Anish Giri spoke about his relationship with Magnus Carlsen in an interview with The Indian Express. Giri says that Carlsen has always been his main target. Anish notes that it is hard to maintain friendship and compete at the same time.

Anish Giri

Anish Giri

Netherlands' No. 1

“I think he’s very competitive, and we have a bit of a personality clash. In the sense that I’m not a very aggressive person as such, but I don’t want to give any ground, and he likes to take ground.

If you let him take the ground, he will welcome you to his circle of friends, but I always wanted to stand my ground. In some sense there was this clash.

But essentially, if you have two people that compete with each other regularly, even if they would be great friends, there would always be some massive tension underneath.

It is very hard, especially in a game like chess. You’re trying to outsmart each other, outwit each other, look for each other’s weaknesses. It’s very hard to maintain genuine friendship and compete.

I feel, honestly, I have tremendous respect for him, for his chess. He’s undoubtedly either the greatest player of all time or one of the couple of great players of all time.

My top chess career started with beating him in Wijk aan Zee, and since that moment, whenever I played professional chess, he was always World No. 1. So, I’ve always seen him as sort of a main enemy in a sense, the main target. I tried to learn from him and learn how to deal with him.

A lot of time I spent, of course, preparing against him, because he was basically my most dangerous opponent throughout my entire chess career.”

The complete head-to-head record of Giri and Carlsen is 2-6 with 22 draws, according to Chessgames.com. Anish gave the interview during the Tech Mahindra Global Chess League 2026. At the event, Anish and Magnus are playing on the same team for the first time.

Credit: Lennart Ootes