1001 brilliant ways to checkmate pgn fun

How could I possibly expect to have even a remote chance? On the other hand, even if I had unlimited time, this challenge would still be dangerously difficult: The second best chess player in the world has a hard time defeating Magnus, and he’s devoted his entire life to the game. I set the challenges with the hope that I would succeed at 75% of them (I just wasn’t sure which 75%). I had selected all of my other challenges to be aggressively ambitious, but also optimistically feasible in a 30-day timespan. Unlike my previous challenges, this one was near impossible. Then, through a sequence of random events, I was offered the chance to sit down with the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen in Hamburg, Germany for an in-person chess game.Īnd so, this became my twelfth and final challenge: With a little over one month of preparations, could I defeat world champion Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess?

I landed a standing backflip, learned to draw realistic portraits, solved a Rubik’s Cube in 17 seconds, played a five-minute improvisational blues guitar solo, held a 30-minute conversation in a foreign language, built the software part of a self-driving car, developed musical perfect pitch, solved a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, memorized the order of a deck of cards in less than two minutes (the threshold to be considered a grandmaster of memory), completed one set of 40 pull-ups, and continuously freestyle rapped for 3 minutes. For the first eleven months, I succeeded at each of the challenges:

On November 1, 2016, I started a year-long project, challenging myself to master one expert-level skill every month.

1001 brilliant ways to checkmate pgn fun