I teamed up with my wife on Valentine’s Day 2021 to break a Guinness World Record’s title or the Guinness Valentine’s Day special video. We broke a couple of records and this week I’m featuring the Fastest time to arrange a chess set (team of two).

The previous record of 36.70 seconds doesn’t seem all that fast for two people using 4 hands setting up a board simultaneously. And it wouldn’t be. But the Guinness rules require each person to set up their own color alone, one piece at a time, with one hand only, from over 12 inches away, and the person setting up black can’t start until the person setting up white is done. In addition, if a single piece isn’t in the correct square or is on the line of any box, the entire attempt is disqualified. When we pulled off a time of 34.09 seconds, we were pretty happy.

When it comes to chess, Beth Harmon has nothing on my wife in terms of setting the board up or beating me. We also played the fastest possible game of chess that clocked in at an unofficial time of 1.73 seconds from start to finish. It’s called fool’s mate and I walked through our variation which was the fastest, the two variations that the pawns can move one more square forward, and fool’s mate in which black is mated which takes one more inconsequential move by white.

Breaking the record took weeks of deliberate practice, a growth mindset, and plenty of grit. We wanted to give up several times since we often didn’t seem to be making any progress. But with deliberate practice: timing every run for each of us, getting immediate feedback on if the strategy worked, and trying again with micro-adjustments, we were able to pull it off.