I Played An Entire Chess Club At Once

This July, I attempted a new challenge for myself, I played a simul against all challengers from my local club, the Columbia Chess Club in South Carolina. I've previously played small simuls in camps, and I've played fairly challenging simuls such as one against the South Carolina state high-school champion chess team, the Governor's School of Science and Mathematics. However, my most-challenging previous simuls topped out at around 13-14 opponents with a peak rating of around 1500.

This simul against the Columbia Chess Club featured 19 opponents including an opponent rated over 2000, an opponent rated over 1900, and lots of opponents in the 1400-1700 range. For me, with a rating in the mid-2200s, this was quite a difficult field. Additionally, I played the event as a clock simul so I had only 90 minutes to complete all 19 games. Numerous game-ending blunders and time forfeits was perhaps the most likely outcome for me.

I recorded the entire simul and created a video diving into the experience, my mindset during the simul, and lots of interesting moments including both nice tactics and sizable blunders. It may not be the best video editing I've ever done, but it was certainly the most video I've ever done so I hope you enjoy it! I tried my best to tell the story of a simul from the simul-givers' perspective.

I managed to collect the complete scores to 16 of the 19 games from my generous opponents. My biggest takeaway was that I rushed a bit too much in the early stages and got into a lot of difficulties. Probably the adrenaline created a bit of haste. If I had it to do again, I'd try to slow down slightly and play may main openings. I think I could improve my early positions significantly, and if I succeeded in that, then I would likely not have needed quite so many big thinks later. With luck, I might have won some games a bit more cleanly this way and have had more time to focus on the other games. That said, I was really happy with the final result! Even if my play had some big flaws, I made no game-ending blunders such as hanging checkmate or hanging a piece. Both are serious concerns in a simul.

Hopefully some day I can try this again. I really enjoyed the challenge, and maybe next time I could add some more dynamic video from a Go Pro. 🤔

All the available games are accessible in my library collection (Columbia Chess Club Simul Collection), and I've also embedded them below. I haven't had time to annotate the PGNs so all notes are from my opponents or game review.

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