Michelle Khare's 30 Days of Chess: From Blindfolded Defeat to PogChamps 3 and a 1,000 Rating
Michelle Khare
In this episode of Challenge Accepted, Michelle Khare tries to find out how good she can get at chess in 30 days, starting from almost nothing. She is coached by some of the best-known players and teachers in online chess. At the end of the month she plays in PogChamps 3, a real tournament against some of the biggest streamers on the platform. The video follows her lessons, her tournament games, and a longer stretch of training she chose to take on after the challenge ended. Running through all of it is her fear that being bad at chess would mean she isn't smart.
Ground Zero: A Blindfolded Loss to Levy Rozman
Her first coach is Levy Rozman, an International Master. He says he started playing at five, played his first tournament at seven, ranked in the top five for his age in the United States for most of his childhood, and was number two in the country at twelve. Michelle sums up her own knowledge as knowing how the pieces move: knights go in an L, rooks go straight, the bishop goes diagonally, and the queen "is just like a baller who goes wherever."
To size up her level, Levy plays her while blindfolded for the whole game. Michelle opens with pawn to b3, and Levy names it Larsen's Opening and jokes that maybe she isn't such a beginner after all. The game goes badly quickly. Levy develops his bishop, pushes his e-pawn to e4 to attack her knight, brings his queen out, and delivers checkmate with queen to f2 within a few moves. His diagnosis is that she never pushed her central pawns, so she had nothing to hold off his pieces in the open board.
Hikaru Nakamura on Failure, and the First Opening
Hikaru Nakamura, a Grandmaster, five-time U.S. champion, and the number-one ranked blitz player in the world, predicts that dealing with failure will be the hardest part for Michelle. He expects her to lose quite a few games early and says she needs to focus on the end result, not on her first few games.
Nakamura explains that a chess game has three phases: the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. Asked how many openings exist, he says many hundreds, maybe thousands. When they start with the first move and Michelle chooses the queen's pawn, he points out that this could lead into the Queen's Gambit. The video then briefly covers the Netflix series The Queen's Gambit, which one speaker says "completely changed chess forever."
The video also stops on meme openings, with the Bongcloud as the example: after 1.e4 e5, White moves the king up one square. A coach explains that nobody plays it seriously because it breaks every principle. It blocks your own development and puts your king in the center. The coach still welcomes these memes, saying the more there are, the more they annoy people who are gatekeeping the game.
Learning the London System
The opening Michelle is actually taught is the London System. It starts with the queen's pawn, then bishop to f4, which puts the dark-squared bishop toward the center. The coach says controlling the center is extremely important because pieces there are most mobile and active. He shows the order of moves with an example. If Black plays pawn to e3 first, the bishop gets blocked in and can't reach as far into enemy territory. Next comes knight to f3, and then White finishes a "pyramid" of pawns so the light-squared bishop can park in "the small house that you built for it." Michelle finds the image charming and says she can already see how to move across the board better.
The First Week: Tactical Vision and Exhaustion
For the next week Michelle spends at least four hours a day on chess. She plays online, solves puzzles, analyzes her games, and takes lessons. She says that after one week she is already "mentally obliterated" by the volume of new ideas.
One lesson focuses on tactical vision and walks through a line where things go wrong fast. In the line, Black's queen comes out to f6, which offers a queen trade, since taking it lets the opponent recapture with a pawn or knight. Then the coach shows a key concept. If the queen goes to a certain square and a bishop attacks it, the queen can't simply retreat, because another piece sits on the same diagonal. That is a pin. "It's the fourth move of the game and we've lost our most powerful piece," Michelle says. The lesson also looks at a mating pattern. Capturing with the queen instead of the bishop wins, because the queen boxes the king in so that every escape square is covered, while with a bishop the king could get away.
The Stereotype of the Smart Chess Player
Tired of the computer, Michelle switches to practicing on a physical board. Online, the analysis after each game shows her move by move what she should have played. She calls this an incredible tool, but also exhausting, and says it makes her feel like an idiot.
This leads into what she sees as the deeper problem. Chess has a reputation as the game of very smart people, so being bad at it feels like proof of being stupid. One of the chess players featured calls that association nonsense. Another describes how high school movies always cast the nerdiest, most socially awkward kids as the chess team. They say they used to hide from people that they were a competitive player who spent every weekend at tournaments, because they worried people would see them differently. In their view, one big benefit of the online chess world is that it shows there's no particular type of person who plays chess. Michelle, meanwhile, realizes the tournament is two weeks away, not a month, and says she has no idea how she'll manage.
Anna Rudolf's Simulated Game: Tempo, Forcing Moves, and "Castlemania"
Anna Rudolf, an International Master who started playing at four and made Hungary's Olympiad team at twenty, runs a simulated game at roughly PogChamps level. Michelle has to explain her thinking on every move and also analyze Anna's moves.
Michelle opens with the London: pawn to d4 and bishop to f4, "to continue my trip to London." When Anna puts a knight on the edge of the board and asks whether it's well placed, Michelle says she would have played knight to c6 to protect the king and stay more central. Anna agrees and teaches the saying "a knight on the rim is dim." A knight stuck on the edge often has to retreat to where it came from, and that wastes time.
That brings Anna to tempo. Every turn is a unit of time, and if you keep moving the same piece you're wasting it. The fix is the forcing move: checks, captures, and threats. A check has to be answered, a capture usually has to be recaptured, and a threat to the queen usually means the queen has to move. Forcing moves let you gain a tempo on your opponent and improve your position at the same time.
Anna also explains what rooks usually aim for: reaching the seventh rank (or the second, depending on color) and doubling up. Michelle guesses that a rook on the seventh is strong because it traps the king, and Anna adds that two rooks there is even better. Michelle decides this deserves a cooler name than "rook on the seventh" and invents "Castlemania." A coach notes that it's a new name for an old idea, usually called doubling or tripling on the seventh rank, but says that if it works, they don't mind.
Preparing as Black: The Sicilian Dragon
With a few days left, Michelle admits she's embarrassed to still have no opening or plan for Black. A coach explains that the two colors have completely different openings and that Black is usually reacting to the opponent. Michelle says playing Black feels like a different game and she doesn't like it.
A coach who plays the Sicilian teaches her the Sicilian Dragon, which someone in Michelle's chat had suggested. The coach calls the Sicilian one of the most confrontational openings in chess, played from beginner level to the top grandmaster level, with the Dragon as one of its main variations. There's also a practical reason: they argue PogChamps opponents probably won't have prepared for it, which would be a big advantage. The idea goes like this. 1...c5 fights for the center by covering d4. After White pushes d4 and recaptures with the knight, Black goes into the Dragon. The coach describes the long diagonal as the dragon's tail and the knight as its head. The bishop goes to g7, where the coach expects it to be one of Black's best pieces. Against most setups, ...d6 stops White from pushing e5 once Black's knight is on f6.
Scouting Rainn Wilson
Michelle's first-round opponent is actor Rainn Wilson. His account has only one completed game, against Magnus Carlsen, described in the video as the best player in the world at a game played by 500 million people. A clip shows Wilson joking with Carlsen that he's "pretty much the number one actor in the world." Nakamura expects Wilson to be a tough opponent but says anything can happen, and that it's very unusual to face an unknown opponent in a competition.
Michelle's scouting goes as far as Wilson's Architectural Digest home tour. On stream, she and her Twitch chat spot a chessboard, zoom in, and hope it shows a position that reveals his opening. It turns out the art department had reset it to the starting position. There was no opening and no information, though Michelle notes it was a nice board.
PogChamps 3, Round One: A Crushing Loss, Then a Win
The tournament opens with a $100,000 cash prize and a field that includes MrBeast, xQc, Ludwig, moistcr1tikal, and Pokimane. Before the game, Wilson says his opening is "the Cockroach Palace." When Michelle introduces him to Castlemania and he sees she plays the Sicilian, he says "I hate the Sicilian." That alarms the commentators, because it means he knows the opening names.
The first game goes badly. The commentators call Wilson's opening choice very nasty. He plays e5 to hit her knight instead of simply developing. One commentator says the worst part is that Michelle had actually prepared the Dragon. Michelle says she lost control of everything right out of the gate and that it wasn't the game she had trained for. She says playing seriously is nerve-wracking on its own, and having tens of thousands of people watching makes every mistake feel amplified.
The second game goes her way. The commentators say she's clearly outmatched but still finding good moves, such as bishop to b5. Then Wilson's queen gets taken. Michelle first doesn't notice, because she's focused on her rook being attacked, and then she sees it and takes the queen. A commentator calls this "the old Botez Gambit": dropping your queen for nothing and calling it a gambit so it doesn't look dumb. The commentators say Wilson played very well overall but made mistakes at critical moments, while Michelle improved over the course of the game. She wins with her king walk and says she has no feeling in her hands.
Round Two: Logic and Levy's Secret Video
Against the rapper Logic, Michelle says she has something she didn't have against Wilson, which is data. Levy sent her a video in the middle of the night breaking down how to beat him. The game starts as a symmetrical London. Levy had told her that c4 works well against this setup once the opponent's bishop is out, because it opens up queen to b3 and queen takes b7. Levy warns not to just grab on b7, because that's the tricky part. Michelle does it anyway, calling it "probably a bad idea," and Logic answers with a knight move they hadn't prepared for.
The commentators praise her for spotting and stopping one threat, but afterward she grabs a rook without looking at everything available. A commentator says she got tunnel-visioned. Michelle says that after taking the rook she didn't know what to do and hung her queen. A coach says some mistakes, like losing the queen, are very hard to recover from.
After the game Logic shares his approach. Michelle asks about a knight to a5 idea in the first game that seemed to trap her queen, and he says he came up with it over the board because it seemed like "a vibe." He says he likes to freestyle and have fun, and that he doesn't want to be an "Arnold Schwarzenegger computer guy." Michelle realizes she has been treating chess as a chore, while Logic plays the way he makes music, for fun.
Round Three: Tubbo and the Weight of Losing
So against Tubbo she tries to have more fun and brings out musical instruments as distractions. Tubbo is known for putting on a show and says his main strategy is to talk as much as possible. The commentators say she looks confident in the London. She finds a move that pins a knight to the queen, and a commentator notes that bishop to g4 is very strong because it doesn't just react to an attacked piece. Tubbo is annoyed at himself for capturing too quickly, though the commentator says that move was fine. But while he's upset, he misses a mate in one and the game ends in Michelle's loss.
