Iranian chess grandmaster Morteza Mahjoob, who holds the world record for the most number of simultaneous matches, is bent on reviving old Persia’s passion for the ancient game.
Chess was outlawed for nearly a decade after the 1979 Islamic revolution that overthrew the Shah, sidelining Iran from the international chess map.
The 29-year-old Mahjoob, one of seven Iranian international grandmasters — five men and two women — said he was working to reverse this and “promote this sport nationwide.”
PHOTO: AFP
This fueled his bid to break the record for simultaneous games when he played 500 opponents in Tehran’s Enghelab sports complex last August in a feat monitored by FIDE, the World Chess Federation.
“I had less than five seconds for each move, while each competitor had 20 minutes for his or hers ... And I had to walk more than 500 meters for each round,” he said.
“It actually took 18 hours, from 10am ... until 4am the next day, and given the high temperatures that month it was quite a challenge,” he said.
Though Mahjoob was “really worried,” he won 397 games and “broke the record recorded in the Guinness Book of Records,” Dave Jarrett of FIDE said in an e-mail.
This sidelined Bulgarian grandmaster Kiril Georgiev, who set the world record six months earlier playing 360 opponents.
Now Filipino international grandmaster, Rogelio Antonio, will try to break Mahjoob’s score in April by playing 600 simultaneous matches at Ninoy Aquino stadium in Manila, organizers said.
The attempt was to have taken place this weekend, but organizers said it had been postponed.
But Mahjoob is undaunted.
“I always knew that this record would some day be broken, but did not expect it would be this fast,” he said.
If sidelined by Antonio, he said he is already “working to regain the world record again during the coming summer.”
“I don’t know how many more [players] but hopefully one hundred more,” he said — meaning 700 simultaneous games.
Mahjoob trained for more than a year for last August’s event, including an exhaustive physical fitness regime.
“In this kind of competition as well as having a trained mind, one has to be in good physical shape,” he said.
But his real start came as a youngster when he saw his first game.
Chess was outlawed in 1981 because it was thought to encourage betting, which is forbidden in Islam. However, in 1988, the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa permitting chess as long as no gambling was involved.
The game, driven underground, made a vigorous comeback.
“One day I went to a park near my home to get a notebook from my friend and ... saw two grown-ups playing chess on a bench,” Mahjoob said.
“To kill time I gazed at them moving their pieces around the board and it was there and then that I learned chess. I asked one of them if I could play ... I told him I had just learned it by watching him! But the man let me play and I beat him in my first game,” he said.
“I was 13 then and it made me realize that I had potential in chess,” he said.
Mahjoob won grandmaster status in 2007 and today ranks 668 in FIDE’s list of active world players and 60 among active Asian players. He runs two chess schools with a dozen coaches and 800 trainees.
Both his Web site and that of the Iranian Chess Federation feature a picture of Khomeini’s hand-written fatwa.
“It paved the way for Iran’s progress in the world of chess,” Mahjoob said.
Iran, which had no grandmasters and only three international masters prior to the revolution, now ranks 49 on FIDE’s list of the 139 top chess countries and has about 200,000 residents playing competitively, national chess officials said.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees