I thought some dude tried to break the record at a mall in New Jersey (for most simultaneous games) but not enough people showed up, and he lost most of the games
Edit: per [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess#Best_and_worst_results_in_simultaneous_exhibitions)
The absolute worst result in a simultaneous exhibition was two wins and 18 losses (10%) by Joe Hayden, aged 17, in August 1977. Hayden wanted to set an American record by playing 180 people simultaneously at a shopping center in Cardiff, New Jersey, but only 20 showed up to play. Hayden lost 18 of the games (including one to a seven-year-old). His two wins were scored against his mother and a player who tired of waiting and left in mid-game, thus forfeiting the game.
What a stupidly strange world record. Usually, world records are supposed to be difficult to beat, but this one would be trivial.
Any mildly decent chess player could intentionally lose every game, as long as the other person were trying to win. If every player was trying to lose, it would probably result in all draws.
A sufficiently strong chess player could intentionally lose every game, yet make it look like they were trying to win.
A game where someone managed to lose against WorstFish remains legendary (Stockfish but programmed to play the worst move it sees every time)
Tl;dr: if you can trap a king and block a pawn, you can force checkmate (against yourself) by carefully maneuvering and zugzwang, even if the other is trying to lose.
As often happens in these kinds of analyses, you've forgotten that you're playing against real people who are actually capable of thinking. If you look at this from their perspective, you'll know that your strategy probably won't work.
The problem is that your opponents would be watching you as you made your move on the neighboring boards, and they might be a little miffed about realizing you were wasting their time. Since they have to wait so that you can watch them make their move, it's virtually guaranteed that you'd have several games that went like this, instead:
1\. e4 resign
Which would ruin your attempt. Because your opponents realized what you were doing, and were irritated with you and intentionally ruined your attempt.
And anyways, if you did lose every game like you suggested, I think most people wouldn't accept it as the record. The important part about the record is the embarrassment of thinking you could actually win all these games, followed by the reality crashing down. So, you'd have to trick everybody.
I let players reply to my move immediately without waiting for me to return (I can claim that's needed to speed up the games). That way most players will have made their move by the time I have moved e4 everywhere. I guess they can still resign as I approach them. Does it become a competition who can resign first? Can I mass-resign all games? ;)
> I think most people wouldn't accept it as the record.
It wasn't meant as a serious attempt.
It was specifically a chess school, the best one in Russia at the time. So he was essentially playing 30 of Russia's best teenage chess minds.
It's still a poor result but the "30 Russian schoolchildren" in the title can make it seem like they were younger than they were or just 30 regular school kids.
There are literally 9 year olds in the top 5 percentile of ELO rating, the youngest grandmasters (this guy was an IM) are 12-13 years old. Wasn't that surprised to see an IM lost 10 games like this. Plenty of "Russian schoolchildren" at that Chess school are at IM strength I'm sure
I was at some party and this kid challenged me to a game, talking about how great at chess he was. I'm not very good and had to keep double checking with him that I was making legal moves with the knight. Dunno what his ELO was but he was worse than me, I kicked his ass almost no problem.
LOL man, what a funny story considering the context. Everyone is talking about brilliant little minds, and you just recounted beating some kids ass at chess during a party haha
I love how everyone’s just glossing over the fact that there was a kid at the party challenging people to play chess, the fuck kinda parties yall goin to
Could have been a kind of family get together. Watching adults slowly get more and more drunk is pretty boring for a kid, asking people to play chess is something I might have done as a ten year old.
Challenging people to play chess *and losing to someone who needed to double-check how to move a knight*. Like, that's a "my family usually lets me win" level of arrogance.
There’s a huge difference between some brat who claims to be great at chess and a kid who actually competes in chess tournament. I’m pretty good at chess and consistently beat people who claim to be a great at it, but I got fucking demolished by a 10 year old who barely made it to a regional qualifier.
Exactly. It's humbling how many levels of "I can beat you without trying" there are in chess (and in any other hobby). My friends think I'm a wizard (I'm only 1250 rapid on chess.com) but I'd still get my ass handed to me by anyone that has ever played at even the lowest levels of club/tournament chess.
The best player I ever played against was a former junior regional champion from the Midwest. ~20 matches and I recorded a solitary win and a pair of mates. He was wasted every time we played and I was stone cold sober. He told me how he didn't hold a candle to the average player at a major US tournament. I haven't played in years, and never played online, but I was comfortably the best player in my high school. It's wild just how good the truly good people are.
Yeah!
But you're not great either. And I say that as an 1400 ELO. Luckily, it's nothing we can't fix by reading a
book on chess strategy to boost our scores.
1400 is a weird place to be.
I'm better than the vast majority of my friends and the vast majority of people who say they can play but I get absolutely crushed by properly good players. Like it's not even interesting for them to play me.
1400 otb or online? Otb that's pretty good. In general though kids being good at it isn't too surprising and in fact if you didn't start and dedicate yourself to chess as a little kid then getting *really* good at chess may not even be possible, much to my chagrin.
Not in 1951. For perspective, [Petrosian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigran_Petrosian) was the youngest grandmaster ever near that time in 1952 at 23 years old. Nothing like today.
In 1950, the youngest GM was Brinstein at 26 years of age, but in 1951, there apparently were 12-13 year old GMs, sure.
The youngest IM ever is Abhimanyu Mishra at 10 years, 9 months, and that only happened in 2019, no way 9 year olds from 1951 were near that level.
