Norwegian chess legend Magnus Carlsen faced an unprecedented challenge this month — playing a single freestyle chess game against over 143,000 people around the globe. Billed as “Magnus Carlsen vs The World,” the match was hosted by Chess.com, and ran from April 4 to May 13.
It was the first-ever online freestyle game to feature a reigning or former world champion.Unlike traditional games, this clash followed a “freestyle” format, where the non-pawn pieces are randomly arranged at the start, allowing for a greater emphasis on creativity over memorisation. Carlsen, playing with the white pieces, was pitted against a global team of players — Team World — who collectively voted on each move, with both sides allotted 24 hours per turn.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Despite Chess.com’s predictive models favouring Carlsen, the game proved far more evenly matched than expected. By move 32, the world had checked Carlsen’s king into a stalemate scenario known as “threefold repetition,” ending the game.Who's that IPL player?Reflecting on the match, Carlsen praised the quality of play from his formidable opponent: “Overall, ‘the world’ has played very, very sound chess from the start. Maybe not going for the most enterprising options, but kind of keeping it more in vein with normal chess — which isn’t always the best strategy, but it worked out well this time.”
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The game marked the third time a world-class grandmaster took on a global audience in a record-setting online duel, following Garry Kasparov in 1999 and Viswanathan Anand in 2023.
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