Simultaneous Exhibition

A simultaneous exhibition — a "simul" for short — is an event in which one strong player, usually a master or grandmaster, plays many opponents at the same time, walking from board to board arranged in a circle or long rows. Each amateur faces one game; the master faces all of them, often twenty, thirty, or more. The simul is chess's oldest form of public spectacle, part sporting contest and part theater, and having stood on the inside of that circle many times myself, I can tell you it is also one of the most instructive experiences chess offers — for both sides of the boards.

What Is a Simultaneous Exhibition?

The format is simple. Boards are set up around the perimeter of a room, the exhibitor takes White on every board (by long tradition), and the games begin together. The master walks the circuit, making one move at each board per visit; the amateur is expected to reply when the master arrives, then has the entire lap — often several minutes — to think before the next visit. There are no clocks in a standard simul. The event ends when every game is decided, which for a large exhibition can take three to five hours.

Variations exist. In a clock simul, every board has a clock running against the master — an enormously harder task, reserved for elite events. In a blindfold simul, the exhibitor sees no boards at all and holds every position in memory, calling out moves in algebraic notation. And in tandem simuls, two masters alternate moves, which mostly produces comedy, since neither can follow a plan.

People always ask about the score. A grandmaster against a typical mix of club players and juniors expects to win the vast majority — a normal result on thirty boards might be twenty-seven wins, two draws, one loss. The losses are not embarrassments; they are the whole reason people line up. Everyone in the room is playing for the story they will tell.

A Short History of the Simul

The simul grew out of the nineteenth-century coffeehouse, where the resident professional would take on all comers, and it soon became the touring master's business model: before big prize funds existed, exhibitions were how chess professionals actually made a living. Paul Morphy amazed Paris in 1858 by playing eight strong opponents blindfolded at the Cafe de la Regence. The heroic era came in the early twentieth century, when world-class players crossed continents on exhibition tours. Jose Raul Capablanca was the supreme simul machine: in Cleveland in 1922 he faced 103 boards, winning 102 games and drawing one — a staggering display of speed and clean technique. Alexander Alekhine and later George Koltanowski pushed blindfold simuls to dozens of boards, and Miguel Najdorf — a hero across Latin America — played 45 blindfold games at once in Sao Paulo in 1947, an effort he prepared for like an athlete.

The tradition never died. Every strong player of my generation grew up on both sides of it: first as the kid clutching a scoresheet against a visiting master, later as the professional giving the exhibitions. Simuls remain how federations and clubs across the world — very much including Chile, where I received and later gave plenty of them — connect champions to the community and put a grandmaster within reach of anyone with the courage to sit down.

How the Master Actually Does It

The question I am asked at every exhibition: how can you possibly calculate thirty games at once? The honest answer is that I don't. A simul is not thirty deep games; it is an exercise in applied pattern recognition, and understanding how it works tells you a great deal about how strong players think.

First, we lean on structure rather than memory of moves. I do not memorize thirty positions; I recognize thirty positions. Each board falls into a familiar pawn structure — a Carlsbad, an isolated queen's pawn, a Hedgehog — and the structure itself tells me the plan, which pieces to trade, and which breaks to prepare. This is the same thesis as my book Chess Structures: A Grandmaster Guide: if you know the structure, you know the middlegame. In a simul that knowledge is not academic; it is the engine that lets me play a reasonable move in ten seconds, because I am not searching, I am recalling.

Second, we standardize the openings. I steer every board toward systems I know intimately, keeping my opening choices narrow so that fifteen boards effectively share one body of knowledge. Third, we play sound, low-risk chess and let the opponents err first: solid development, no unnecessary complications, small accumulating advantages. The mathematics of the circuit favor patience — my opponent gets one lap of thinking per move, but they must sustain that discipline for four hours, and almost nobody does. Most games are decided by a single blunder or a tactical oversight around move twenty-five, and the master's trained eye catches it in passing.

The real difficulty is not intellectual but physical: an exhibitor walks several kilometers, bent over boards, making perhaps a thousand decisions. Late in a long simul the danger is autopilot — playing the typical move in a position whose details have stopped being typical. The best boards in the room are the ones that force me out of autopilot, and every loss I have suffered in a simul came exactly that way.

What I Have Learned Giving Simuls

Giving exhibitions taught me things about chess teaching that years of individual lessons did not. The first is diagnostic: walking a circle of thirty games is like taking an X-ray of amateur chess. You see the same three diseases on every lap — pieces developed without a plan, kings left in the center one move too long, and pawns grabbed with the initiative handed over as payment. When I later sit down to coach, I am really treating what the simul circuit showed me.

The second lesson is about who causes trouble. It is almost never the player who uncorks a memorized trap or an unsound gambit — those games end fastest, because a master has seen every trap and refutes it in stride. The dangerous opponents are the quiet ones: solid setup, no weaknesses, every recapture correct, patiently steering toward an endgame where my ten-seconds-per-visit disadvantage really bites. A master in a simul is a sprinter forced to run a marathon; the amateurs who make it a marathon are the ones who score.

