Magnus Carlsen vs The World: When the World No. 1 chess player took on 143,000 people in a historic freestyle showdown | Chess News

Norwegian chess legend Magnus Carlsen confronted an unprecedented problem this month — enjoying a single freestyle chess sport towards over 143,000 people round 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 on-line freestyle sport to function a reigning or former world champion.Unlike conventional video games, this conflict adopted a “freestyle” format, the place the non-pawn items are randomly organized at the begin, permitting for a better emphasis on creativity over memorisation. Carlsen, enjoying with the white items, was pitted towards a world staff of gamers — Team World — who collectively voted on every transfer, with each side allotted 24 hours per flip.Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!Despite Chess.com’s predictive fashions favouring Carlsen, the sport proved much more evenly matched than anticipated. By transfer 32, the world had checked Carlsen’s king into a stalemate situation often known as “threefold repetition,” ending the sport.Who’s that IPL player?Reflecting on the match, Carlsen praised the high 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.”

The sport marked the third time a world-class grandmaster took on a world viewers in a record-setting on-line duel, following Garry Kasparov in 1999 and Viswanathan Anand in 2023.