Alik Gershon: The Man Who Played 525 Games at Once
On a single day in Tel Aviv in 2011, the grandmaster Alik Gershon walked among 525 chessboards, making move after move, hour after hour, against 525 opponents at the same time. When it was over — many hours and many kilometres of walking later — he had won the overwhelming majority and set the Guinness World Record for the largest simultaneous chess exhibition ever held. It is the feat for which he is best known, and a vivid demonstration of what a trained chess mind can do.
The Simultaneous Exhibition
The 'simul' is a chess tradition as old as the game's public life: a master plays many opponents at once, moving from board to board. Most simuls involve a few dozen players; a large one, a hundred. Gershon's, staged in Tel Aviv in 2011, involved 525 — a logistical and physical ordeal as much as a chess one. To play it, he had to hold hundreds of separate, evolving positions in his mind, recognise each instantly as he arrived at its board, and choose a strong move on the spot, again and again, for the better part of a day.
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Take the IQ test →He won the vast majority of the games, the standard by which such records are validated, and entered the Guinness World Records. The achievement made headlines far beyond the chess world — the rare chess story that needs no explanation to impress an outsider.
A Grandmaster's Craft
The record was possible only because of what lay beneath it: Gershon is a genuine grandmaster, born in the Soviet Union in 1980 and raised in Israel, with the deep positional understanding and pattern recognition that let an expert grasp a position at a glance. He represented Israel in international competition and worked as a chess author and commentator. The simul was not a stunt by an amateur; it was an elite professional applying his craft at an extreme scale.
Why This Matters
Gershon matters because his record dramatises, for everyone, the nature of chess mastery. Most of what a grandmaster does is invisible to the public — the silent calculation, the years of study. The 525-board simul made the invisible visible: here was a single human mind engaging hundreds of games at once and prevailing, a spectacle that conveyed the depth of chess skill more directly than any tournament result could.
He matters, too, as an ambassador for the game. By setting a world record that captured public imagination, Gershon did what chess always needs — he made people who would never follow a tournament stop and marvel at what the game's masters can do. The Israeli grandmaster who played 525 games at once turned his craft into a feat the whole world could understand.
Achievements
- Chess grandmaster
- Guinness World Record: largest simultaneous chess exhibition (525 games, Tel Aviv 2011)
- Won the overwhelming majority of the 525 games
- Represented Israel internationally
- Chess author and commentator
