10 Interesting Stories From The World Of Chess

There has long been an association (rightly or wrongly) between chess and intelligence. Many celebrities have been fans of the game or players themselves to varying degrees. It could be argued that GM Hikaru Nakamura, with his streaming on Twitch, has become a mainstream name outside of the chess world.

The current world champion is a Norwegian player by the name of Magnus Carlsen. He played a friendly blitz game against Bill Gates in 2014 where he allowed the world's richest man the white pieces and two minutes on his clock compared to Magnus' 30 seconds. Despite this, Bill was soundly defeated with Magnus only using 12 seconds of his time but admitting that he did so with "a cheap trick".

The annotation for the game is readily available and it should be pointed out that what Magnus played was in no way illegal, just likely to get him crushed by a Grandmaster of similar level to him.

Both of boxing's Klitschko brothers are chess enthusiasts, Woody Harrelson is believed to be reasonably strong as well as California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Humphrey Bogart was believed to be rated 2100 or so, a seriously strong player by any standard.