"You'll be amazed at the people I've lost to while playing online," Carlsen joked, after admitting that, "once in a while I've used some of my friends accounts and won a couple of games… or a lot."
Magnus Carlsen's AMA (Ask Me Anything) slot on Reddit shot to the top story of the website, after it was voted up by more than 4,500 chess fans.
Carlsen threw something of an olive branch to Viswanathan Anand, the Indian player he ousted as World Champion last November, citing the Indian's 1994 game with Russia's Gata Kamsky as his favourite chess game of all time.
He downplayed the importance of his victory in November.
"Even before the World Championship I was the best player in the world, so in that sense it's the same and I am the one to beat. I have the confidence that I can always do well."
He said it was impossible to know when a new young talent would rise up who could beat him.
"I think it is very early to say who will be a future threat, it's really hard to see those traits before players are fully developed," he said.
He said that to be the best in the world, you needed to start playing chess at a very young age, and develop a great passion for it.
However, he said a late starter could nonetheless become a grandmaster.
He said that as a child one single chess book, Kramnik: My Life and Games, had "made a big impression", helping him become immersed in chess theory before the age of nine.
The Norwegian said that he still felt he had a lot to learn in chess, and did not feel he had plateaued.
"I don't think I've conquered chess yet. I still have very much to learn and there is much room for improvement, so I think I'll stick to that for a while," he wrote, although he conceded there wasn't really anyone who could teach him.
"Most of all, it is up to myself to improve because even the best coaches don't fully understand what's going on in my mind – haha," he wrote.
He admitted that he finds it difficult to bear the computer recreation of him aged 23 which has been developed as part of the Magnus chess app.
"I always struggle playing against Magnus 23. When playing younger "Magnuses", I'm occasionally successful," he wrote.
In other answers, he credited raisins as the source of his superhuman strength, admitted that apart from chess, "I basically suck at everything else", and named Donald Duck comics as his favourite books outside of chess.
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