Magnus is more than famous in Norway, when he played his World Championships he gathered "all of Norway", figuratively, in front of TVs, phones, radios, live update sites and whatnot. Everyone watched. He makes us proud, one guy from a tiny country like Norway competing against giants, and winning. Now he's the giant. It's beautiful.
The match with Kasparov was indeed important to him. He was 13 years old and almost managed to win against Kasparov who had been the best chess player for twenty years or so. The match ended in remis. The way Magnus remembers games (from what he has explained) is that he sees patterns that makes him understand how the position came to be, and he recognises the styles of various players. That gets him in the ballpark of which games it might be. And then he has that incredible memory that often let him pinpoint exactly which game it was.
What you're explaining there is just standard pattern recognition literally any professional chess player do. Classical chess is nothing but remembering old games and patterns. That's why Magnus has stopped playing and defending the title in classic, and mostly focuses on other forms of chess and streaming online.
His personality has not changed. He is a completely open book and it's very refreshing. The only way to illustrate how exceptional he is, I believe, is to say that if he was not here, then Fabiano Caruana would be in his position. As I've said a few times, Caruana is by far the worlds second best. The distance between Carlsen and Caruana has typically been equal to the distance between Caruana and No 3. Carlsen is completely exceptional and there was a great deal of nurture, but you can't get there without nature. The way chess has exploded because of him, there might not be many generations until the next one of his kind, but if we don't see it again in our lives, I would not be surprised.
There's a good documentary about him from 2016 that's 1 hour + long. Think it's just called "Magnus". If you know where to look you can find it /watch it
There are only four chess players that even remotely could claim the title of GOAT of chess. Some Americans think that Fischer or Morphy are the greatest, mainly for being Americans I guess. However, chess was bonkers when Morphy played in the 1800s and Fischer was also beyond his contemporary peers but only a few players were super strong when Fischer was at his prime. In my opinion it is clear that only Kasparov or Carlsen should be considered to be the GOAT. Magnus himself once said that Kasparov is the best. But Carlsen has had the highest ELO score in the history of chess and he has been crowned World Champion in all time formats and even been reigning champion at the same time in all time formats. And that in the era of computers and databases where all the top guys use them to enhance their own game. And still, all the top guys today recognize Carlsen as being beyond what they can achive themselves. For me it is clear that Carlsen already is the strongest chess player of all time! Fun fact: Magnus picked up chess in Finland (where his dad worked for a while when Magnus was a kid).
It depends how you define “Goat” or “best of all time”, if it’s just based on playing strength and skill then naturally every generation is better than the last, some people see it as potential, like saying Fischer would have been the best by far if he had access to engines, so you can’t really compare players from different generations
Even if he likes chess, I hope he will put his mind to doing something useful. There are a lot of problems in the world that need an intelligent person to take a look at different solutions.