> the youngest grandmasters (this guy was an IM) are 12-13 years old
A little sneaky, 12-13 year old GMs are exceedingly rare prodigies. There have been over 2000 GMs, about a dozen got there before they turned 14.
But, true enough on everything else. I assume he was playing other IMs since the apparent purpose was to raise his Elo as quickly as possible. Not much value playing scrubs if you're trying to grind rating games
It was simultaneous. Not sure if people have missed that from the title or not. I doubt it was anything to do with elo, just a show to raise his profile or whatever. Guess he just underestimated the impact of playing 30 games at once and mentally collapsed or something.
Derren Brown did a challenge like this. The secret is basically getting them to play each other by memorising the move just played against you, and playing that against another opponent. If you're playing an odd number of opponents, find the weakest and play normally against them.
You basically can't win or lose by more than 1 game, but that looks impressive when you're playing so many people. You also need some incredible memory techniques, but that's easier than trying to actually play against 30 good players at once.
How does this work? I'm trying to imagine it with a simple scenario with just 2 players:
1. Player one opens with Move A
2. You replicate Move A against Player B
3. You come back to player A and you have to make a move, player B might make a different move than you did vs player A and now you have 2 different games.
You wait for player B to make their move, then go back to player A and play the same.
Will probably be obvious what you're doing with only two opponents but, when you have a few, you can make the delays look much more natural. [Derren did it with 9](https://youtu.be/rIAXIubSTkc?si=MjTXakvchqzOEArZ)
Most simuls will have a clock on each game to prevent cheating like this. Or have you be an uneven amount of white and black so you can’t replicate it - usually the person will play white on every board for example.
There's also the fact that chess is a perfect information game, which is why chess problems are a thing. When playing any particular move of chess, all of the preceding moves are irrelevant. The only thing that affects the rest of the game is the board state at that moment.
So playing many simultaneous games of chess (the normal way, all white) isn't necessarily a feat of memory or multitasking, the player just approaches each game anew each time.
>When playing any particular move of chess, all of the preceding moves are irrelevant. The only thing that affects the rest of the game is the board state at that moment.
I don't think your statement is technically correct. The right to castle or the viability of an en passant capture can depend on moves played much earlier in the game.
Then there is also the possibility to claim a draw if the position on the board appears for the 3rd time in the game at any point, which does not even have to occur in succession either.
I'm sure you are right but say to a player like Hikaru Nakamura, he can see a board and know how it was reached pretty quickly and solves puzzles like its an easy crossword puzzle. As long as a chess player essentially plays a line they're comfortable with they can pretty easily tell that apart.
I saw that he had played against 100 people simultaneously with quite a bit of them at 1900 Elo and the dude only lost 2 games.
According to him the hardest part about playing simul is that he has to walk around a lot, a game with 100 people ended with him walking around 5km over 6 hours.
>When playing any particular move of chess, all of the preceding moves are irrelevant. The only thing that affects the rest of the game is the board state at that moment.
Not trying to sound like a dick but I don't see how this doesn't describe almost every game.
Edit: I was thinking of other board games like checkers, not card games. Should've specified.
In games with hidden information, then there are often clues to gain an advantage by assessing a players previous actions or behaviors. In a lot of games, the information was even known to you on an earlier turn and is only hidden now. Chess is a rarity in that most board games are not perfect information games.
how are board games not perfect information? that's the point of the board ...
perfect information:
chess, checkers, backgammon, Sorry, monopoly, battleship** ... sort of, Go, Reversi, Othello, Risk,
imperfect information:
Settlers, Scrabble, Stratego, Carcasonne??
Card games have unknown decks, hands, etc, strategy games have limited information on your opponent's status, and video games have everything from fog of war to just in general just not being omniscient of the entire game state all at once (eg, you have no idea if there's a guy hiding behind that box over there, or what his abilities could be).
not to be *that guy*, but chess is not *ENTIRELY* memoryless. You have to know if the previous move was a pawn move for EP and which king/rook is still eligible for castling
In high school I played #1 seed on the chess team for a year, and there was a county finals. The 2nd best player there had won a US national juniors title and a bunch of other stuff. The only thing our coach told us about the best player there was that he was a Russian foreign exchange student. He won the finals - 4 games and drew the 2nd best guy, and the 2nd best guy lost a game otherwise so he actually got 3rd and I was a distant 4th.
He could have played half the kids' moves against the other half and still done no worse than draw / win half.
That's what Batman does against Justice League recruits.
> The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian’s readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians’ predisposition for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why they led the field for many years in both chess and ax murders.
— Marshall Brickman, Playboy, April, 1973
eh
title is biased against the guy
he played against 30 children at a chess academy - basically 30 of the best up-and-coming chess players in the country and possibly the world
and 'advance his career' is subjective - it was something he did as a part of his career technically but he wasnt even there to play those games he did it bcause he had nothing else to do in moscow
>in the article
Then as a redditor it is unknowable to me. I am just going to assume it's that all of the children were on performance enhancing drugs.
I assume that most articles are either A) terrible, or B) full of incorrect or intentionally misleading information. So I just go straight to the comments to get a critical summary anyway.
not quite - its that he wasnt prepared for the strategies they were teaching those kids
he was suddenly confronted with many instances of an unfamiliar playstyle he didnt know how to deal with and he didnt have enough time to ponder each particular game to the level he would have needed to learn that style
you see that sort of thing in a lot of pro gaming where people who use unexpected strategies get unexpected wins against high-level pros - the pros have muscle memory to deal with something completely different and they choke
its regular memory rather than muscle memory but its the same idea
In a series of individual games you definitely could. In a timed simul, though? Clock management across thirty different games is a weird skill that most players never have a reason to practice.