Michelle takes this hard. She says she has lost every match so far. She understands she's lower rated and less experienced than the others. But she's known online as the person who takes on any challenge, works hard, and gets it done, and here she feels she's failing.
The Consolation Bracket: Beating MrBeast and Pokimane
A commentator expects Michelle to do better in the consolation bracket, where the players start on more equal footing. Her first opponent is MrBeast, and one commentator calls it a coin flip. Michelle had noticed that MrBeast struggled with time management in his earlier games, so she plays faster on purpose. The commentators praise her development, including bishop to b4. They say every move she plays early on is perfect and that her speed shows she now has a feel for where the pieces belong. One commentator bet a lot of channel points on her and feels confident.
She finds a knight fork, and MrBeast admits he has been moving too fast to think. With a pawn that can't be stopped, the commentators wonder whether she knows the king-and-rook mate and whether she'll avoid stalemate. The game ends with MrBeast resigning or running out of time; the commentators aren't sure which in the moment.
Next is Pokimane. Michelle blunders early by taking on d4 with the knight instead of the pawn, which damages her pawn structure. A commentator points out that she no longer falls apart after mistakes and keeps fighting: "It's not about who makes the first blunder, it's about who makes the last blunder." Michelle wins with a back-rank mate. Pokimane says even when she was up a knight in the first game it felt very even. Michelle says Pokimane's play was clearly "anti-London," which she hadn't practiced against. Michelle makes the consolation final.
The Final Against Neeko
Her final opponent is Neeko, described as a TikTok star who was streaming chess months before the tournament and who has outperformed her rating. Commentators say she plays well very fast, "like one of those assassins who just comes in, gets the job done and gets out." They call Michelle the underdog with real chances.
Michelle had seen Neeko play the Bird Opening in other games, so she prepared the best Black response to it in a full lesson with Anna Rudolf. Then Neeko doesn't play the Bird. Michelle compares it to studying for a science test, walking in, and finding a history test: you panic for half an hour and then scribble wrong answers. The commentators say the key against Neeko is controlling the tempo and not panicking when she moves in two or three seconds. In game one, Michelle seems surprised and nervous. Neeko spots rook takes bishop, a pawn reaches e7, and a pawn on b5 happens to guard c6, so there's no defense. Michelle calls it not her best game.
Game two is a must-win as White. Nakamura advises staying calm, sticking to her opening, and playing fast for the first ten moves. A commentator explains why they sometimes dislike the London: if the opponent doesn't play the usual pawn d5, pawn e6 setup, the ideas are completely different. Here Black's king is very safe. Michelle finds bishop to e4, which the commentator calls great because Black's only weaknesses are on the queenside, but she's down three minutes. The position collapses after one move, and Neeko has "multiple ways to mate, choose your flavor." The commentators call it a grandmaster-level game by Neeko, and Michelle says she got her "ass handed to me." Neeko says she was very nervous the whole time because she'd been told Michelle plays very methodically.
Training On Past the Challenge: The Plateau and 1,000
Michelle then tells Anna Rudolf that for the first time in Challenge Accepted history she'll keep training after the challenge ends, because she wants to reach a 1,000 rating. She says the challenge was about overcoming her fear of not being smart enough, and much of the struggle was self-doubt. She says she has never felt this much support from a community in any challenge, and that she owes it to Anna Rudolf, Anna Cramling, and Levy to reach the original goal.
Six months in, she hits what players call the chess plateau. Levy describes it as a point where your rating stops improving and says everyone hits one, whether at 500, 800, or 1,200. He says he plateaued several times, most clearly at 2,000 Elo at age twelve. He couldn't consistently beat anyone above him and quit for three years. Michelle is furious after losses and says "I hate chess," a week after tweeting "I love chess." Every loss lowers her rating, and she says what she needs is a big win against someone rated higher.
That win comes against Quagon, an opponent rated about 1,100 with much more experience. The commentary follows her moving a bishop to defend her knight on d3, winning material with a knight fork, and bringing a rook to the second rank to attack all of his pawns. She then pushes a passed pawn to promotion and finishes with rook checks, which she calls Castlemania. The game is scored at 96.8% accuracy, and the commentators say she converted it perfectly.
At 996, with Anna watching, she plays the game that could take her over 1,000. The opponent abandons the game, and the countdown ends with her at 1,003. Michelle says nothing about the milestone is revolutionary except that she didn't think she could do it. She calls the eight months a war against her opponents and against herself, and says sometimes the answer to "could I do it" was no, but today it was yes. She thanks Chess.com, Danny Rensch, Levy Rozman, Anna Rudolf, and Anna Cramling for the hours of teaching. She adds that the deciding win came because someone abandoned rather than face her tactic, and says it still counts.
On this episode of Challenge Accepted, I am going to see how good I can get at chess in just 30 days. Starting from ground zero, I'm going to be trained by some of the top chess players in the world, and at the end of this video, I will be competing in PogChamps 3, an actual chess tournament against some of the biggest streamers on the platform. Challenge accepted.
Hi, Michelle. Hi, my name is Levy Rozman. I'm an international master, and I'll be your coach through this challenge. I've been playing chess since I was five years old. I played my first tournament when I was seven. I've been in the top five for my age in the United States for basically my whole childhood, and I was number two in the country when I was 12.
