With 40 wins in 50 simultaneous games: young Belgian Daniel Dardha pulverizes chess world record

Source : https://www.standaard.be/sport/met-40-zeges-in-50-simultane-partijen-jonge-belg-daniel-dardha-verpulvert-schaakwereldrecord/70833725.html

Belgium’s top chess player Daniel Dardha (19) this afternoon improved the world record for clock simultaneous chess. He played 50 games simultaneously in Deinze and achieved an overall score of 87 percent in them.

In the concert hall De Brielpoort in Deinze, where groups such as U2 and The Cure once performed in the 1980s, the best Belgian chess player of the moment, Daniel Dardha from Mortsel, set a special world record in chess, that of the discipline of clock-simultaneous. Grandmaster Dardha simultaneously played against 50 players and achieved 40 wins and 7 draws against them. He lost only 3 games. Thus, he scored 43.5 points from 50 games, achieving an impressive 87 percent percentage over all games. Remarkably, the Belgian managed to score the necessary 35 points for the world title after only 39 games.

In a clock simultaneous, each participating player may make a move as soon as he wishes, and then press the clock, after which the grandmaster’s time begins to run. Thus, he does not have to wait, as in an ordinary simultaneous, until the grandmaster appears at his board to make a move. Each player will have two hours for his game and after about four hours all games will be played out. Dardha was also given two hours of thinking time in Deinze, but he had to divide that time among 50 players. The average strength of the field of participants in the simultaneous was 1850 elo, or the level of a fairly strong club player. The president of chess club Karpov Deinze, Rudy de Jaeger, called Dardha’s record attempt in advance “actually pure madness.”

Dutchman

The previous world record was achieved in November 2022 by Dutch grandmaster Sipke Ernst. Ernst then played against 47 chess players, 3 less than Dardha today, and against them achieved a score of “only” 74 percent (35 points from 47 games. Ernst then joked that he had “walked a total of only 6.5 kilometers during his simultaneity,” and therefore had plenty of time left at the end for his last 10 boards.