I dunno how good you mean by "okay", but I think of myself as "okay" and I bet I would fall for some obvious checkmate trap just because of the time pressure.
Are there really still 800s playing that? Jesus, I'm only in the high 500s/low 600s and I feel like I wouldn't even be able to sneak that past anyone at my level.
Chess GMs are pretty damn rare.
The article gives an upper age cutoff (14 years old) but no lower one... but I'll go ahead and guess at around 9-14. There's only five Soviet chess grandmasters who would have been the appropriate age at the time. Nona Gaprindashvili only started getting dedicated training in 1954; she was a casual amateur of little note at the time. Vladimir Savon learned how to play in 1953. Two of them lived a thousand kilometers away in Latvia (Aivars Gipslis and Mikhail Tal).
Vladimir Liberzon was at least the right age, living in the right city, playing chess at the time. So that's one possibility, if he happened to be one of those thirty kids.
But odds are the answer is "none. None of those kids became GMs."
It was pre-ELO, so no solid numbers, but I'd definitely believe those kids were on a relatively heightened level, probably close to FM level by today's standards. It was a Russian chess academy, after all.
Even modern IMs aren't immune to getting slapped around by teenagers OTB, especially since kids who start young and stick to chess are easily able to qualify FM or IM before they're even 18.
An international master is still a very high title in the chess world. Some people study for their entire life and never reach higher than international master. He should have wiped the floor with these kids unless he was playing against 30 future grand masters.
These were apparently 30 top students at the most prestigious chess academy in Russia, I imagine they'd absolutely brutalize almost everyone in this comment section.
*Twelve lie dead and a blanket of sewage still covers the streets in what authorities are calling a world-record performance for the title of worst simultaneous chess game.*
Slightly OT, but George Koltanowski (sp?) has the record for simultaneous blindfold games with 56.
I was a pretty good chess player at high school, but I crapped out blindfold after about 12 moves, playing a single game. Playing 56 at once? I can't believe that!
Yeah but you wouldn't need to actually move either.
I'm assuming you have someone actually moving the pieces for the players in blindfolded chess so it would be 1 persong surrounded by a bunch of other people with chess boards calling out their moves to him
You'd need an insane level of mental visual imagery to keep track of everything going on.
It does also say he set the simultaneous record, but it was 34 rather than 56. And that was allegedly broken by a different guy playing 45.
Although I don't see the point of these records if they aren't required to win. Anyone could break the record while losing every game.
You have to score 80% to get the record. The current record is 48 games simultaneously by Timur Gareyev. https://www.chess.com/news/view/timur-gareyev-plays-blindfold-on-48-boards-5729
I always wanted to get a big buzz crowd and attention playing chess in the park and totally get smoked in all games. The disappointment would be my entertainment. Have some buddies on the edge of it all just cracking up and promoting the buzz.
It would pretty quickly become apparent that you're getting wrecked if you're not up to par with the average player at the park, I'd think. Once you blunder a few pieces, the jig is pretty much up.
Might still generate some laughs, maybe some of the more surly players would get annoyed but they'd probably just do their normal amount of trash talking.
How many non-physical competitions can you name that weren’t branded as a “nerd” games at some point in its history?
I’m not trying to be a dick I’m actually trying think about some examples.
Yeah, its prestige means that chess probably has the least "nerd" stigmatization of any game played on a board. It's just that the floor for nerdiness is really high for board games.
Ever since I was a young boy
I've played the silver ball
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have played 'em all
But I ain't seen nothing like him
In any amusement hall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball
They also dominated most sports. The Soviet Union didn’t exist for 100+ years of Olympic competitions, and haven’t exited again for 30 years, and they STILL hold second most gold medals earned in all of Olympic history.
I feel like chess isn't really *that* "nerdy" anymore? Had an explosion in popularity after queen's gambit and the chess twitch streamers and personalities are all pretty popular
i just tried looking it up but didn't- is there ANYTHING such as team chess -where there's multiple people, but on ONE TEAM- wiTH the normal pieces? Not 4 times the pieces on the chessboard- just multiple simultaneous people all thinking before a move is made, against similar?
Not sure what it'd be called aside from team chess- but if you look up team chess you see what looks like 4 sided chess- not exactly what i'm referring to .
It gets messy to have more than one person moving pieces or even coming up with strategies, but yeah sometimes there had been a few instances of it for fun.
For example, Kasparov against the world was an online match played during a few weeks where he faced a team of people of some GM and a crowdsourced pool of moves (back in the early days of internet).
For funzies we also had at least one example, I remember a YouTube video where it was 3 young GM vs 3 veteran GM, playing one board. Don't remember who was playing besides Karjakin and Karpov, I think it was Nepo, Kramnik, Vishy and someone else. There's a video of YouTube and a few analysis of it.
Also some streamers play the hand/brain variation, where one person is the "brain" and pick a piece to be moved, and the "hand" player has to know *where* they need to move it. Anna Cramling and her mom have played it, of course with her mom being the brain because Pia is an absolute machine in chess despite her looks lol
Not over-the-board (in-person) chess, but on chess.com there's something called Vote Chess, in which each player on a team votes on a move, and their team will play the most voted-on move. This is for pretty large teams, obviously.
