Today I Learned: A Collection of Facts We Didn’t Know We Needed to Know

You have to take risks to advance your career. One international chess master decided to take a risk and failed miserably. He thought it would be fun to play against 30 Russian schoolchildren at the same time. This was in 1951, so maybe this guy didn’t know that Russians are obsessed with chess.

The Russian government has been funding chess training and programming for decades, so it’s only natural that a lot of kids would get really good at the game at a young age. This poor chess master was no match for these well-trained kids. He ended up drawing ten and losing 20 of the other games. He set a record, but not in the way he anticipated. He set the record for the worst simultaneous chess playing in the world. Ouch.