A simultaneous exhibition (often abbreviated to "simul") is an event where chess masters play multiple chess games at a time with selected players (usually below master strength). A chess master is a chess player of such skill that he can nearly always beat players of the general strength found in chess clubs, who themselves typically can nearly always prevail against the level of play generally possessed by the average player in the general population. ...

In a regular simul, no chess clocks are used. The master walks from board to board in a fixed order. The opponents are expected to make a move when the master arrives at the board. The master may pause a little before responding, but too many long pauses will drag the exhibition out for too long. Regular simuls are often played with several games, often twenty or more. As games are finished off, they are usually not replaced, meaning that towards the end only a few games remain. At this point clocks are sometimes introduced with each side getting a fixed amount of time. In most, but not all simuls, the master plays white in all the games. A game clock consists of two adjacent clocks and buttons to stop one clock while starting the other, such that the two component clocks never run simultaneously. ...

In clock simuls all the games are played as normal tournament games, timed by a clock, apart from the fact that the master is playing on all boards. Since time pressure can become quite severe in such simuls, they usually have fewer players than a regular simul.

External Links

Simultaneous Chess Server.