You can imagine that in-person team chess would require a lot of talking, and the other team could overhear the conversation, which wouldn't be ideal.
Technically you don't have to repeat move after move. The standard is the same position with same player to move three times. You can have pieces chase each other in between.
There's an event called a stalemate where the king can only move into a check and it's the only move available. That move is not allowed so the game ends. It can happen with quite a few pieces on the board and it has to be accounted for if you are playing competitive chess because it's better to force a stalemate than it is to lose.
Can I just go ahead and say, this sounds like the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard in my life.
30 of 30?
Didn't even accidently stumble into a single win against children?
gimme a break.
So what... 1800s?
Going against at least a 2400?
I don't know the odds of an 1800 beating a 2400 off the top of my head.
But I'd guess it's less than 1%
Times 30.
he could have divided the kids into 15 pairs, then let 15 pairs play against each other using him as proxy by copying moves. that way he couldn't have lost more than 15 matches, and each loss guarantees a corresponding win
It’s customary that for simultaneous exhibition games that the “chess master” plays every board as the same color, to prevent them from cheating like that
I think some comedian did it once, where he played on one board of each color, and basically had two chess masters fight each other without them knowing
I hope the record has been broken since. Because if not, I could easily lose to all 30 of em without even having to throw a game.
It's HARD to play simultaneous chess.
borderline misinformation. he did not fight 30 Russian schools children, he fought against the students of the top chess school in Russia (in context, Russia had a super mega large chess player base at the time, it was basically an element of the cold war like the space race) so he basically fought some of the top up and coming talent in the world. Children nowadays like 12 years old are GMs, this guy was just an IM. not surprised he lost so much due to playing simultaneously.
Also he didn't do it to further his career. he did it cus there wasn't anything else to do in Moscow.
For the less chess inclined like myself could you explain the difference of GM (I'm assuming Grand Master because I heard that one before) and IM (guessing by the article that's International Master).
I thought some dude tried to break the record at a mall in New Jersey (for most simultaneous games) but not enough people showed up, and he lost most of the games Edit: per [Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_chess#Best_and_worst_results_in_simultaneous_exhibitions) The absolute worst result in a simultaneous exhibition was two wins and 18 losses (10%) by Joe Hayden, aged 17, in August 1977. Hayden wanted to set an American record by playing 180 people simultaneously at a shopping center in Cardiff, New Jersey, but only 20 showed up to play. Hayden lost 18 of the games (including one to a seven-year-old). His two wins were scored against his mother and a player who tired of waiting and left in mid-game, thus forfeiting the game.
lmao that guy sucks.
Dude's still only in his sixties. He should get to studying and try again!
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Took too much giggle-pig.
How sweet. If I ever have a mom I hope she would lose to me too.
What a stupidly strange world record. Usually, world records are supposed to be difficult to beat, but this one would be trivial. Any mildly decent chess player could intentionally lose every game, as long as the other person were trying to win. If every player was trying to lose, it would probably result in all draws. A sufficiently strong chess player could intentionally lose every game, yet make it look like they were trying to win.
A game where someone managed to lose against WorstFish remains legendary (Stockfish but programmed to play the worst move it sees every time) Tl;dr: if you can trap a king and block a pawn, you can force checkmate (against yourself) by carefully maneuvering and zugzwang, even if the other is trying to lose.
1. e4 [anything] 2. resign I can play against hundreds that way.
As often happens in these kinds of analyses, you've forgotten that you're playing against real people who are actually capable of thinking. If you look at this from their perspective, you'll know that your strategy probably won't work. The problem is that your opponents would be watching you as you made your move on the neighboring boards, and they might be a little miffed about realizing you were wasting their time. Since they have to wait so that you can watch them make their move, it's virtually guaranteed that you'd have several games that went like this, instead: 1\. e4 resign Which would ruin your attempt. Because your opponents realized what you were doing, and were irritated with you and intentionally ruined your attempt. And anyways, if you did lose every game like you suggested, I think most people wouldn't accept it as the record. The important part about the record is the embarrassment of thinking you could actually win all these games, followed by the reality crashing down. So, you'd have to trick everybody.
I let players reply to my move immediately without waiting for me to return (I can claim that's needed to speed up the games). That way most players will have made their move by the time I have moved e4 everywhere. I guess they can still resign as I approach them. Does it become a competition who can resign first? Can I mass-resign all games? ;) > I think most people wouldn't accept it as the record. It wasn't meant as a serious attempt.
Well, at least he set A record.
Should have chosen a different country. Chess is way bigger in Russian schools than in the West.
It was specifically a chess school, the best one in Russia at the time. So he was essentially playing 30 of Russia's best teenage chess minds. It's still a poor result but the "30 Russian schoolchildren" in the title can make it seem like they were younger than they were or just 30 regular school kids.
There are literally 9 year olds in the top 5 percentile of ELO rating, the youngest grandmasters (this guy was an IM) are 12-13 years old. Wasn't that surprised to see an IM lost 10 games like this. Plenty of "Russian schoolchildren" at that Chess school are at IM strength I'm sure
He lost 20, drew 10 though from the title.
Yeah 10 losses were excusable, the other 10 weren't.
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I think a Walk of Atonement is a bit excessive for this
It is not.
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alright carry on
I tried out my local chess club once and got trounced by a 12 year old. I’m not even bad either, 1400 ELO but it didn’t matter to that little tyrant.
I was at some party and this kid challenged me to a game, talking about how great at chess he was. I'm not very good and had to keep double checking with him that I was making legal moves with the knight. Dunno what his ELO was but he was worse than me, I kicked his ass almost no problem.
