28 January 2014

Carlsen vs. Gates, The Aftermath

Ever since Yahoo ran a couple of articles on GM Carlsen, I've been looking forward to the next one. Why? Because of the comments. They give me a good idea what most of the world thinks about chess. See, for example, Mainstream Comments on Magnus for person-in-the-street remarks on the two previous articles. The latest Yahoo piece was captioned,

The billionaire shows he's a good sport to take on the world's best chess player, but how fast he loses is a shocker. "Unlucky"

and reached the top five in the Yahoo headlines, after 'Record-sized fish speared' and 'Where your home ranks'.

For the full article, see Bill Gates obliterated by chess champ in just over one minute. It starts,

Bill Gates is a smart guy. A really smart guy. But when it comes to chess, he's a regular Joe. The world's richest man (or thereabouts) met the world's best chess player Thursday night on Skavlan, a Norwegian-Swedish television talk show hosted by Norwegian journalist Fredrik Skavlan.

Some of the more than 1000 comments imagined what might have happened after the show.

  • Bill promptly bought [Carlsen's] house, his family's house and their family's houses and quickly burnt them to the ground. Who's the champ now!?
  • In related news, Microsoft has just purchased the rights to chess and banned its play worldwide.
  • Gates is REALLY #$%$. He paid that guy $1 million to LOSE.
  • The 23 year old chess champ will be on Gates list for world de-population.
  • Gates called Microsoft immediately after the game to start a new project for a supercomputer that will defeat the world champion.
  • Afterwards, Bill Gates foreclosed on Carlsen's home and threw him out into the streets. The Microsoft robots "escorted" Mr. Carlsen to a black van with tinted windows and he was never heard from again.
  • And then Bill bought Norway and felt better immediately.
  • Then Bill whipped out his checkbook and showed Carlsen the balance. Carlsen started crying.

I wonder what it would cost to buy Norway. If you laid all of the world's billionaires end-to-end, I bet they still couldn't afford it.

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