How much chess have you played? I know how the pieces move. I know the knights go in the L, and the rooks go like that, here and here. And then the bishop goes here on the D, and then the queen is just like a baller who goes wherever.
Why don't you and I just play a game? It's not necessarily a fair fight, so I will wear a blindfold for the whole game.
Pawn b3. Larsen's Opening. Maybe you aren't such a beginner after all. I'll go pawn to e5. Okay, I hope I'm doing this right. Okay, my turn. How about knight goes from b1 to c3? I'll play bishop to c5. Bishop. See, you go so fast, and you're blindfolded.
You know what? Okay, how about this? Pawn a4. I'll go pawn to d5. Okay, knight goes from g1 to f3. You're attacking my pawn. I'll push that pawn from e5 to e4. Knight e5. Queen to f6. Pawn f4. Queen takes pawn. Bishop b2. Okay, so I could take your knight with my queen, but I think a better move is queen f2.
Checkmate. So I don't know what the heck. That's it. I think the real problem is that you didn't push your central pawns, so you couldn't really fend off my pieces out in the open. Respectfully, what the—
My name is Hikaru Nakamura. I'm a grandmaster at chess, five-time United States chess champion, and the number one ranked blitz player in the world. The hardest thing for Michelle is probably dealing with failure at the start. I think it's going to be very difficult to get into chess. I expect her to lose quite a few games at the start. I think the most important thing is that she focuses and realizes that it's about the end result. It's not simply about the first couple of games.
The game of chess is split into three phases. You have the opening, the middlegame, and the endgame. How many openings are there? Many hundreds, maybe in the thousands. Am I going to learn one? Well, we should start with the first move, yes. I'm going to choose to move the queen pawn. If I play also with my queen's pawn, you have the option to play the Queen's Gambit. Like the show? Oh my God, we're already there. We're doing the Queen's Gambit.
The global Netflix hit The Queen's Gambit follows the rise of fictional chess prodigy Elizabeth Harmon, checkmating her way to victories in the male-dominated sport, the onscreen matches igniting a new offscreen interest in the game. The Queen's Gambit just completely changed chess forever.
The opening that I wanted to show you is called the London System. They all have different names? A lot of them have different names, either after people or places, and then some have meme names, like the Bongcloud.
The Bongcloud is an opening where both players move their pawns to start the game: pawn to e4, pawn to e5. And then the player with white will move their king up one square. You don't play it seriously because it violates every principle. Not only do you block your development, you also move your king into the center of the board. The more memes in chess, the better, because that way we can piss off everybody who's gatekeeping it.
The whole way the London starts is with the move bishop to f4, getting your dark-squared bishop to the center of the board. Controlling the center in chess is extremely important because from the center, your pieces are the most mobile and active. So your next move might be pawn to e3. But see, if I do the same move that you just did, you'll notice that I blocked in my bishop. So now my bishop can't come out as far into the territory as your bishop.
Develop your king's knight to f3. Now finish your pyramid of pawns, and the reason you do that is so that you can park your light-squared bishop in the small house that you built for it. Oh, that's so cute. Look at it. Already, I feel like I can see how to move better across the board.
So for the following week, I spent at least four hours a day playing chess online, doing puzzles, analyzing my games, and taking lessons with some of the best chess players and coaches online. And after only a week, I am already mentally obliterated.
It's two-move, three-move sacrifices. Your threat is g5, which will kick the knight. During the time of Queen Isabella, actually, in Spain. Go find somewhere else to swim. Yeah, and I apologize if I went a little too fast, or sometimes I get excited. I'm just going to destroy you. And before you know it, you're speaking chess.
What we'll do for this lesson is just kind of start training our tactical vision. This is standard, right? Like the most universal first move. Black plays e5. Generally, what you want to do, if you can, is put two pawns in the center. And you can take back with the queen, but you do not want this because—okay, so queen f6. This is offering a queen trade. Why? Because if we take the queen, they can take back with the pawn and the knight.
Now bishop here. So this is a super important concept. If you go queen here, now the bishop does come out to attack the queen. Is it protected? Yes, by the pawn. Oh God. Oh my God. By the—oh, oh. So then the queen has to just retreat or go elsewhere anyways. Yeah, but it can't because look who's on the same diagonal. Oh my God. So that's something called a pin. It's the fourth move of the game, and we've lost our most powerful piece. Fantastic.
What would you take this with? You would take it with the bishop because then the king has to take that pawn, and bye-bye, bye-bye, because the queen's there. Yes. However—oh no, however—queen is better. But why? The king can escape if it's a bishop. Oh, very good. Yes, the queen boxes the king in like this. That's what you have to remember. All these squares are occupied, and it's checkmate. You win the game. Okay, again.
d4, bishop c—oh [__]. Okay, today I wanted to sit down and just practice some of my techniques at a physical board because I got really sick of using the computer. When you play on the computer, after every game it tells you move by move what you should have done. And while that's an incredible tool, it can be very exhausting and makes me feel like an idiot. Checkmate. Checkmate.
There is a perceived stereotype that people who play chess are very smart. Therefore, if I'm bad at chess, I'm stupid. Chess is historically associated with the highest degree of intelligence. Yeah, that's absolute [__]. Checkmate. [__].