The third lesson is emotional. Somewhere in the circle there is always a child playing a grandmaster for the first time, and that child will remember the game for decades — I know, because I was that child once. Whatever the score ends up being, that is the actual product of a simultaneous exhibition.

Simul Etiquette: The Unwritten Rules

Simuls run on customs that every participant should know, because breaking them — usually innocently — creates real friction.

Move when the master arrives. You think during the lap, not during the visit. When the exhibitor reaches your board, play your prepared move promptly; if you are truly stuck, most exhibitors allow a "pass" once or twice, but it is a courtesy, not a right.

One move, no takebacks. Touch-move applies with full force, and adjusting your move after the master has walked on is the cardinal sin of the format. Play it, stand by it.

Stay at your board and play your own game. Wandering to study neighboring positions, consulting friends, or — the modern plague — glancing at a phone engine all violate the spirit of the event. The entire premise is your mind against the master's divided attention; outside help dissolves the premise.

Resign with grace, and don't play to the bare king. When your position is hopeless, a handshake keeps the event moving for everyone else. Conversely, do not resign prematurely out of awe — the master's attention is divided, and defending stubbornly is fully within the etiquette.

For the exhibitor, the duties mirror these: a move at every visit without stalling, respect for every opponent regardless of age or rating, and a few words with each player afterward. The exhibition is hospitality as much as sport.

How to Play Against a Master — and Maybe Win

Strategy for the amateur side of the table, distilled from watching hundreds of opponents succeed and fail against me.

Play a solid opening you actually know — this is the wrong day for experiments, and it is definitely the wrong day for traps, which masters neutralize on reflex. Follow classical opening principles, castle early, and aim for a position with a clear plan and no loose pieces. Then use your structural advantage: time. You get minutes per move to the master's seconds, so spend them on concrete calculation — check every capture and check on every move, for both sides, because the master's brief visits make tactical oversights their most likely failure mode, and you must be ready to punish one. Avoid mass simplification into positions where technique decides; technique is exactly what the exhibitor has automated. Instead keep a little tension, create one modest threat per move if you can, and force the master to spend real thought on your board every lap. A master obliged to actually think at one board out of thirty is a master falling behind on the other twenty-nine — and that is how simul upsets happen.

And if you lose — you probably will — ask the exhibitor afterward where the game turned. Then go home and check honestly: analyzing that one game against a grandmaster, using something like the process in our guide to analyzing your games, is worth a month of casual play.

Training the Simul Skill Set at ChessMind AI

Everything that makes a simul exhibitor effective is trainable, and the amateur preparing to face one draws from the same well. The exhibitor's core weapon is instant pattern recognition — seeing the tactic or the standard plan in seconds — and that is precisely the muscle our puzzle trainer builds, while Puzzle Flash recreates the simul's actual time pressure: recognize the pattern now, because the master is already walking to the next board. Structural understanding, the thing that lets one mind run thirty middlegames, is what our middlegame trainer and positional puzzles teach position by position. If you have a simul against a master coming up, rehearse one solid system in our opening courses rather than improvising on the day. And to find out honestly which of these skills would collapse first under a master's pressure, start with our skill assessment.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many boards does a master play in a simul?

A typical club exhibition runs 20 to 40 boards; large promotional events exceed 100. The practical record-setters play several hundred over marathon sessions lasting a day or more. Beyond about 50 boards, the limiting factor is walking distance and stamina rather than chess strength.

Does the master really remember every game?

Better than remember — recognize. Strong players encode positions as familiar structures and plans rather than as lists of moves, so one glance at a board restores its context, the way you recognize a face without memorizing its measurements. That said, in blindfold simuls the exhibitor genuinely does hold every position in memory, which is why those events are considered chess's most extreme mental feat.

Can I win against a grandmaster in a simul?

Yes — every large simul produces a loss or two, and it is usually a patient, solid player who scores it rather than a trickster. Play an opening you know, calculate carefully with your extra time, keep the game long, and stay alert for the oversight that divided attention eventually produces. The upset is rare per board but routine per event.

Why does the master play White on every board?

Tradition and logistics: identical colors let the exhibitor stay within one repertoire and one set of plans across all boards, and the first-move advantage partially offsets the handicap of divided attention. Some modern exhibitors offer Black on request as an extra courtesy.

What is a clock simul?

A simul in which every board has a chess clock running against the exhibitor, who must budget real time across all games instead of moving instantly at each visit. It is drastically harder than a standard simul — the format in which strong national teams have famously taken on world champions single-handed.

Chess Titles — what the GM and IM titles behind the exhibitor's name actually certify.
Blitz Chess — the everyday format closest to the exhibitor's seconds-per-move reality.
Touch-Move — the rule enforced with full ceremony at every simul board.
Calculation — the amateur's best weapon when granted minutes against the master's seconds.
Blunder — the single mistake that decides most simul games, on both sides of the board.
Elo Rating — the scale that measures the gulf a simul temporarily bridges.