby Fischer, who was training for his match against Boris Spassky.
Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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