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Anyone who plays video games on a regular basis is likely familiar with the frustration stemming from your controller failing to obey you at a crucial moment. However, that has nothing a similar issue that led to a pro chess player being eliminated from a tournament with a $1.5 million purse.
Chess has a history that can be traced back to a game that was first played in India around 1,500 years ago, but the “modern” version began to morph into the form most people would be familiar with today in Europe around the start of the 1500s.
The ensuing centuries spawned plenty of developments concerning theory and different styles of play, but the core concept—moving a bunch of pieces around with your hands on a physical board—remained unchanged.
However, things took a turn when some of the developers responsible for ushering in the computing revolution began working on chess programs that first became A Thing in the 1950s. They were originally rudimentary efforts that allowed you to play on a digital board, but they became increasingly advanced to the point where grandmasters started to lose games to virtual opponents in the 1980s before IBM’s Deep Blue famously beat Garry Kasparov in a match in 1997.
The internet has also revolutionized chess by allowing players to hone their skills against other competitors around the globe from the comfort of their home. Most people who play in person will still opt for a physical board, although that was (somewhat obviously) not the case when the Esports World Cup hosted its first-ever chess tournament in 2025.
Unfortunately, one player was eliminated due to a brutal technical issue he fell victim to.
Pro chess player Jan-Krzysztof Duda was eliminated from the Esports World Cup over a mouse slip
The first chess event at the Esports World Cup saw 16 players head to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for a tournament where $250,000 of the $1.5 million purse was reserved for the winner.
Magnus Carlsen—the so-called “bad boy” of chess and the man who holds the record for the highest FIDE rating in the sport’s history—is probably the only competitor the average person might be familiar with. However, he was far from the only talented player who headed into the group stage vying for one of the eight spots up for grabs in the ensuing single-elimination tournament.
Carlson defeated Jan-Krzysztof Duda in a match to become one of the members of that octet, and his Polish opponent subsequently had to face off against the winner of a showdown between Nodirbek Abdusattorov and Fabiano Caruana to advance.
Abdusattorov ultimately prevailed to earn the right to play against Duda on Wednesday, and they split the first two games of their best-of-three tilt before heading into a do-or-die matchup.
The duo was still in the early stages of a game that was essentially even when Duda went to move a pawn a couple of spaces only to inadvertently lock in another move that saw it advance by just one (a mistake known as a “mouse slip” in the parlance of computer chess) —a critical slip-up that shifted the game in Abdusattorov’s favor to the point where Duda resigned.
MOUSE SLIP DURING ARMAGEDDON 🤯 pic.twitter.com/LCgsPQGf3U
— EWC Extra (@EWC_Extra) July 30, 2025
Abdusattorov would go on to lose in the quarterfinal against Alireza Firouzja, who will be taking on either Carlson or Hikaru Nakamura in the final (the former is up 1-0 in their match as of this writing).