M2M Day 382: The last day
This post is part of Month to Master, a 12-month accelerated learning project. For October, my goal is to defeat world champion Magnus Carlsen at a game of chess.
Today is the very last day of my M2M project, and I’m excited to finally share one of the most unexpected parts of this month’s challenge (and the entire project): I had the opportunity to play a game of chess, over the board, with the real Magnus Carlsen last week (November 9) in Hamburg, Germany.
It was an incredibly energizing and enjoyable experience, and I’m really grateful that I had the opportunity.
To celebrate the completion of the project, The Wall Street Journal wrote a story covering the match, and produced a video to go along with it:
FAQ 1: How did you set up a game with Magnus?
I didn’t. The game was offered to me (via a collaboration between Magnus’s team and the Wall Street Journal), and I accepted. This didn’t seem like something I should turn down.
FAQ 2: Did you actually think you were going to win?
I never thought I was going to win. In fact, this was the entire premise of this challenge: How could I take what is an impossible challenge (i.e. if I trained using a traditional chess approach, I would have an effectively 0% chance of victory), and approach it from a new angle. Perhaps, I wouldn’t completely crack the impossibility of the challenge, but maybe I could poke a few holes in it, making some fascinating headway and introducing some unconventional ideas along the way. This was more an exploration of how you approach the impossible than anything else.
While I made decent and interesting progress towards this alternative approach, it wasn’t quite ready by the time that I sat down for the game with Magnus. So, barely having learned normal chess, I sat down to play the game as a complete amateur.
Anyway, this year has been a ton of fun, and I’m sure M2M Season 2 is somewhere in my future.
Until then, thanks to everyone who has been following along, providing input, and supporting the project over the past twelve months. It has meant (and continues to mean) a lot to me.
Read the previous post.