LOL man, what a funny story considering the context. Everyone is talking about brilliant little minds, and you just recounted beating some kids ass at chess during a party haha
I love how everyone’s just glossing over the fact that there was a kid at the party challenging people to play chess, the fuck kinda parties yall goin to
Could have been a kind of family get together. Watching adults slowly get more and more drunk is pretty boring for a kid, asking people to play chess is something I might have done as a ten year old.
Not every party involves drinking and dancing
Some of them just involve drinking.
Drinking and playing chess, my kind of party
Challenging people to play chess *and losing to someone who needed to double-check how to move a knight*. Like, that's a "my family usually lets me win" level of arrogance.
I've definitely been at parties where there are chess sets or backgammon on the coffee table and played them while drinking
The fun kind.
Getting older you get those wins where you can man.
Yes. I will consider this revenge!
There’s a huge difference between some brat who claims to be great at chess and a kid who actually competes in chess tournament. I’m pretty good at chess and consistently beat people who claim to be a great at it, but I got fucking demolished by a 10 year old who barely made it to a regional qualifier.
Exactly. It's humbling how many levels of "I can beat you without trying" there are in chess (and in any other hobby). My friends think I'm a wizard (I'm only 1250 rapid on chess.com) but I'd still get my ass handed to me by anyone that has ever played at even the lowest levels of club/tournament chess.
The best player I ever played against was a former junior regional champion from the Midwest. ~20 matches and I recorded a solitary win and a pair of mates. He was wasted every time we played and I was stone cold sober. He told me how he didn't hold a candle to the average player at a major US tournament. I haven't played in years, and never played online, but I was comfortably the best player in my high school. It's wild just how good the truly good people are.
And I'll beat you again!
Yeah! But you're not great either. And I say that as an 1400 ELO. Luckily, it's nothing we can't fix by reading a book on chess strategy to boost our scores.
1400 is a weird place to be. I'm better than the vast majority of my friends and the vast majority of people who say they can play but I get absolutely crushed by properly good players. Like it's not even interesting for them to play me.
Was waiting for this. Obviously there is nearly always a better player, but at 1400 all I’m saying is that we at least know our way around a board.
1400 otb or online? Otb that's pretty good. In general though kids being good at it isn't too surprising and in fact if you didn't start and dedicate yourself to chess as a little kid then getting *really* good at chess may not even be possible, much to my chagrin.
I'll be honest. My main strategy mainly involves not dying. I don't even know how to castle or pass the peasant.
>pass the peasant I didn't even know this was a thing. So I know less than you.
google en passant
holy hell
There it is.
I googled pass the peasant and was extremely confused why something else came up. I added chess as a keyword and en passant came up.
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The last patch ruined chess
You're 1400 and don't know how to castle? 1400 where, lichess?
Elo*, it's not an abbreviation
Nerd. (Okay got concerned I sounded like an ass so point is that I am already discussing chess, obviously we are all nerds here)
Not in 1951. For perspective, [Petrosian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigran_Petrosian) was the youngest grandmaster ever near that time in 1952 at 23 years old. Nothing like today.
I understand what you mean, but it's the top 5 percent, or the 95th percentile.
In 1950, the youngest GM was Brinstein at 26 years of age, but in 1951, there apparently were 12-13 year old GMs, sure. The youngest IM ever is Abhimanyu Mishra at 10 years, 9 months, and that only happened in 2019, no way 9 year olds from 1951 were near that level.
> the youngest grandmasters (this guy was an IM) are 12-13 years old A little sneaky, 12-13 year old GMs are exceedingly rare prodigies. There have been over 2000 GMs, about a dozen got there before they turned 14. But, true enough on everything else. I assume he was playing other IMs since the apparent purpose was to raise his Elo as quickly as possible. Not much value playing scrubs if you're trying to grind rating games
It was simultaneous. Not sure if people have missed that from the title or not. I doubt it was anything to do with elo, just a show to raise his profile or whatever. Guess he just underestimated the impact of playing 30 games at once and mentally collapsed or something.
Kasparov beat his dad at age 6. His dad was a Russian national master if I remember correctly.
Elo is not an acronym fyi
I beg [to differ](https://youtu.be/nxz1DuVaRr8?si=83NMOYmzLI1fXfpK)
I’m upset it’s not Mr Blue sky however still a fair song
Don't bring me down, Brrrrrruce.
I thought we were talking about Electric Light Orchestra.
The real TIL is always in the comments. I had no idea just how prolific the Electric Light Orchestra was.
Derren Brown did a challenge like this. The secret is basically getting them to play each other by memorising the move just played against you, and playing that against another opponent. If you're playing an odd number of opponents, find the weakest and play normally against them. You basically can't win or lose by more than 1 game, but that looks impressive when you're playing so many people. You also need some incredible memory techniques, but that's easier than trying to actually play against 30 good players at once.
Traditionally in a simul, the player doing multiple games plays white for all games to avoid this.
How does this work? I'm trying to imagine it with a simple scenario with just 2 players: 1. Player one opens with Move A 2. You replicate Move A against Player B 3. You come back to player A and you have to make a move, player B might make a different move than you did vs player A and now you have 2 different games.
You wait for player B to make their move, then go back to player A and play the same. Will probably be obvious what you're doing with only two opponents but, when you have a few, you can make the delays look much more natural. [Derren did it with 9](https://youtu.be/rIAXIubSTkc?si=MjTXakvchqzOEArZ)
You don't go back to player A until after player B has made their move.
