ChessboArt at Global Chess Festival 2026 (Budapest)

On September 26, 2026, the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest gave itself over to chess for a day: a blindfold exhibition on the main stage, a giant floor-standing board that a museum's worth of visitors kept pushing pieces across, five community teams from wildly different corners of the chess world sitting down against one of the greatest players who ever lived, and — somewhere between two Baroque canvases — a wall-mounted board getting slammed down mid-checkmate by an eight-year-old. This is what a day inside Judit Polgár's Global Chess Festival actually looks like, seen from the floor of it.

By Michał Fudalej, FIDE Master (FIDE profile) and founder of ChessboArt.

Published September 28, 2026 · ~16 min read

The main stage: a blindfold opening, then RubikChess

The festival's Morgan Stanley main stage ran a full program through the day, and a ChessboArt board sat on it more than once. As it does every year, the day opened with a strong accent, right at 10:30: "Chess on the Board of Imagination," the festival's own name for its blindfold segment. Judit Polgár played without sight of the board, keeping every piece and every move in her head alone. Sofia Polgár stood beside a ChessboArt wall-mounted board set on an easel next to the stage, physically moving the pieces and narrating the position for the crowd as her sister called the moves blind.

A second game followed soon after on the same stage, this time with both players' eyes wide open — Cédric Comhaire, a Belgian club player who organizes Belgium's own Chess & Mates Festival and is known online as "Ced le Belge," took his seat at the board for that one, continuing straight on from the morning's opening act.

Twenty minutes later, at 10:50, the same stage turned to "RubikChess — Logic in Motion" — and the name is literal: its opening ceremony was led by Judit Polgár alongside Ernő Rubik, the actual inventor of the Rubik's Cube, before the segment settled into a chess demonstration paired with cube-solving puzzles in front of rows of visiting schoolchildren.

Later in the program, the stage turned lighter again: illusionist Béres Benedek, known professionally as "Benedict," brought Judit back up for a card trick built around recreations of her own famous games — a strange, fitting pairing of two very different kinds of trained memory.

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Who actually sits down against Judit Polgár

Away from the main stage, in one of the gallery's smaller rooms, Judit Polgár sat down for an unhurried simultaneous exhibition against five community teams — the festival's own framing for it, each with its own name on the live broadcast overlay. One board flew Hungary's own colors as "Hungarian Community," anchored by Professor Szilveszter E. Vizi — a neuropharmacologist, former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of Hungary's Order of Saint Stephen, the country's highest civilian decoration — with other local club players rotating in alongside him at the same board as the afternoon went on. WCM Hannah Sayce played solo under her own name on the overlay, having streamed her own climb from a 700 rating to 2200 on Twitch and later been named Chess.com's Creator of the Month for it. Another board, billed as "Checkmate Pietro," paired Pietro Silke Balerna with Tushar Anand, the Indian YouTuber known as Goofy Chess — a former data scientist turned full-time creator whose entertaining commentary style has pulled in over 674,000 subscribers on his main channel, sadisticTushi. WCM Alexandra Prado Serrano, a former Bolivian junior champion whose short chess-trick videos have pulled in a following in the hundreds of thousands across YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, took a fourth board. The fifth, billed as "Chess Is for Everyone," was Alba de Lomas, a Catalan player and streamer who has spoken publicly about being underestimated as a girl at the board. IM Anna Rudolf moderated and commentated courtside, turning what could have been five quiet games into something closer to a live show.

It's a strange, and fairly wonderful, thing about this particular festival: a museum doesn't usually have a decorated former Academy president and a chess streamer with a six-figure following sitting at the same small table, an easel's width apart, both a little nervous about the same opponent.

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Free to walk in, and easy to talk to

None of this cost anything to watch. Entry to the Hungarian National Gallery and the whole day's programme was free — Morgan Stanley's Hungarian office was backing the festival for an eighth consecutive year — and a friend of ours flew in from Poland for exactly one reason: to play in the festival's own tournament, open to anyone rated under 2000. Register ahead of time and you could take part in a tournament, a simul, a training session, a lecture — the full program, not just the parts with cameras pointed at them.