Every single high school movie would portray the nerdiest, most socially awkward people as the chess team, and that was a stereotype that everybody who liked chess had to deal with. I didn't like sharing with people that I was a competitive chess player and that I was spending every weekend competing because I felt like, oh, they would see me differently. A great benefit of this online outlet is that you can see there is really no stereotype for what type of person a chess player should be.
I have no clue how I'm going to do this at a tournament in like a month from now. Two weeks. Two weeks from now.
My name is Anna. I'm a chess international master. I've been playing chess since I was four years old, and my dream was to be on the Olympic team of Hungary, which I finally achieved at the age of 20. What we're going to do today is to simulate a game that will be about the level of a PogChamps competition. Okay. And what I need you to do, every move, you're going to talk us through your thought process, and you will also analyze my moves.
So I will just do pawn d4 because I've been practicing London. I'm going to copy you and push this pawn. I'm going to go bishop f4 just to continue my trip to London. I'm going to make this move. Do you think the knight is all right here? I probably would have gone knight c6 to at least protect the king and also be more centered in the board. Very good, which means that now my knight is stuck on the edge.
We have a saying at chess that a knight on the rim is dim. If I want to move this knight again, what would be an all right move for me? Well, you just have to retreat back. Yeah, that's really sad when you need to retreat to the square you're coming from. I don't want to retreat. I know. You need to think of every turn as a time unit. You want to make sure that you use that time for the benefit of your pieces. And if I have to keep moving the same piece, I'm wasting time.
Then you make a forcing move, and forcing moves are checks, captures, and threats. If you give me a check, I have to respond to the check. If you capture a piece of mine, very likely I have to take back if I can. If you threaten my queen, most likely I have to move my queen. So forcing moves are a category of moves that are some of the strongest. When you're making a move or a sequence of moves, your opponent is kind of forced to react to them. You win a tempo, or a move, on your opponent's position, and you improve your position at the same time.
With rooks, there are two things you oftentimes will aim for: to get them to the seventh or second rank, depending on which color you play with, and to double them. Why do you think a rook on the seventh is strong? It's trapping that king in there eventually. Yeah, even cooler if you have two rooks on the seventh. Something that doesn't even have a separate name. I think it should have a name. A rook on the seventh, that's such a lame name. Of course no one cares. That's not how cool kids are called on the—Castlemania.
It's an interesting way of renaming an already known theme. Normally, what we call it is a doubling or tripling on the seventh rank. First time I heard the term Castlemania, I was like, huh? But then, you know what? This kind of makes sense. If it works, I could care less.
The tournament is just in a few days, and I'm kind of embarrassed because I still don't have an opening or plan playing with the black pieces. I think it's important to remember that white and black have totally different openings. Usually, when you play with black, you are reacting to your opponent.
How do you feel like everything has been going? I'm really trying to figure out still what a good plan is with the black pieces. It's like a completely different game. It's really weird. I don't like it. I play the Sicilian. I play c5 here. Someone in my chat said that they recommended Sicilian Dragon earlier. That's the one I'm going to show you. Oh, see, that just sounds cool.
The Sicilian Defense is one of the most confrontational openings in chess. It's played from the beginner level all the way up to the highest grandmaster level. And the Dragon Sicilian is one of the major subsets of the Sicilian Defense. It's certainly not something that the opponents are going to be preparing for in PogChamps, so they're going to be very unfamiliar with it, which definitely is a big advantage.
The idea of going c5 is that you want to take control of the center. So when you're going c5, you're protecting the d4 square, and they play—yes, take with the pawn in the center. They take with the knight, and we leave it. And this is when you go for the Dragon. So you can sort of think about it as this being a dragon tail, this whole diagonal, with the knight as the head of the dragon, right? Yes.
Then you place your bishop on g7, and this bishop is going to be one of your best pieces. This bishop is very strong in this diagonal. Whatever they do, if they bring the knight out or they go bishop e3, you're going to go d6. And the idea of going d6 is to stop white from going e5 whenever you place your knight on f6.
Okay, so I just got the email from PogChamps. Rainn Wilson. Rainn Wilson is my first game. Rainn Wilson only has one completed game on his account, against Magnus Carlsen. Magnus Carlsen is the best in the world in a sport played by 500 million people.
You're the number one chess player in the world. I'm pretty much the number one actor in the world, right? How can I disagree with that? I know I've seen the game against Magnus, and he'll probably be a very tough competitor. But I think that anything can happen, and it's very unusual that there's an opponent in a competition who is unknown.
I pulled up everything on Google I could find about Rainn Wilson. I found an Architectural Digest tour of his home to see if we could find any clues in his lair. Welcome to our house. Hi, AD. Does anyone see a chess set in this frame? I don't. Okay, moving on. No chess set, but I do love the animals. Oh, anyone see? There it is. I told you. What did I say? What did I say?
We zoomed, enhanced. The entire Twitch chat was going crazy because we thought maybe, just maybe, Rainn Wilson had left the board in a unique position. No, the art department reset it. It was just a normal board. No opening, no information, but it was a nice board.
Welcome, welcome, welcome, everyone. It's PogChamps 3, and boy, we're excited. In addition to even bigger names than we've ever had, we also have bigger prizes. It's $100,000 cash. Now it's hard to even quantify how big this is going to be, for guys like MrBeast to throw with xQc. You've got Ludwig, you've got MoistCr1TiKaL, you've got Pokimane, and then we have Rainn Wilson making his debut versus Michelle Khare.