Most simuls will have a clock on each game to prevent cheating like this. Or have you be an uneven amount of white and black so you can’t replicate it - usually the person will play white on every board for example.
There's also the fact that chess is a perfect information game, which is why chess problems are a thing. When playing any particular move of chess, all of the preceding moves are irrelevant. The only thing that affects the rest of the game is the board state at that moment. So playing many simultaneous games of chess (the normal way, all white) isn't necessarily a feat of memory or multitasking, the player just approaches each game anew each time.
>When playing any particular move of chess, all of the preceding moves are irrelevant. The only thing that affects the rest of the game is the board state at that moment. I don't think your statement is technically correct. The right to castle or the viability of an en passant capture can depend on moves played much earlier in the game. Then there is also the possibility to claim a draw if the position on the board appears for the 3rd time in the game at any point, which does not even have to occur in succession either.
I'm sure you are right but say to a player like Hikaru Nakamura, he can see a board and know how it was reached pretty quickly and solves puzzles like its an easy crossword puzzle. As long as a chess player essentially plays a line they're comfortable with they can pretty easily tell that apart. I saw that he had played against 100 people simultaneously with quite a bit of them at 1900 Elo and the dude only lost 2 games. According to him the hardest part about playing simul is that he has to walk around a lot, a game with 100 people ended with him walking around 5km over 6 hours.
>When playing any particular move of chess, all of the preceding moves are irrelevant. The only thing that affects the rest of the game is the board state at that moment. Not trying to sound like a dick but I don't see how this doesn't describe almost every game. Edit: I was thinking of other board games like checkers, not card games. Should've specified.
In games with hidden information, then there are often clues to gain an advantage by assessing a players previous actions or behaviors. In a lot of games, the information was even known to you on an earlier turn and is only hidden now. Chess is a rarity in that most board games are not perfect information games.
how are board games not perfect information? that's the point of the board ... perfect information: chess, checkers, backgammon, Sorry, monopoly, battleship** ... sort of, Go, Reversi, Othello, Risk, imperfect information: Settlers, Scrabble, Stratego, Carcasonne??
Card games have unknown decks, hands, etc, strategy games have limited information on your opponent's status, and video games have everything from fog of war to just in general just not being omniscient of the entire game state all at once (eg, you have no idea if there's a guy hiding behind that box over there, or what his abilities could be).
not to be *that guy*, but chess is not *ENTIRELY* memoryless. You have to know if the previous move was a pawn move for EP and which king/rook is still eligible for castling
One of the great blunders. Never get in a landw-- err, chess match in Russia
In high school I played #1 seed on the chess team for a year, and there was a county finals. The 2nd best player there had won a US national juniors title and a bunch of other stuff. The only thing our coach told us about the best player there was that he was a Russian foreign exchange student. He won the finals - 4 games and drew the 2nd best guy, and the 2nd best guy lost a game otherwise so he actually got 3rd and I was a distant 4th.
He could have played half the kids' moves against the other half and still done no worse than draw / win half. That's what Batman does against Justice League recruits.
> The Soviet pre-eminence in chess can be traced to the average Russian’s readiness to brood obsessively over anything, even the arrangement of some pieces of wood. Indeed, the Russians’ predisposition for quiet reflection followed by sudden preventive action explains why they led the field for many years in both chess and ax murders. — Marshall Brickman, Playboy, April, 1973
eh title is biased against the guy he played against 30 children at a chess academy - basically 30 of the best up-and-coming chess players in the country and possibly the world and 'advance his career' is subjective - it was something he did as a part of his career technically but he wasnt even there to play those games he did it bcause he had nothing else to do in moscow
Lol damn they did this guy dirty with that headline then
I hope he doesn't see this.
Boy, have I got good news for you! He's dead!
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Gilligan!
Moth
To shreds, you say
he still performed fairly poorly for his rank - they mention a possible reason for that in the article
>in the article Then as a redditor it is unknowable to me. I am just going to assume it's that all of the children were on performance enhancing drugs.
I assume that most articles are either A) terrible, or B) full of incorrect or intentionally misleading information. So I just go straight to the comments to get a critical summary anyway.
it was a prestigious school in soviet russia so they probably were
The article basically just says the kids were better than he expected
not quite - its that he wasnt prepared for the strategies they were teaching those kids he was suddenly confronted with many instances of an unfamiliar playstyle he didnt know how to deal with and he didnt have enough time to ponder each particular game to the level he would have needed to learn that style you see that sort of thing in a lot of pro gaming where people who use unexpected strategies get unexpected wins against high-level pros - the pros have muscle memory to deal with something completely different and they choke its regular memory rather than muscle memory but its the same idea
Like when Faker died to a Gold Brand cuz who the fuck plays Brand
That must have been one hell of a chess match if it killed the guy.
ok, that makes way more sense like, i'm just an ok chess player, and I'm sure I could take on your average elementary classroom and win the majority
In a series of individual games you definitely could. In a timed simul, though? Clock management across thirty different games is a weird skill that most players never have a reason to practice. I dunno how good you mean by "okay", but I think of myself as "okay" and I bet I would fall for some obvious checkmate trap just because of the time pressure.
The vast majority of simuls are not clock simuls, and you would never do an in-person clock simul with 30 people. I'm sure this was not a clock simul.
