Magnus Carlsen, the chess grandmaster, drew a game against 143,000 opponents on Tuesday. The special online match against ‘the rest of the world’ started on April 4 and earned the Norwegian a world record.
The 34-year-old Carlsen competed against the users of the popular chess site Chess.com. With his online game against thousands of players, the world number one followed in the footsteps of chess legends Garry Kasparov and Viswanathan Anand.
Where Kasparov and Anand competed against 50,000 and 70,000 players respectively, Carlsen faced 143,000 chess players. This set a thick record. The 143,000 chess players were all allowed to vote on the next move. The move with the most votes was played.
The match took place according to the rules of freestyle chess. This variant was devised by the famous American chess player Bobby Fischer. In freestyle chess, part of the initial setup is determined by lot.
Both players – Carlsen and his 143,000-strong opponent – were given 24 hours for a move. After a game of 46 days, it ended in a draw.
“‘The rest of the world’ played enormously sound,” Carlson told The Guardian. “The opponent didn’t necessarily go for the most adventurous options and approached it a bit like a normal chess game. Normally that’s not the best tactic in freestyle chess, but this time it worked.”