We went on Architectural Digest and watched your home tour. We saw the chess sets. We zoomed, we enhanced, and unfortunately did not get to see your opening or anything. I play the Cockroach Palace. That could be real, and I would believe it.
Mr. Wilson, let me introduce you to Castlemania. Call me Mr. Wilson? I know I'm old, but please. No, it's not because you're old. It's because I respect you so much. Oh, damn you and your Sicilian. I hate the Sicilian. Oh my God, he knows the names. Uh-oh. Uh-oh is right. Oh no, Michelle. Michelle, I think she'll figure it out. Yeah, that's a good move, actually.
This is a very nasty kind of opening choice by Rainn Wilson. This is very good. He's not even just developing his pieces. He plays e5 and hits the knight, and no, of course he does. What? Oh my God, I don't even know how to recover from this. The worst part is that she has done some preparation here in the Dragon, and now your game—
Right out of the gate, I just kind of lost control of everything. It was not pretty. It was not the game that I had trained to play. Okay, I know this isn't the right move, but I literally have no idea what else I'm supposed to do because I can't go here. I can't go here. I think I have to just take this pawn. Oh my God, no. Oh my God, this is so embarrassing.
It's already very nerve-racking to play chess in a serious competition, and it's even more intense when there's tens of thousands of people watching you. Even just knowing that there's an audience makes it feel like your mistakes are amplified. Brutal first game. Oh my gosh, harsh. There are many positive takeaways from Michelle. You blundered in your first PogChamps game, and that's okay because now you've got a second one.
All right, here we go. Castlemania. Oh, oh my God. Oh, I cannot believe he just did that. Not even a moment to breathe. Okay, well, I'm going to go knight d2. Good, good. Open up my queen. Yes. God, she is clearly overmatched, but she's still finding good moves, like bishop b5 is a very, very good move. Yes.
So the first game didn't go my way, but in the second game, something crazy happened. Okay, not the best move, but I mean, again—oh, queen takes. What? Queen takes queen. What? She doesn't even see it. She's only looking at her rook under attack. Oh, oh, I think she spotted it. She took. It's game on. Oh, oh no, Rainn played the old Botez Gambit.
The Botez Gambit is where you drop your queen for free and get nothing back, but you call it a gambit so it doesn't look like you're very dumb. It's fun. It's like a meme for more casual games. He's played very, very well, but I feel like Rainn, at critical moments, has made some mistakes. She's also evolving throughout this game, it feels like. That's it. Walk the king. There it is.
Congratulations. Oh my God, I have no feeling in my hands. Castlemania.
And in honor of the hottest new tactic in chess, you can now purchase your very own limited edition Castlemania T-shirt and hoodie. So be sure to check out the link below. Okay, back to the tournament.
Going into my game against Logic, I had something which I did not have against Rain, and that was data. Levy, in the middle of the night before the game, sent me a secret video decoding exactly what I needed to do to beat Logic.
They are off a symmetrical London, not unexpected. I did mention to her that c4 is good against these setups when the bishop is out, because then you can play queen b3, queen b7.
Everything is going just as the plan. I move that pawn out to d4. I get that queen out on the b-file.
Don't just go queen b7. That's the very tricky thing here.
I'm still going to do it. Is that crazy? Because we're creating a bigger threat. Okay, this is probably a bad idea, but whatever. Bam, we take the pawn, and then he moves his knight, which we had not planned for.
Michelle, don't take the knight. The bishop sees it. Oh, this could be so bad. Michelle is drawing an arrow toward the knight. Oh, but then he takes part. Oh, she's on. Oh, she prevented. Well done, Michelle. She's now looking for a way out to at least get some material for the queen.
I guess I'll just take the rook. I don't know what else to do.
Got tunnel visioned. You got to look at everything. Look at everything you can take. Oh, when she took the rook...
Anna, after that, I had no idea what to do, so I hung my queen.
There are certain types of mistakes that are impossible to recover from. For example, if you lose your queen, I would say it's very hard to come back.
I had a blast, and I want you to know you're a great player.
Thank you so much. Thank you. I learned so much playing both of those games, but so many facepalms during both of them.
And that first game, it seemed like you found this knight a5 idea to kind of trap her queen. You've never seen knight a5? You just came up with that over the board?
Yeah, I just saw it. I was like, that'd be a vibe. I like to have fun, kind of freestyling a little bit and just having a good time. I don't want to be this Arnold Schwarzenegger computer guy.
He plays chess like he likes to write music, which is for fun, and doesn't want it to feel like a chore. And I realized up until this point, I've been kind of making chess a chore. So for my next match against Tubbo, I wanted to have a little bit more fun.
Let me bust out my distraction, or musical instruments. What? How do you like this? Thinking? You're thinking? How's your thinking going?
Tubbo, he likes to have a lot of fun when he's playing chess. He plays a lot of music. He really puts on a show.
I'm losing my mind. You're actually pretty good at it.
My main strategy when it comes to chess is to talk as much as possible and be distracting.
Okay, well, I might mute you at some point.
And we got Michelle starting off with a London System. I feel like she's learned the moves. She's smiling. She seems to be pretty confident with this opening.
