Chess record

Mexico set a new record for simultaneous chess games on Sunday when 13,446 players faced off at the same time in a vast Spanish colonial square at the heart of the former Aztec empire, Mexico City officials said.

Players seated in Mexico City's Zocalo square beat last year's record of 12,388 simultaneous games set in the nearby Mexican city of Pachuca.

Russian chess giant and former world champion and Grand Master Anatoly Karpov attended and a representative from Guinness World Records confirmed the new record, city officials who organized the event said in a statement.

The vast Zocalo square recently played host to a stalemate unrelated to chess, when thousands of leftist protesters claiming fraud in a July presidential election camped out in it, refusing to leave for more than a month.

Chess marathons were a common site during the sit-in as scores of protesters played each other under large canopies to kill time.