TEL AVIV: An Israeli chess grand-master took the Guinness record for simultaneous chess games from the Jewish state’s arch-foe Iran on Friday after a marathon 19-hour match against 523 players.
A Guinness representative confirmed the new record on Israeli army radio.
Alik Gershon, 30, won 86 percent of the games he played against amateurs in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square. He won 454, lost 11 and drew the other 58.
He needed to win at least 80 percent to seal the record, which previously stood at 500 simultaneous games.
As he played his final move on the very last chess board at around 5:30 am (0330 GMT), Gershon shook the player’s hand before raising his arms in victory as the first light of dawn broke over the square.
"It’s a very sweet feeling," he said after having the record confirmed. "It’s something which we prepared for a very long time; we couldn’t have failed. I am very, very happy that I made it."
The tournament had started under the blazing midday sun on Thursday with Gershon shaking hands with every single player as he walked along rows of tables lined with chess boards.
Training for the event, which was sponsored by the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and the Israeli Chess Federation, was purely physical and included a lot of jogging and swimming, the former Israeli champion said.
"There are a lot of kilometers to walk and you have to stay focused," he told AFP on Thursday, noting that his Iranian rival, Morteza Mahjoob, walked 40 kilometers (25 miles) to secure his record.
Mahjoob set his record in August 2009 in a feat which took him 18 hours and with less than five seconds for each move.
"Hopefully all our wars against Iran will be on the chess board," said a smiling Gershon. "For such wars, I am prepared."
Off the board, the rivalries are more strongly felt, with Israel and Iran being implacable foes.
Iran’s firebrand President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is notorious for oft-repeated denials of the Nazi Holocaust and for saying that the Jewish state will one day be wiped off the map.
Last week, Ahmadinejad visited Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, coming the closest he has ever been to the Jewish state, in a trip that was denounced as provocative by Israel and the United States.
The two governments and other world powers accuse Iran of using its nuclear energy program to hide efforts to produce an atomic bomb, a charge Tehran vehemently denies.
Iran refuses to recognize the Jewish state and is a strong supporter of both the Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, and Lebanese insurgent group Hezbollah, which fought a devastating 2006 war with Israel.
