Every Guinness Chess Record

If you haven't heard of Guinness World Records, either you're a time traveler who departed sometime before the idea was developed in 1955, or you're even less aware of popular culture than I am. And I don't know which of those possibilities is more unlikely. But if you want your name to go down in history, or at least for it to spend a few years on a weird list before someone even weirder than you is better at being weird, then the Guinness records are the way to do that.

Now what if you wanted all that, but in chess? Those are the kinds of records we're here to talk about.

Guinness tracks all sorts of records, but this article focuses only on those that can be applied for and broken by anyone with the time, inclination, and an unusual talent (and possibly money). Typically these are directly observed by Guinness, but not always. Records like "youngest grandmaster," although Guinness has one—it's also GM Abhimanyu Mishra—are for another article. 

Note: Guinness was not involved in the conceptualization, production, or publication of this article.

• Duration Records
• Speed Records
• Participation Records
• Size Records
• Conclusion

Duration Records

Guinness World Records has been around for almost 70 years. None of the following Guinness chess records have taken quite that long to achieve, but they all took much longer than I'd be able to do them for.

Longest chess marathon

We're starting here because of a looming attempt at breaking this very record. Right now, 56 hours is the most time two people have spent playing chess against each other without a break. I don't think I've ever been awake for 56 hours in a row, let alone playing chess for that long.

Two guys in Norway pulled this off and if the next attempt works, the record will still belong to two guys in Norway, including Chess.com's very own Askild Bryn.

Longest time consecutively ranked chess world number one (female)

This is pretty much the only "normal" chess record that Guinness has certified and has an application process for—although it's an impossible record for a random Guinness applicant to break.

GM Judit Polgar is almost unanimously—and maybe not "almost" unanimously—considered the greatest woman chess player of all time, and being the #1 rated woman for more than a quarter-century is a major reason why.

Longest duration playing correspondence chess

I suppose anyone can claim to set a record with no one watching, but this one seems particularly hard to confirm. Guinness did anyway: two gentlemen who played correspondence chess continuously for 53 years. Maybe one of the players hoarded kept all of the correspondence.

They played 112 games "with both men having won half the games," according to Guinness, but surely there were some draws. And was the score really exactly 50-50? Maybe they weren't keeping the games after all.

Longest marathon playing chess underwater (team of two)

This marathon lasted 25 hours but it's also a bit reminiscent of an old Steven Wright joke... not in a row! They took three breaks. In that case, I'm not exactly sure how this record is defined, so let's move on.

Speed Records

Speed is an important part of blitz and bullet chess, but when someone sets a Guinness-chess-speed record, it is almost invariably after having found a unique twist on the usually rather mundane task of setting up a chessboard. 

Fastest time to arrange a chess set

You'd think the Chess.com servers would hold this record at around 0.001 seconds, but no, it has to be a physical set. (Dang.) And that record belongs to S. Odelia Jasmine, who did it in 29.85 seconds in July 2021. If that seems a bit long to you, first of all the record must be set with one hand, and also remember there are 32 pieces to place on squares, so it means less than a second per piece was needed. Good luck.

Fastest time to arrange a large chess set

It's not clear how much larger this large chess set was than a normal set, but it took Nurzat Nurlanovich Turdaliev 46.62 seconds to put all 32 pieces where they belong. Did he just have to reach farther than normal, or was there some moving of the legs involved? That's for Nurzat and Guinness to know and us to not find out.

Fastest time to arrange a chess set blindfolded

Interestingly, increasing the size of a chess set has about the same effect as putting on a blindfold for a normal set: At 45.72 seconds, the time on this record is almost identical to the previous one. Punithamalar Rajashekar did this task in May of 2023, which of course requires recognizing each piece by feel instead of sight... wouldn't be much of a board-setup record if you could just place random pieces on random squares. Say, that gives me an idea: Fastest time to arrange a Chess960 starting position blindfolded.

Upon further review, two hands were allowed for this record. I declare shenanigans!

Fastest time to arrange a chess set (team of two)

How much time do you save when two people are arranging the set? Apparently less than zero, because this record stands at 30.80 seconds, almost a full second longer than the record for a one-person job.

Based on the photograph from the Guinness website, however, it seems as if they took turns—one person set up the white pieces and then the other person set up the black pieces—which would explain the lack of any efficiency gain. But also makes you wonder why this is even a settable record under the current ruleset.

Fastest time to arrange a chess set with the mouth

By far our favorite of this variety. Veteran Guinness record-setter Lim Kai Yi from Malaysia needed 97.25 seconds, or just over three seconds per piece, in order to—yes, you read that correctly—set up a chessboard using his mouth instead of his hands to pick up and place the pieces. It's just too bad no footage of this one seems to exist publicly.

On the other hand, that lets us speculate on the logistics of this record (which certain coworkers have egged me on to do). Inhibited motor control is the most obvious obstacle, but if it's a standard size chess set, there also isn't that much room for the pieces as the board fills up. And this is true horizontally and vertically. Not much you can do about the size of the squares, but it's probably easier to start with the shortest pieces and move up to the tallest ones. Anyway, that's already way too much time spent thinking on this. Release the footage, Guinness!

Participation Records

A few record holders needed some help in achieving their goal. Okay, a lot of help.