Oh my God, I can pin it. Oh, I can pin the horse to the queen. Oh my God.
Usually when your pieces are attacked, the first reaction is to just move them, but bishop to g4 is a very strong move.
Uh-oh, too quickly. No, damn it. I shouldn't have taken that. I got too trigger-happy.
He doesn't need to beat himself up over that move. It was still perfectly fine. I want to see if he realizes it's mate in one. He was so busy being upset. Are we going to see this? It's been played. Oh my God.
Oh no. Oh my God, that was so brutal. I'm so sorry.
No, you did awesome. Oh my gosh.
I've lost every match I've played so far. It doesn't matter what group it's in. It's embarrassing. I know I'm a lower rating than everyone else. Other people have more experience. I get it, but I feel like I'm known online as the girl who will take on any challenge, work really hard, and somehow get it done. And here I'm failing.
Michelle actually has a much better chance to thrive in the consolation bracket because the players are starting from more equal footing. For the first round, Michelle will be playing against MrBeast.
I hope I don't get destroyed too bad. Have you been training a little bit?
That's an understatement, but okay. Oh gosh, if you pull any tricks, I'm muting you, Jimmy.
We have MrBeast taking on Michelle Khare. I really don't know who's going to win. I feel like this one is a true coin flip. Bishop b4 is a great developing move. Knight e4 is on the agenda. I already like Michelle's position, and look at the clock. She's up more than a minute.
Yeah, and of course, I bet my points on her, so she's got to win the match.
You bet your channel points?
Yeah, I bet quite a few of my channel points.
Okay, well, there you go. I noticed in MrBeast's other games in the tournament, he struggled a bit with time management, so I thought maybe if I just move faster than him, I could end up winning.
Very, very nice play so far by Michelle. I think she's got a great position. The speed in which she's playing here shows she has an intuition now at this point, that she has a feel for where to put the pieces early in the game.
Right, what does one do?
Every move that she has played so far has been perfect, and I'm feeling very confident in my bet. She found knight three.
Oh man, wow. I deserve that. I bet you Hikaru is going, "Oh, well, there's the fork that I was just telling you about five seconds ago." I guarantee that's what he's saying. Oh my God, let's go.
Uh-oh, the pawn can't be stopped. Jimmy doesn't realize it. Oh, Jimmy doesn't realize.
If only I had more time to think. I could have solved this, but I've been moving so quick the last few turns. All right, so how do I do this?
Does she know how to mate with king and rook is the question. Will she realize that you can use the king? She's going to play it. She does. I think she's going to gobble those pawns.
Oh my God. Okay, no stalemate. Oh my gosh, he just resigned. He ran out of time. Oh my God, no, he resigned.
We have our next two players ready, Pokimane and Michelle Khare. Michelle has already made a blunder here. She took on d4 with the knight instead of taking with the pawn and keeping the pawn structure intact.
In this game, Michelle's getting much more confident. When she makes a mistake and she blunders, doesn't get defeated by it, but she continues to play on and fight back for the advantage. It's not about who makes the first blunder. It's about who makes the last blunder, who makes the last mistake.
And she back-ranked her. Yeah, that's the game over.
Oh my God. Jesus.
The first game, even when I was up a knight, it still felt very, very equal. So yeah, I hope Michelle's really, really proud of how well she's playing.
Oh my gosh, I reflect the same back to you, Poki. I could tell by the way that you were playing, it was very anti-London, and I haven't really practiced against that or looked it up. So good on you for preparing. You did so awesome. I was sweating hard over here.
Well, congrats. I'm excited to see you play in the finals.
I'm so proud of Michelle. She's played so well. 4–0 in a single day. She's going to the finals.
For the finals, Michelle is going to be going up against Neeko. She has been playing chess on her streams already months before she even knew she was going to be in PogChamps.
Neeko, of course, is a TikTok sensation. She's had great games in terms of overperforming her Elo.
Neeko's amazing with time. It blows my mind, honestly. It was like, oh, she plays so well, so fast. It's like one of those assassins who just comes in, gets the job done, and gets out.
While Neeko has been playing chess for longer than Michelle, Michelle has proven to be one of the best performers in the consolation bracket. I think Michelle is the underdog, but she certainly has chances to win.
She moves very quickly, and she has a very unique opening. However, Castlemania. Watching some of her other games, I learned that she plays the Bird Opening, so I had an entire lesson with Anna Rudolf to prepare the best black response to the Bird Opening.
Oh my God, I'm nervous. I'm not nervous. I'm fine. It's just another game of chess. Here we go.
Neeko plays her first move, and it's not the Bird Opening.
Sometimes chess feels like you're studying for a science test. You walk in, and it's history, and then you panic. You spend the first half an hour thinking, "Oh God, what am I going to do?" And then scribbly writing down the wrong answers for the latter half.
If Michelle can keep her nerves together, that's really the big key for anyone who played against Neeko, being able to control the tempo and not panic and get flustered when she'd make these moves in two to three seconds.
Wow, okay. Yeah, and now unfortunately, after they trade, now I think Neeko is almost certainly going to spot rook takes bishop here at the end. But again, I think the problem for Michelle is also, I suspect she did not expect this position, and so I think she's also very nervous as well.