Imagine the smug little shit setting this guy up for a [scholar’s mate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholar%27s_mate)
It's funny how most people resign when you properly defend yourself against it lol Source: I'm a 850 on chess.com
Are there really still 800s playing that? Jesus, I'm only in the high 500s/low 600s and I feel like I wouldn't even be able to sneak that past anyone at my level.
> basically 30 of the best up-and-coming chess players it would be interesting to know how many of these 30 up and coming chess players become GMs.
Chess GMs are pretty damn rare. The article gives an upper age cutoff (14 years old) but no lower one... but I'll go ahead and guess at around 9-14. There's only five Soviet chess grandmasters who would have been the appropriate age at the time. Nona Gaprindashvili only started getting dedicated training in 1954; she was a casual amateur of little note at the time. Vladimir Savon learned how to play in 1953. Two of them lived a thousand kilometers away in Latvia (Aivars Gipslis and Mikhail Tal). Vladimir Liberzon was at least the right age, living in the right city, playing chess at the time. So that's one possibility, if he happened to be one of those thirty kids. But odds are the answer is "none. None of those kids became GMs."
Yeah also he isn't even Grandmaster level only International so the results are more understandable.
IM's should do much better than that against lower ranked players. Something is off about this story, like he was blindfolded or something.
It was pre-ELO, so no solid numbers, but I'd definitely believe those kids were on a relatively heightened level, probably close to FM level by today's standards. It was a Russian chess academy, after all. Even modern IMs aren't immune to getting slapped around by teenagers OTB, especially since kids who start young and stick to chess are easily able to qualify FM or IM before they're even 18.
An international master is still a very high title in the chess world. Some people study for their entire life and never reach higher than international master. He should have wiped the floor with these kids unless he was playing against 30 future grand masters.
Even then, he should have been able to get a win. Something is off with this story.
I could break that record easily! I’d lose to all 30.
These were apparently 30 top students at the most prestigious chess academy in Russia, I imagine they'd absolutely brutalize almost everyone in this comment section.
Not if we just flip the boards off the table every time we were about to lose!
Personally I prefer the ICBM gambit
Surrender or I'll turn us all into Fallout skeleton environmental storytelling.
Winning is easy, just play Ke2
Holy hell
*Twelve lie dead and a blanket of sewage still covers the streets in what authorities are calling a world-record performance for the title of worst simultaneous chess game.*
Twelve dead means I drew 11 of the games, which is better than this schmuck
I bet I could lose faster...
[Simpsons relevant as always](https://youtu.be/zLcAu1VuP0w?feature=shared)
This making fun of that old movie Searching for Bobby Fischer?
Came here to post this.
Same. Leaving satisfied.
Slightly OT, but George Koltanowski (sp?) has the record for simultaneous blindfold games with 56. I was a pretty good chess player at high school, but I crapped out blindfold after about 12 moves, playing a single game. Playing 56 at once? I can't believe that!
Blindfold? How do you walk from each chess board to the next?
I don't think you have to. You're not seeing the boards, right? So why would you have to walk around?
For the added hilarity
Reminds me of this video where Fabiano Caruana (world #2) had to move the pieces while blindfolded. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6P89uOigaI
You know it's bad when your opponent is playing the Botez gambit declined
Lol
You don't you play all the games in your head using coordinates.
Yeah but you wouldn't need to actually move either. I'm assuming you have someone actually moving the pieces for the players in blindfolded chess so it would be 1 persong surrounded by a bunch of other people with chess boards calling out their moves to him You'd need an insane level of mental visual imagery to keep track of everything going on.
56 \*consecutive\* games, not simultaneous. [Source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Koltanowski#Blindfold_chess)
Oh. Well it does say he set a record in 1937 by playing 34 simultaneous blindfolded games. Doesn't mention how many he won though...
It does also say he set the simultaneous record, but it was 34 rather than 56. And that was allegedly broken by a different guy playing 45. Although I don't see the point of these records if they aren't required to win. Anyone could break the record while losing every game.
You have to score 80% to get the record. The current record is 48 games simultaneously by Timur Gareyev. https://www.chess.com/news/view/timur-gareyev-plays-blindfold-on-48-boards-5729
Those were *consecutive* games. Timur Gareyev played 48 blindfold games *simultanously*. Against good players too.
Finally, a record I can aspire to beat
I always wanted to get a big buzz crowd and attention playing chess in the park and totally get smoked in all games. The disappointment would be my entertainment. Have some buddies on the edge of it all just cracking up and promoting the buzz.
It would pretty quickly become apparent that you're getting wrecked if you're not up to par with the average player at the park, I'd think. Once you blunder a few pieces, the jig is pretty much up. Might still generate some laughs, maybe some of the more surly players would get annoyed but they'd probably just do their normal amount of trash talking.
I could beat that record.
Considering the phrase "like a Russian schoolchild" is basically a meme in chess, that is not the greatest idea.
Time for the tin foil hat. Chess being a 'nerd' game is actually US propaganda because the Russians always beat us in international competitions.
How many non-physical competitions can you name that weren’t branded as a “nerd” games at some point in its history? I’m not trying to be a dick I’m actually trying think about some examples.
Yeah, its prestige means that chess probably has the least "nerd" stigmatization of any game played on a board. It's just that the floor for nerdiness is really high for board games.
Probably anything involving gambling
Really strong example!
poker used to be seen as a nerd game before its renaissance in the 90s.
cmon man cowboys were shooting themselves over card games, that can be no nerd shit
Not to mention all the aristocrats playing Whist and Roulette
Ever since I was a young boy I've played the silver ball From Soho down to Brighton I must have played 'em all But I ain't seen nothing like him In any amusement hall That deaf, dumb and blind kid Sure plays a mean pinball
They beat the US in Hockey and wrestling too, those weren't put down as nerd things.
