I really enjoy the experience of playing humans. The psychological game is so much more important.

I'm more interested in the games than the people.

Without the element of enjoyment, it is not worth trying to excel at anything.

I think with chess as with everything, marketing is the main issue.

Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head.

My former coach, Simen Agdestein, used to be the best player in Norway.

You can feel the same thing in football or soccer - that for the best teams in Spain and England, for instance, the public... they're not really going to cheer at all when they play against bad teams unless they do something spectacular. Even if they're winning by a few goals they'll probably just say, "nah." That's normal and they're not excited about it.