Now e7, and it's game over. And it's even worse because the pawn on b5 accidentally guards c6, so there's not even a way to stop. The only trick is rook g2, rook takes g3. That's the only way here for Michelle to try and stay in the game.
Impressive, impressive. Damn, okay.
Definitely not my best game, but that was really hard. Good job, Neeko.
Michelle is now in win-or-go-home territory. What does she got to do in game two as white to make it happen?
I think Michelle needs to be calm, just stick to her opening, and play relatively quickly for the first ten moves.
Neeko's got a great position. The problem for Michelle, and this is why I also sometimes don't like the London Opening, is if your opponent does not play a traditional pawn d5, pawn e6 setup, the ideas are completely different. The black king is so safe here.
Michelle finds bishop e4, which is actually a great move, because the only weaknesses black has here are on the queenside. That's it, nothing else. It's a tough position. Michelle's also down three minutes, so it's going to take a lot for her to keep this consolation and her PogChamps dreams alive.
Yeah, it's going to take some kind... Oh no. Oh no. Oh my God. Oh my God. For Michelle, but also very well played by Neeko. Multiple ways for mate in one. Choose your flavor.
Oh my God, wow. I just got my ass handed to me. Holy cow.
Yeah, this is just brutal. Just fall apart with one move, and you can't even be upset if you're Michelle. You just tip your hat because that was a grandmaster-level game.
Neeko, seriously, what a day here. You just came out, you played fast, you played well. What can you say?
Honestly, I was actually really nervous when I was going to play against Michelle today because you guys told me that she played very methodically. So I was actually very nervous the whole time I was playing.
Neeko was streaming chess before it was cool to stream chess, so I think it's just only fitting that Queen Neeko takes her throne. Michelle, thanks so much.
Hi, Anna. Thanks so much for meeting with me today. I wanted to talk to you because I have something to tell you.
What is it, Michelle? What is it?
For the first time ever in Challenge Accepted, I'm going to continue my training after finishing the challenge.
No way.
And I have to do it because I know I can do better, and I really want to hit that goal of a 1,000 rating.
This is the best news I heard today. Thank you so much for sharing it with me.
I went into this challenge really wanting to overcome my fear of not being smart enough. A lot of this, I feel, has been me self-doubting my own ability. And I just wasn't expecting so much love and support from this community. I've never experienced it to this degree in any challenge I've done, and I think I owe it to you and to Anna Cramling and to Levy to achieve the goal we set out from the beginning.
If they offer you the second pawn, I wouldn't take it. I wouldn't take it, but you can play something like c6. If they make your queen abandon the b2 pawn, then they could...
No, put it away. Leave me alone.
After six grueling months, I finally hit what chess professionals refer to as the chess plateau.
At a certain point after you start out, you hit the wall where your ranking stops improving. That happens to everyone in chess. Everybody plateaus. You might plateau at 500, 800, 1,200. I personally have had that multiple times. I think the most obvious, I was 2,000 Elo at the age of 12, and then I quit for three years because I got to a point I could beat no one above me consistently.
Fucking hell. Are you fucking kidding me? I hate chess, y'all. I hate it. I'm so pissed right now. I hate chess.
One week ago, you tweeted, "I love chess," in all caps.
Every time I lose a game, my rating drops, and what I needed was a big win against someone who was higher rated than me.
This time, moving the bishop to defend the knight on d3. What? Who is this girl, and where has all this chess knowledge come from? A knight fork, now winning even more material.
Oh, I didn't expect that.
And this is a real sign of Michelle's excellence, that she finds the way to get the rook onto the second rank. She now is attacking all of the pawns of Quagon, all of them, to now free the way to her a-pawn. She's pushing it. She's one away from promotion, and Quagon cannot stop it. Queen incoming for Michelle. And now if the king moves, and he has to, he has to move the king to the edge of the board. He has to do it. It's Castlemania. It's Castlemania if she finds it. The rook check, the rook check. Checkmate. She did it. She did it.
Oh, Castlemania. You had 96.8% accuracy. That's insane.
She beat an 1,100-rated opponent with a lot more experience than her, as she converted this game from top to finish so perfectly.
When I finally beat Quagon, my goal of 1,000 Elo was finally within reach. Here we go, just another game.
Oh, shoot. Oh my God, Anna's here. Anna, I'm trying to win this game. I'm at 996. Here, here, here. Take rook. Is that crazy? I'm going to do it. What could they do? They have to move the king or the pawn. Come on, use your time. Oh my God. Oh my God. Five, four, three, two, one.
Oh my God, I just hit a thousand.
Nothing about this milestone is truly revolutionary, except that I didn't think I could do it, and we did it.
Oh my God, this is so crazy. I'm shaking. And G had to deal with all my [__] complaining about it, and he stayed with me, you guys. That's real love. Now I need to give a thank-you speech. Can I play the national anthem? Is that copyrighted?
It's been an eight-month battle, a war, if you will, not just against my opponents across the board, but against the woman I am inside. Could I do it? At times, the answer was no, but today it was yes. I would like to thank Chess.com, Danny Rensch, Levy Rozman, Gotham Chess, Anna Rudolf, Anna Cramling, for all of the hours you guys sat with my ass teaching me this game. It all paid off today when someone abandoned their game because they were scared of our tactic, baby. You know what? It still counts, so go home. We hit 1,000, baby. What? 1,003.
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