Chess records

Chess records
By Frank ‘Boy’ Pestaño
Chessmoso

Listed in the various websites I visited, including an article by Hall of Famer Bill Wall in chess.com, are the shortest and the longest games, the youngest and the oldest players, the most and the least players, the best and the worst etc.

Cebu holds the record for the largest chess tournament in terms of participants with 43,157. It covered a period of three months and had its grand finals on Jan. 22, 2012 and I was one of the official witnesses.

Just lately, Rhenzi Kyle Sevillano, 13, set a perfect record of 9/9 in Davao, which is rare in top level chess. Shell can be considered as “top level” at least for kiddies.

There are only a very small number who set perfect scores at top level. Gustav Neumann went 34-0 in Berlin in 1865. Henry Atkins went 15-0 in Amsterdam in 1899. Emanuel Lasker went 13-0 in New York in 1893. Capablanca went 13-0 in New York in 1913. 

Alekhine went 11-0 in the Moscow Championship in 1919-1920. Bobby Fischer went 11-0 in the US Championship in 1963-64.

Wesley So scored 9/9 in the 2011 Inter-Provincial Chess Team Championship and won the gold medal in the 2011 SEA Games 2011 in Indonesia with a score of 9/9.

Eugene Torre played in 21 Chess Olympiads, the most by any player.

In 2011, Ehsan Ghaem-Maghami faced 604 players in 25 hours. He won 580, drew 16, and lost 8.

A disaster in a simultaneous exhibition was two wins and 18 losses by Joe Hayden, aged 17, in August 1977. Hayden wanted to set an American record by playing 180 people simultaneously at a shopping center in Cardiff, NJ but only 20 showed up. Hayden lost 18 of the games (including one to a seven-year-old). His two wins were scored against his mother and a player who got tired of waiting and left in mid-game.

Iceland has the highest per capita chess population in the world. In December 2005, Reykjavik had eight grandmasters living in its city of 110,000.

The highest rating by a woman is Judit Polgar’s peak Fide rating of 2735 (July and October 2005 lists). Hermann Helms wrote a chess column for 62 years, from 1893 to 1955, in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 

George Koltanowski (honorary GM) wrote a daily chess column for 52 years, totaling over 19,000 articles in the San Francisco Chronicle . On Dec. 4 1960, in San Francisco, California, he played 56 consecutive games blindfolded, with only 10 seconds per move. He won fifty and drew six games. It is listed in the Guinness Book of Records.

The largest private library for chess is owned by GM Lothar Schmid with over 20,000 chess books. The strongest player is not human but a chess computer “Houdini”with a rating of 3300.

These are just some of the cool trivia in chess and I will be writing about them in the future.

More here. 

My own chess records:

* 56 consecutive Olympiad game Scoring Streak (A record of 31 wins, 25 draws, 0 loss [77.7%] over 4 Chess Olympiads from 1988 – 2004, all on board 1)

* Most Consecutive Games Played (1,131 games against 551 opponents: 1,112 wins, 16 draws and 3 losses = 99.03% – Previous record: 1,102 games)