The Week in Chess

The Freestyle chess exhibition game between Magnus Carlsen and the users of Chess.com was drawn by repetition in 33 moves, the match took place April 4th to May 20th 2025. This was the first time Chess960 has been used in such a match. There was a reported 143,000 players voting in the match.

Carlsen got a small edge with the white pieces but he couldn't exploit it. The World team and its mentor advisors played solidly and accurately, and The World managed to force a draw by repetition, the game finishing on move 33. I don't have the ability to display Chess960 games on my website but have a download link below for PGN.

Vishy Anand held the previous record for the number of participants in such a match when beat a team of 70,000 participants in a similar match with regular chess on chess.com in 2022. The first such match was the bitterly contested Kasparov vs The World game on the MSN Gaming Zone. An incredible, for its time, 50,000 voters participated, although it was a small number of up and coming players such as Etienne Bacrot, Irina Krush, Elisabeth Paehtz and Florin Felecan who dominated the analysis (they also used engines to help) and made it competitive, this forced Kasparov to put huge amounts of effort into the game too. The weakness of the voting system was revealed when the best advice of the key players wasn't followed at a key moment by the mass of voters, and Kasparov went on to win.