Blind Simultaneous Draughts

This weekend Erno Prosman attacked the world record blind simultaneous draughts. He played blind against 27 players and was finished after about 22 hours playing. His score was exactly 70% which meant that the attempt was successful. He played much faster than the previous record holder, Ton Sijbrands, and against two opponents more. It was very exciting. He had started Friday evening and I arrived there at about 11 on Saturday when the score was 15-1. So he had 15 points out of the required 38 and there were 19 ongoing games. It seemed that it would not be a question of whether he would succeed but only of how many points he would score. But then there came the setbacks. During such a simultaneous play it is allowed to make a maximum of 5 impossible moves. After this any impossible move results in a loss on the board at which you do this move. In this way he lost two games- one of which in a very clearly equal position. Furthermore, Erno made another mistake. The move he did was not impossible, but he had made a notational error and just gave away his king. (playing 5-32 instead of the planned 5-28). In the end everything turned out OK and we could celebrate. Erno had taken a sabbatical from work in order to prepare for this attempt and if he hadn’t made it it would have been a disaster. His world record even got mentioned in an interesting item on national television.

I feel that I should do more things that I like.