By Jill Barton
Palm Beach Gardens, California - Susan Polgar, a four-time women's world chess champion from Hungary, was out to set a new world record on Monday for the most simultaneously played games of chess.
By Monday afternoon, Polgar had 326 games going - enough to break the record of 321 listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. She expected to play 18 hours or more to finish all her games.
Her opponents ranged from four-year-old Hannah Boshell to 95-year-old Jona Lerman, who's been playing the game for more than eight decades.
| 'At least I will make their day' |
"Every Monday night, ever since my wife told me I was too old for tennis, we have 20 people get together for a friendly game," Lerman said.
Lerman and the other opponents sat at long rows of tables set up in a shopping mall. They wore matching white "Susan Polgar" T-shirts, tagged with numbers, and played at identical chess boards with anything but identical strategies.
Continues Below ↓
The pre-game warm-up for eight-year-old Alex Venarchick consisted of trying a few surprise moves on his mother, Rebecca Venarchick.
"I know that I'm going to lose to the grandmaster," Alex said. "Everybody's going to lose."
Polgar was confident in her ability to win each game, but she looked at the possibility of losing a match or two optimistically: "At least I will make their day," she said.
Now 36 and living in New York City, Polgar started playing at age four in her native Hungary and was ranked No 1 in the world by the time she was 15.
In 1986, she became the first woman to qualify for the "Men's World Championship," forcing organisers to drop "Men's" from the tournament title. In 1991, she earned the Men's Grandmaster title, and she has won the Chess Olympiad five times.
She said her longest matches stretched to 16 hours in the mid-1980s before tournaments imposed a seven-hour time limit. But she said Monday's exercise would be the most gruelling.
"I have to combine the physical as well as the mental," Polgar said before moving her first pawn. "That (16-hour match) was one game, but here I'm playing 350 and walking. And it's likely to be an eight-mile walk."
Polgar remained standing throughout the event on Monday. She walks along the rows of opponents, watching one person make a move, then moving her own piece before taking a step over to the next board.
Most players knew they had little chance of victory, and many set more realistic goals for themselves.
"I don't expect to put up a tough fight. But I would like to get through 20 moves," said Neil Bauman, 50, who was visiting from California. "One thing I know for sure is that she's going to have a powerful headache." - Sapa-AP
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
