Reigning World Champion Magnus Carlsen and Russia’s Sergey Karjakin will square off in tiebreakers, 25-minute “rapid” games, starting at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
There will be four of those. If there’s still no winner, the 2016 World Chess Championship goes to five-minute blitz games.
While we wait for the results, here’s a silly way to pass the time: a guide on how to win a chess match in just 2 moves – known as the “Fool’s Mate.”
Full disclosure: this will never work on anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of the game, and it 100% relies on your opponent making two pretty bad moves. (And, in case it was not yet clear, this is obviously not supposed to be taken too seriously.)
But if you ever find yourself in need of a party trick, here goes:
Step 1: Your opponent will open by moving his pawn to f3 or f4, which opens up the king's diagonal and exposes a weakness.
Step 2: You need to move your pawn to e5 or e6, in order to make space for the queen to move.
Step 4: Your opponent makes the mistake of moving his pawn to g4, which further opens up the king's diagonal.
Step 4: You then need to move your queen to h4 to check the king.
Now let's see what White can do here.
White has left his king exposed. The only place the king can move is in the direction of the queen, which doesn't help. None of the surrounding pieces can block the queen, and none of the surrounding pieces can take the queen.
So Black wins.
Obviously, you can't make your opponent play these two bad moves, but if you ever find yourself playing against an opponent who does that, you'll know what to do.