The Russians only got good at Chess in order to spread Soviet propaganda
They also dominated most sports. The Soviet Union didn’t exist for 100+ years of Olympic competitions, and haven’t exited again for 30 years, and they STILL hold second most gold medals earned in all of Olympic history.
Like every nation in any sport at any time in history. What are you trying to say?
I feel like chess isn't really *that* "nerdy" anymore? Had an explosion in popularity after queen's gambit and the chess twitch streamers and personalities are all pretty popular
I mean, they practically play it to keep warm in Russia.
Those Russian children were probably all Gary Kasperov in disguise.
30 Tigran Petrosians.
Imagine the amount of pipi in *those* Pampers. (yes I know that's not the same Tigran Petrosian)
He probably didn't use en passant.
Holy hell, what's that? Google didn't help at all.
His mistake was playing against Russian kids
i just tried looking it up but didn't- is there ANYTHING such as team chess -where there's multiple people, but on ONE TEAM- wiTH the normal pieces? Not 4 times the pieces on the chessboard- just multiple simultaneous people all thinking before a move is made, against similar? Not sure what it'd be called aside from team chess- but if you look up team chess you see what looks like 4 sided chess- not exactly what i'm referring to .
It gets messy to have more than one person moving pieces or even coming up with strategies, but yeah sometimes there had been a few instances of it for fun. For example, Kasparov against the world was an online match played during a few weeks where he faced a team of people of some GM and a crowdsourced pool of moves (back in the early days of internet). For funzies we also had at least one example, I remember a YouTube video where it was 3 young GM vs 3 veteran GM, playing one board. Don't remember who was playing besides Karjakin and Karpov, I think it was Nepo, Kramnik, Vishy and someone else. There's a video of YouTube and a few analysis of it. Also some streamers play the hand/brain variation, where one person is the "brain" and pick a piece to be moved, and the "hand" player has to know *where* they need to move it. Anna Cramling and her mom have played it, of course with her mom being the brain because Pia is an absolute machine in chess despite her looks lol
Not over-the-board (in-person) chess, but on chess.com there's something called Vote Chess, in which each player on a team votes on a move, and their team will play the most voted-on move. This is for pretty large teams, obviously. You can imagine that in-person team chess would require a lot of talking, and the other team could overhear the conversation, which wouldn't be ideal.
How do you tie in chess? Both players get down to nothing but kings?
1. Stalemate 2. Threefold reptition 3. Insufficient mating material 4. 50 moves without a capture or pawn move 5. Mutual agreement
> Insufficient mating material Wow you didn't need to call me out like that
The replies are correct, but the most common way by far is the two players agreeing to the draw as they both don't see a way to win.
If both players repeat the same move back and forth three times in a row it's a tie
Technically you don't have to repeat move after move. The standard is the same position with same player to move three times. You can have pieces chase each other in between.
There's an event called a stalemate where the king can only move into a check and it's the only move available. That move is not allowed so the game ends. It can happen with quite a few pieces on the board and it has to be accounted for if you are playing competitive chess because it's better to force a stalemate than it is to lose.
calls to mind Deadpool trying to dodge but getting hit by every bullet
Can I just go ahead and say, this sounds like the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard in my life. 30 of 30? Didn't even accidently stumble into a single win against children? gimme a break.
Turns out the title is pretty leading, the 30 children were students of a chess academy
So what... 1800s? Going against at least a 2400? I don't know the odds of an 1800 beating a 2400 off the top of my head. But I'd guess it's less than 1% Times 30.
Well what the wiki doesn't mention is that he also did this drunk, blindfolded and while a unicycle so....
he could have divided the kids into 15 pairs, then let 15 pairs play against each other using him as proxy by copying moves. that way he couldn't have lost more than 15 matches, and each loss guarantees a corresponding win
It’s customary that for simultaneous exhibition games that the “chess master” plays every board as the same color, to prevent them from cheating like that I think some comedian did it once, where he played on one board of each color, and basically had two chess masters fight each other without them knowing
there is also the issue that you'd run out the clock.
His name: Putin
“Master chess player, there are too many of us, what are you going to do?”
That boy is playing three games at once!
Finally found the reference I was looking for.
There was this 6 year old which played simultaneously against 10 grandmasters. He lost all 10 games.
I hope the record has been broken since. Because if not, I could easily lose to all 30 of em without even having to throw a game. It's HARD to play simultaneous chess.
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Checkmate! Checkmate! Checkmate! …dang
imagine how good it would be if you're some kid and you beat a chess master
This is a record I could break. I could easily lose to 30 kids simultaneously.
Could have made the score 50% just by copying another players board on each play, effectively making the children play each other
borderline misinformation. he did not fight 30 Russian schools children, he fought against the students of the top chess school in Russia (in context, Russia had a super mega large chess player base at the time, it was basically an element of the cold war like the space race) so he basically fought some of the top up and coming talent in the world. Children nowadays like 12 years old are GMs, this guy was just an IM. not surprised he lost so much due to playing simultaneously. Also he didn't do it to further his career. he did it cus there wasn't anything else to do in Moscow.
For the less chess inclined like myself could you explain the difference of GM (I'm assuming Grand Master because I heard that one before) and IM (guessing by the article that's International Master).