Ivan Ljubicic reveals Roger Federer has an interest in the game of chess and likes to play bullet chess. Ljubicic, a former world No 3, joined Federer’s team as a coach in 2016. The Croatian was then a part of Federer’s team all up until the Swiss’ retirement.
“He likes to play kind of bullets to kill time and distract himself. I know more (than Roger) or less but I prefer not to talk about it. He would not enjoy me talking about it. He got hooked by seeing how fanatic I was about it.
He had the basics and I honestly don’t know if he still does it because we haven’t spent a lot of time together in 14 months since he had surgery but yeah he also knows the general ideas of what’s happening in the chess world,” Ljubicic said while playing a chess match against FIDE CEO Emil Sutovsky, per Sportskeeda.
Ljubicic loved working with Federer
After Federer announced his retirement, Ljubicic opened up on how it felt working with the former 20-time Grand Slam champion. According to Ljubicic, Federer was really easy to work with and demanded from his team members to always be straight honest.
“Easy! Easy because he makes it easy for coaches. He is really open and makes sure you have freedom. You are comfortable and you feel you can say whatever you think is right and the way it is. He always said, ‘I don’t want to hear from you what you think I want to hear – I want to hear what you really think; I want to hear the truth,” he continued.”
He repeated that multiple times, really making sure that we as coaches – or at least me as a coach – really felt free and comfortable. It was always that,” Ljubicic told Eurosport. Federer, 41, ended his professional career at the Laver Cup in late September.
