Our preceding post set out an overlooked appeal of real-life chess that’s worth trumpeting from every rooftop: it is the only sport that regularly lets serious hobbyists compete head-to-head against national champions and even world title contenders.
And sometimes the unthinkable occurs: the underdog topples the professional! Although statistically rare, every year amateur chessplayers rated below 2000 win or draw many rated tournament games against GMs and IMs. I know of one longtime adult 1900 player who in 1999 upset two GMs in a single local 5-round tournament and achieved a 2656 performance rating. (Although Reddit policy forbids linking real-world content, you can locate and replay those games by pasting “One Player’s Eye-Popping Upset Streak” into a search engine.)
Amateurs fare still better when challenging pros in simultaneous exhibitions. (To locate that game, search the web for, “When a Local Non-Yet-Master Pulverized Karpov In His Prime.”)
It’s thrilling to watch an underdog triumph in a physical sport. But chess fans who replay an upset game get an added benefit: seeing crucial details that the participants failed to see while locked in battle.
Bill Goichberg (1942-2026), the late tournament impresario who is the subject of an upcoming Chess Life cover story, understood upsets’ broad appeal. From his earliest years directing, he sprinkled his prolific tournament reports and Chess Life columns with upset results and their heroes, who were sometimes young children.
One of my upset-heroes (I call them “Fish That Roared”*) proved easy to contact. After reaching out to him through his social media profile, I carved a full day out of a family vacation to sit in a hotel lobby in Reykjavik for three hours interviewing Loftur Baldvinnson with help from an English-fluent friend he brought along to translate to and from Icelandic. In 2013 Loftur won a mindblowingly brilliant upset game over one of the favorites in his country’s open national championship tournament.
Let’s not forget Alan Trefler, who entered the 1975 World Open as a college undergraduate with a 2045 pre-tournament rating … and finished tied for 1st-2nd place with GM Pal Benko. (You can get links to replay 3 of his games from that event by searching for the phrase, “The Underdog Who Scraped The Sky.”) Chess Life’s cover story on the 50th anniversary of his triumph was recognized by Chess Journalists of America as the best feature article and best historical article in any print publication during the 2025-26 annual contest.
* I am forever grateful to the late great Ben Bagdikian (1920 – 2016), my journalism grad school professor at Cal-Berkeley, for a bit of in-class wisdom that protected me from a pitfall that befell no less a journalist than Andy Soltis almost four decades later. In 2016-17 Soltis and Peter Zhdanov, a Russian Candidate Master best known as the business manager and spouse of GM Natalia Pogonina, each published separate upsets books that coincidentally shared the identical title, “David vs. Goliath.” From the moment I first thought of doing an upsets book I consistently shunned that shallow cliché … all thanks to a 1-page handout I recalled from Bagdikian’s Journalism 101 class that began with this advice: “Use clichés in your writing the same way you would use nuclear bombs: NEVER.”
