On Saturday, December 8th Magnus Carlsen broke Garry Kasparov's chess rating record of 2851. By drawing with Hikaru Nakamura at the London Chess Classic, the Norwegian player will be certain of an Elo of at least 2856 on the January 1 FIDE rating list. We produced a video in which Carlsen talks about the game and about breaking the record.

Transcript:

[About the game]

I think we were both surprising each other numerous times. I think the position we got I was vaguely familiar with, at least and I think it's pretty OK for Black, so I wasn't too unhappy.

[About 16...Ndxb4]

I didn't see anything else clear. I thought at that point I should be playing for an advantage because I felt that his play was rather strange. I saw that I really couldn't lose after I took on b4 so I decided just to go for it.

I thought I was going to be better but that was wrong. I think it was just equal and that's the way it went.

I certainly shouldn't have exchanged on f3. That's actually bothering me quite a bit now. I should have taken some time to calm down and realize that  taking on f3 and Qe5 was nothing, and actually to find the proper way.

[About the tournament so far]

My games haven't been brilliant. They haven't been bad but they haven't been brilliant either. It's just about fighting I think. In the end I believe you will always get what you deserve. So, to some extent I think I at least deserved this score.

[About breaking Kasparov's record]

I think that's pretty cool. It's probably the biggest achievement of my career so far because I didn't think that anyone thought that it was going to be broken this soon. Also, it's nice to do it with some kind of spectacular performance, at least, if not by the standard of play then by points. Because I remember, of course I broke 2800  with a 3000 performance in Nanjing and now I break the record with what's probably going to be a pretty good performance here, so that's nice.

The tournament right now is the most important for sure. I'll try to play a good game against Vishy in the last round and we'll see what happens.

[About being fifty points ahead of the rest]

I think if we all play at our best it's probably not that big a difference but I think the difference is I never really have any bad tournaments. I might have some mediocre ones but I never really perform under 2800 and that's why I'm way ahead of the others.

Why not?

I don't know. Sometimes I have some bad starts or bad finishes but in the end it all seems to end up with a more or less the same performance every time.

I think I can improve. I think I can learn a lot still. The difficult thing is to actually use that to my advantage in games. I know that a lot of people know a lot about chess, they learn, but they cannot really improve. So, we'll see. But, again, I have a lot to learn, so that's what I'm content with.