Paris (AFP)

"You meet him in the evening, you can never guess that he is a chess champion".

Far from the cliché of the cold, impassive, disturbing or cracked chess player, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave traces his route to the top by cultivating a "quiet life" outside of competitions.

"He could have done something else" in his life continues Eric Birmingham, his first trainer when he made his debut at 5 at the Créteil club.

At 30, MVL is the best French player, and for a long time.

Precocious talent (champion of France under 8 to 6 years old, international grandmaster at 14), very gifted in mathematics, he relies on extraordinary abilities.

"He has a brilliant mind, things go at 100 an hour in his brain," notes the international grand master Fabien Libiszewski, one of his relatives.

"He is very strong in arithmetic, he sees very quickly, he is very lively. He is not afraid to play for the initiative. He does not like positions where you have to defend passively", analyzes Kevin Bordi, l he host of Blitzstream, the first French-speaking chess channel, on which MVL regularly works.

"He's an acrobat" on the chessboard, says Birmingham, who remembers a "real sponge" with extraordinary learning abilities.

- Pleasure -

He admits to having "the intelligence of a chess player".

"I was born with", explains in a light drawl the young brown man wearing a jacket adorned with a large white K, logo of the internet platform Kasparovchess, of the legendary Garry Kasparov with whom he has a partnership.

But at such a level, you obviously also need a drastic discipline, preparations for relentless games, memorization of endless variants of openings ... And it is not always easy for those who admit in their book "Player of" chess "(Fayard)," a slight tendency to laziness ".

"I need to go through the notion of pleasure," he told AFP.

"Compared to other athletes, I may be a little less able to" hurt myself "on the job.

The chess world is rich in tutelary figures with troubled minds, burned by chess;

fictional characters like Loujine the mad hero of Vladimir Nabokov in "The Loujine Defense", or of course Beth Harmon from the series "The Lady's Game";

but also players from the past like Bobby Fischer, Paul Morphy, Akiba Rubinstein ...

In this harsh world of fierce competition (at the end of the Candidates tournament the Chinese Wang Hao, ill, announced his retirement, to no longer undergo so much stress), MVL keeps the chessboard at a distance to spare himself.

"I don't want to shut myself up (...) if I only had to see the game of chess, I would get bored of it".

So, when he's not in tournaments around the world or online, he has an almost banal life of a Parisian thirty-something who likes to go to bed late, watch and bet on sport (he is a fan of Olympique Lyonnais) or jogging in the Luxembourg Gardens, not far from the apartment bought thanks to his earnings (around 200,000 euros per year currently).

But under this "quiet life" the fire of the game is smoldering.

"I play a lot, cards, poker, tarot, video games, board games. Everything is an opportunity to play, to bet".

"He likes to play, anything," replies Mr. Birmingham.

- Nice guys -

"There are ferocious players and nice guys. I am a ferocious player," said the American Bobby Fischer, chess legend who had notably managed to steal the world crown from the Soviet Boris Spassky in the middle of the Cold War in Reykjavik in 1972.

MVL, "is a very nice person," says Kevin Bordi.

"Maxime is a real good guy. Fischer, Karpov, Kasparov, they are killers. Not Maxime," according to Birmingham.

"I can sort things out between what happens in real life (...) and the clashes on the chessboard. Some players in the past have not balanced things so as not to have access of weakness, it is up to each to judge in his soul and conscience ".

But "clearly, I'm not going to hate everyone now."

© 2021 AFP