Largest board game tournament

Of course the largest "board game" tournament ever was a chess tournament—were you expecting Magic: The Gathering? (Is that even a "board" game?)

The 43,157 participants in this tournament gave it a larger "population" than eight independent countries (Marshall Islands, Liechtenstein, Monaco, San Marino, Palau, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Vatican City) and eight U.S. state capitals (Montpelier, Pierre, Augusta, Frankfort, Helena, Juneau, Dover, and Annapolis).

Most simultaneous games of chess by an individual

In contemporaneous reports of this record held by GM Ehsan Ghaem-Maghami, the number of opponents was said to be 604. Officially, however, it is only 135, as the webpage entry notes that "Maghami also played against an additional 469 opponents who did not meet the qualifying criteria of possessing a published Elo rating of at least 1,200." Good thing 135 plus 469 equals 604, or I'd be quite confused.

Most games of chess played simultaneously in one location

This one was not set by one person! The record is listed at 20,480 although because that was actually the number of games, it puts the number of players at 10,240.

The difference between this record and the largest board game tournament is the "simultaneously in one location" part, so unlike the 43,000 people who played the Cebu City tournament two years later, this group of 10,000 were playing... simultaneously... in one location, which was the University of Gujarat Sports Grounds in Ahmadabad, India. National living legend GM Viswanathan Anand was there, not playing, but enjoying the spectacle of so many people playing chess at once.

Largest chess lesson

The entry doesn't specify whether the 1,459 students at this lesson were at a single location. Considering that the chess clubs of Muttenz established this mark in 2018, maybe they were using Zoom Skype.

Size Records

Bigger isn't always better when it comes to Guinness records. Although... sometimes it is.

Largest chess piece

Welcome to the World Chess Hall of Fame. Learn about great players from the history of chess... or, you know, just come for the biggest chess king in the world.

Two basketball hoops tall and the long side of a pool table wide, you can see from the thumbnail that even a typical outdoor set has nothing on this chonk of a king. And you can still go see it if you want:

Well, that looks big. pic.twitter.com/tInWdBfZbe

— Anish Giri (@anishgiri) November 13, 2023

Largest chess set collection

Don't worry; largest chess set collection means the most sets in a collection, not the collectively largest group of sets by size. And that record is 438 sets, belonging to Mongolia's Tumen-Ulzii Zandraa. That's enough for everyone in the U.S. Congress to get one. (Not that they deserve to.)

Smallest chess computer program

It's 354 bytes. Not kilobytes. How are 354 units of information enough to simulate the nearly-uncountable, infinite-seeming number of positions that chess consists of? Well, I'm not a computer programmer, so don't ask me, but Guinness didn't ask record-setter Alejandro Garcia either.

This GitHub claims to host a 288 byte chess program—I guess they either didn't apply to Guinness, or it's not technically a chess program (they admit it might be a bit too limited to be considered one)—but does try to explain of how such a tiny chess program might be achieved, if you care about that kind of thing.

Largest chess set

With the 5.9-meter-by-5.9-meter board already matching the square footage of a decent-sized room, the king in this set is also about four feet tall.

And see, if this were the set Nurzat Turdaliev used to break the record for "Fastest time to arrange a large chess set" then I'd know to be impressed. But we just don't know. Tell us, Guinness!

Smallest hand-made chess set

Ara Davidi Ghazaryan created a chessboard of eight millimeters by eight millimeters, which is more than 500,000 times smaller in surface area than the record largest set, and the king was 2.4 millimeters, or almost 500 times shorter than the other king.

Ghazaryan broke the previous record 15.3mm by 15.3mm set by... Ara Davidi Ghazaryan. The video below is from his older record.

But is it really a chess set if you can't actually play a game of chess on it? Unless you have the finest motor skills this side of a robot (not to mention perfect eyesight), a game ain't happening.

Speaking of robots...

Smallest machine-made chess set

Is it really a chess set if you can't actually play a game of chess on it? Sorry, now I'm getting desperate to know. Because the smallest machine-made set had a board, courtesy of students from Texas Tech University, that was 435μm x 435μm. Yes, we're getting so ridiculous that the unit prefix abbreviations are now coming from the Greek alphabet instead of the Latin one.

What in the world even is a μm? It's a micrometer, a.k.a. 1/1000th of a millimeter, giving this board only 0.3% the surface area of the record manmade set. It's also about 4% the surface area of a single pixel on your computer screen. So it's... small.

But I suppose you can play chess on it... well, not you. But they built the board with an arm that can move the pieces and some space on the side to store captured pieces. So it has that going for it, which is nice.

Highest altitude playing a board/party game (on land)

Well what do you think the board/party game was? I guess chess on an airplane doesn't count though. (The record link says "on land" but nothing on the page does.)

Where did they set it? Well, Mount Everest, of course. Not the summit, though; that would be insane. No, they only did it around at 6,000 meters/19,000 feet of elevation.

Conclusion

So there you have it. All 20 Guinness chess records that you can apply, today, to try to establish. I hope you've been practicing!

For chess records that are generally less unusual than the ones we talked about here, read this article by Tarjei Svensen next.

Which record is your favorite, and why is it "Fastest time to arrange a chess set with the mouth"? What if you could set your very own chess record, what would it be? Let us know in the comments!