lot of things: founder of Microsoft, richer than almost anyone else
alive, brilliant, you name it. But none of those attributes helped him
out one tiny bit when he faced off against a young man in a chess match
on a Swedish talk show. Of course Gates wasn’t just facing any young man
at the chess board –
he was competing against none other than Magnus Carlsen,
who as a 23 year-old is the World Chess Champion as of this moment. And
Carlsen has been hard at it for the last 10 years as he has been a
grandmaster since he was only 13 years old. Wow. What was I doing when I
was 13? Obviously I wasn’t becoming a grandmaster of chess.
If anyone could challenge Carlsen in a chess match, it would be Bill
Gates, right? One would be safe to assume that Bill Gates knows his way
around a chess board. And while Gates does indeed know a lot about
chess, he still lost. Quickly.
And The Winner Is???
We all knew who the winner was going to be, even before the match
began. Admittedly, so even did Bill Gates who freely admits that he was
destined to lose to Carlsen. Hey, at least Gates is humble enough to
admit when knows he is not the best at something.
So, just how quickly did he lose to Carlsen? It turns out that it
only took Carlsen 9 moves before he had Bill Gates in checkmate. Given
the fact that they were given a combined 2 minutes and 30 seconds to
choose their moves, this game was over in a heartbeat. (Bill had 2
minutes while Carlsen only had 30 seconds).
So, even though Bill Gates is probably better at almost anything than
I am, it is comforting to know that even he can still lose a chess
match from time to time. It gives hope to the rest of us.