For four months in 1999, Garry Kasparov played a single game of chess against everyone else. Microsoft hosted the match on the MSN Gaming Zone: on each move, the “World Team” — a panel of teenage advisors plus thousands of online voters — chose Black’s reply by majority. The advisors were 16-year-old GM Étienne Bacrot, 19-year-old Florin Felecan, 14-year-old Elisabeth Pähtz, and 15-year-old Irina Krush, then the U.S. Women’s Champion. Krush ended up doing most of the public analysis. Kasparov won in 62 moves, but the game is widely regarded as one of the finest correspondence games ever played.
What made it remarkable wasn’t just the game — it was the bulletin board. Grandmasters, amateurs, software engineers and complete beginners argued out every move in a public forum that ran into the thousands of posts. Microsoft took the site down years ago. This archive preserves what could be recovered.
None of this came from Microsoft. It was rebuilt from browser caches that people had kept on their own machines, sent in by email and merged together. The reconstruction owes a lot to:
Where caches overlapped, the duplicates were merged by post id. Where the only thing left of a post was a row in someone’s metadata table, that row was reconstituted into a stub post. The 6,435 surviving posts are now available in one chronological page above; the 198 PGN files are similarly merged into a single replay page.