When Magnus Carlsen and his second clashed, pushed each other in heated training camp moment before world championship

There is no doubt about the competitive fire that burns within Magnus Carlsen. He might have opted not to compete in the World Chess Championship any more, but opponents and friends always talk of the Norwegian as a man who gives no quarter, whatever the sport.

Russian grandmaster Daniil Dubov, who was part of Magnus Carlsen’s team for the world championship battles against Fabiano Caruana and Ian Nepomniachtchi, recently spoke about how competitive the Norwegian can get. Dubov, in a Russian podcast with Ilya Levitov, opened up about his experiences with Carlsen at the world no 1’s training camps ahead of the world championship fights in 2018 (against Caruana) and 2021 (vs Nepomniachtchi).

Dubov revealed that he was invited to join the Team Carlsen after playing a spontaneous blitz match at a Chess World Cup. Dubov sets the scene of the training camp. He said he had flown to Oslo after a series of stopovers, and at the airport he was picked up by members of Team Carlsen who then picked up Carlsen before the team headed to a suburbs near Oslo for the camp.

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But things started off rocky for the duo. Dubov said he had a clash with Carlsen on the first day itself at a training camp, not during a chess game, but while playing a football match.

“We even had a clash on the first day, that was fun. We went to play football on the first day and we just got emotional. We did clash, I remember thinking ‘How stupid is that!’ I dribbled him a couple of times or something, and he started calling me names. I asked him to repeat. We did push each other, and the funny part is that we got separated quickly,” Dubov told Levitov before adding: “We stopped playing football quickly after that.”

Dubov spoke about the initial awkwardness in the team after his clash with Carlsen.

“At that point, I didn’t know him at all! He froze, we were now in a deafening silence, riding a golf cart as we were leaving the football pitch. I remember sitting there thinking ‘How stupid.’ Not that I cared! I wasn’t obsessed with the idea of working with Magnus or thinking about the fact that I wouldn’t work with him anymore. But I had this thought like, ‘Jeez, the journey there was such a pain that I don’t want to leave today! How stupid!'”

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Carlsen is not a prima donna

Dubov explained how he had diffused the tension during that golf cart ride.

“I looked at him at some point, and he was there, calmly sitting. I patted his shoulder, I said, ‘That was silly!’ He said, ‘Yes, no worries!’ He’s great in that respect. He can get upset, but so can you. You can say something rude to him, he’s not a prima donna. You can go hard at him playing football. In that respect, he doesn’t have double standards. His jokes can be over-the-top at times, but I could tell him whatever I wanted. It was never a problem. He has a thick skin, and so do I,” Dubov told Levitov.

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Dubov also revealed how he had started to work with Carlsen after playing impromptu blitz games against the Norwegian during the FIDE World Cup.

“It happened in a rather unexpected way for me. They (Carlsen’s team) reached out to me when I barely knew him, we had just played a few games together. He later explained to me he has this thing that when there’s someone even minimally annoying to play against, that triggers interest in him. It’s not that he starts fearing that person, but he tries to grasp what that’s all is about. And considering that the financial resources are more or less unlimited, an enormous amount of top players have done training camps with Magnus. Those camps really take place under Magnus’s aegis, we’re not talking about those camps where there are sparring partners all working on their side. These are real Magnus camps, and those people – and that has a psychological say, no doubt – you’ve just reached 2700, he calls you, and suddenly you’re kind of part of his crew so to speak, that does something to you psychologically,” Dubov added.

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