96 Boards, 12 Events, 2,101 Games: The Real Story Behind SUKMA 2026's Chess Broadcast Record
Chess made its long-awaited SUKMA debut this year, contested as part of the 2026 Malaysia Games hosted by Selangor. Alongside the medals, the Malaysian Chess Federation and the SUKMA organisers had their eyes on a Malaysian Book of Records entry for the most broadcast online chess games at a single multi-sport event — built around a headline figure of 96 broadcast boards across 12 chess events.
Twelve events were on the programme, covering all three FIDE time controls in both individual and team formats, for men and women:
- Standard — Individual (Men/Women), Team (Men/Women)
- Rapid — Individual (Men/Women), Team (Men/Women)
- Blitz — Individual (Men/Women), Team (Men/Women)
But dig into the "unofficial" archive page I made to link to Shin Azwan's MYChessDB.com broardcast pages at catur.org/sukma/archive.html and the number that actually shows up isn't 96 — it's 2,101 games, logged across those same 12 events.
At first glance that looks like a huge overshoot: an order of magnitude beyond what "96 boards" would suggest. Here's the actual per-event breakdown:
| # | Event | Format | Games |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Standard Individu Lelaki | Standard | 161 |
| 02 | Standard Berpasukan Lelaki | Standard | 136 |
| 03 | Standard Individu Wanita | Standard | 140 |
| 04 | Standard Berpasukan Wanita | Standard | 136 |
| 05 | Rapid Individu Lelaki | Rapid | 161 |
| 06 | Rapid Berpasukan Lelaki | Rapid | 168 |
| 07 | Rapid Individu Wanita | Rapid | 154 |
| 08 | Rapid Berpasukan Wanita | Rapid | 168 |
| 09 | Blitz Individu Lelaki | Blitz | 207 |
| 10 | Blitz Berpasukan Lelaki | Blitz | 216 |
| 11 | Blitz Individu Wanita | Blitz | 198 |
| 12 | Blitz Berpasukan Wanita | Blitz | 216 |
| Total | 2,101 | ||
So Where Does 2,101 Actually Come From?
It's not a mystery, and it isn't a pile of stray manual entries either — it's simple arithmetic once you separate two different things that "96 boards" and "2,101 games" are actually measuring.
96 boards is a capacity figure — the number of games the broadcast setup could show live, at once, in a single round. That's the number the Malaysian Book of Records attempt was framed around, and it's genuinely impressive as an infrastructure feat: 96 simultaneous camera/DGT feeds is a serious operation to run for even one round.
2,101 is a cumulative total — every game played across every round, in every one of the 12 events, over the full span of the tournament. Swiss and round-robin events don't play one round; they play several, and each round adds a fresh batch of games to the archive.
The numbers actually check out cleanly. Take event 01, Standard Individu Lelaki: the tournament ran as a 7-round Swiss with 46 players, which works out to roughly 23 games per round. Seven rounds later, that's 161 games archived for that single event — exactly the figure on the record.
The explanation : I've seen Norazwan key in games during and after the round - games that were not covered by the live DGT boards, just to make his games collection more complete. Whether he did this or got volunteers to do it, the fact remains - we have one of the most complete games archive from a very important Malaysian chess event.
The Bigger Picture
These games are still available to view on MyChessDB but I don't know for how much longer seeing that MyChessDB has paid membership so better go and view or study all the games of interest to you while it is still available for free!
Leave a Comment