Be my own manager, at least for one year

Here is the continuation of the Kramnik interview with ChessBase founder Frederic Friedel.

…First of all I already have some serious preparation left from my match with Anand, so I can take, well not totally a year off, but sort of, and so I decided that it would be interesting for me, and even refreshing, to be my own manager, at least for one year.

Ahh, I was just about to ask: who is your new manager? The answer is Vladimir Kramnik!

Right, it is not that I am changing my manager, I am just quitting my manager and taking over myself. That is a different story. Of course I guess that for some time people might send some things through Carsten, and of course we agreed that he would definitely pass this information on to me, but basically in the future people should contact me directly.

One thing puzzles me. Carsten earned you a LOT of money – I mean the computer match, the world championships and so on were extremely well funded. And I believe he was the person who found all the sponsors, or was closely involved in finding them.

Yes, that is true, he basically found most of them…

So you are giving up a sure source of income and might lose quite a bit of money by managing yourself?

Ahhh, well, okay. You know, Frederic, nowadays the last thing I think about is money. If I would be thinking about money maybe I would not be playing chess but occupying some nice comfortable place in Gazprom somewhere [laughs]. Believe me, that would be much more profitable. No, it is really not about money at all. Yes, I understand that I might earn less now than before, but I am not really concerned about that. I am more concerned about achieving something, and my next important goals are things like becoming number one in the world, or to become again World Champion, or best of all both together.

Here is the full interview.