Mass chess festival to break world record
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Around 12,000 people are expected to participate in a gigantic chess tournament in a bid to break the world record for 'the most people playing chess simultaneously', organizers of the event announced here on Tuesday.
Called the Mega Chess 12000, it will be held at the Kemayoran fair ground in Central Jakarta on Friday with the winner to be awarded a Daihatsu Xenia car.
"We're hoping for 12,032 players exactly for the tournament. We want it to be recorded in the Guinness Book of Records," Santi Diansari, the chairwoman of the organizing committee, said during a press conference.
"It's not an easy task to net that number. But we have been working with more than 100 coordinators assigned in the Greater Jakarta area to enlist the participants," she said, adding that they had registered 10,000 so far.
Santi said they were hoping to break the current world record set up in Havana, Cuba, with a turnout of 11,320 people on Dec. 7, 2002.
The one-day tournament, which is scheduled to run from 8 a.m to 6 p.m Jakarta time, will be conducted in fourteen rounds in a single elimination tournament.
The first seven rounds will be played with the participants each allowed to complete the match in 15 minutes, while the remaining rounds will be just 5 minutes.
If there are the expected number of people, there will be 12,031 overall matches, compared to 5,660 in Havana, where the players each just played one match.
To ensure that the expected number is met, each of the participants will be identified with a barcode which will automatically record their names on a monitor.
Besides videotaping the event, officials from the Jakarta Chess Association and the Jakarta Sports Office will be invited to the event, according to the organizers, as an independent observer to ensure the validity of the event.
Apart from the great display of the top non-master and amateur players, a highly rated smaller tourney will also be held for master's players.
The interesting feature in the master's competition is that the final will utilize gigantic pieces measuring up to 1.6 meters.