That’s because one of the top 10 in the world can’t really play in most of the tournaments offered-it would be embarrassing. “If you’re a baseball player, six figures is like a tip.”Īnother irony of the chess world: The higher up you are ranked, the fewer tournaments you can play in, and the less money you can earn through competition. (Carlsen declined an interview for this story.) For other top players in the world, “It’s more like a six-figure income,” Ashley says. Carlsen makes about $4 million in a year, Ashley estimates, and that’s including endorsement deals that no other player has. “If you’re the world champion, Magnus Carlsen, you probably should be making $10 to $15 million each year, but he doesn’t,” says Ashley, the world’s first black grandmaster, who is personally trying to grow the sport’s popularity with his own tournament, the Millionaire Chess Open. (Yes, it’s a sport-players have to be in top physical shape to compete for six hours straight international grandmaster Maurice Ashley compares playing in a top chess tournament to taking two college finals, back to back, every day for nine days.) And even Carlsen, who has become a heartthrob and markets his own chess mobile app, Play Magnus, doesn’t pull in anywhere close to what the No. 1 player in the world.īut beneath Carlsen are legions of players who have built their lives around chess, are extremely skilled, and still struggle to make much of a living competing in the sport. If they can name a current chess star-and that’s a big “if”-it is likely only one young man: Magnus Carlsen, who is 25 years old, models for fashion companies with a trademark scowl, and is the No. They might remember, or have heard about, when Bobby Fischer played Boris Spassky in Iceland in 1972 (the “Cold War of Chess”), or when Garry Kasparov played the IBM ( IBM) computer Deep Blue in 1997.
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Even though an estimated 600 million people in the world know how to play chess, the vast majority of people these days probably couldn’t name a current pro chess star.