BUDAPEST: An 87-year-old Hungarian woman aims this weekend to set a world record by beating 1920s Cuban chess grandmaster Jose Raul Capablanca at his own game: simultaneous play.

Since the 1950s, Brigitta Sinka, a former top amateur player, has played around 13,000 documented games of simultaneous chess across Hungary, usually on dozens of boards at the one time, taking on all-comers, many of them schoolchildren.

With preparations under way for a weekend-long event she calls a “final push”, she hopes to play the final few hundred games needed to overtake a total — 13,545 — attributed to Capablanca (1888-1942), one of the world’s best-ever players. “Chess is my life, simultaneous play is my passion,” grey-haired Sinka said during a short break from a playing excited teenagers inside a circle of 16 tables in a Budapest high school.

“In one hour, I’ve gone round 30 times, you can count how many metres that is, soon it will be kilometres,” she laughed.

Sinka, whose nickname is Auntie Bici (pronounced “Bitzi”), clocked up thousands of games around Hungary playing at summer camps for schoolchildren hosted by her employer for many decades, a communist-era metal recycling firm.

“I love seeing the twinkle in the children’s eyes when they play, chess develops their brains like no other game,” says Sinka, who gives each of her young opponents a miniature rosette she sews at home as a memento.Thirteen-year-old Martin is impressed.

“She always sees ahead where I’m going to move, it seems the older you are, the better player you become,” the schoolboy said.

Published in Dawn, June 23rd, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play