Outside of Judit Polgár herself — genuinely hard to catch, given how much of the day rests on her — this wasn't the kind of event where every guest's minute is blocked out. Sofia Polgár, the grandmasters running lessons, and even Ernő Rubik, who'd opened that morning's RubikChess segment alongside Judit, spent the rest of the day approachable rather than roped off: a conversation, a photo, an autograph, if you had a little patience to wait your turn.

The family circle went further than the stage, too. Judit's husband, Gusztáv Font — recognizable if you've seen "Queen of Chess," the Netflix documentary about her that happened to be screening at the festival that same day — and Sofia's husband, GM Yona Kosashvili, were both around the gallery for the day. So was Hungarian concert pianist Gergely Bogányi, whom the festival honored back in 2018 as a "Goodwill Ambassador of Artistic Values of Chess."

The VIP area, tucked into a quiet corner this year, was less about status than about somewhere to sit: a place to leave your things, catch your breath, and — if the mood struck — play a quiet game. Some of the people using it had flown in from other countries entirely. I played one game there myself. I lost. It rarely held more than two or three people at once, because everyone else was off chasing the main program instead.

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GM Krisztián Szabó: from the relay simul to "Test Your Chess!"

One familiar face ran through several of the day's activities on our boards: Grandmaster Krisztián Szabó, who took part in the festival's Master Relay Simul earlier in the program and then returned later for "Test Your Chess!" — a personalized session where he set up puzzle positions on a ChessboArt wall-mounted board and worked through them one on one with visitors.

Elsewhere in the same rooms, a tournament ran on several more of our boards through the afternoon. For the second year running, we'd prepared its trophy ourselves: a queen piece that doubles, rather unusually, as a piggy bank — carved in wood with a horn accent — awarded to the best-placed woman player. It's an odd little object to make, and I think a genuinely nice one to receive.

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Big chess, and the clock built for it

The centerpiece of the day, for us, stood in one of the gallery's larger halls: the festival's giant floor-standing chess set, paired for the first time with the giant clock we built specifically for it. The installation itself has an official name and concept behind it — "The 65th Square", built around a board with squares extending past the usual 64, framed by the festival as a metaphor for freedom, responsibility, and the rules we choose to respect. We'd agreed with Judit's team on delivering it months before the festival, and spent that whole stretch building it — to my knowledge it may well be the largest chess clock in the world, though I'll leave the full story, and the claim, for a dedicated article of its own. On the day, Judit and Sofia Polgár played a game on it together in front of a gathered crowd, painted murals from the gallery's own collection filling the wall behind them.

Through the rest of the day, the same board and clock stayed in near-constant use — families, school groups, and festival staff all took turns pushing the giant pieces across the floor squares while the clock kept time beside them.

"The best reference is a second invitation" — what we wrote after the 2025 festival held just as true a year later, for a third time.

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Where we actually fit into all of this

None of the above needed us in the room, and that's rather the point of a festival like this — the chess is the actual subject, not any one supplier of boards. But since the boards under a fair share of it were ours, a quick, honest accounting. 2026 was our third year at the Global Chess Festival, after an accidental first appearance in 2024 — the festival's tenth edition was folded into that year's Chess Olympiad, and we'd technically been invited to the Olympiad, not the festival itself, though one of the boards from that trip came home signed by both Polgár sisters — and a proper invitation of our own in 2025, when we brought a fair bit more: a wall-mounted board, a four-player bughouse table we were premiering that year, an oak tournament table, a run of coffee-chess tables, and an engraved Queen Tray we'd made as that year's trophy. If you want the longer version of that year, we wrote it up at the time: Global Chess Festival 2025 in Budapest.

This year the invitation asked for more, and the boards actually worked for their place on the floor rather than just sitting on it: a ChessboArt800 anchored the VIP area, a ChessClub and a ChessboPIN got handed straight to the children queuing for them, a wall-mounted set stood on an easel next to the main stage for Sofia Polgár to move blind moves on, and — the one genuinely new thing — a custom-built giant chess clock ran the whole day beside the museum's giant floor-standing set. We also made the festival's tournament trophy for a second year running: a queen that doubles as a piggy bank, an odd thing to be asked to carve but a nice one to hand over.

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More from the day

The clock itself traveled through several rooms of the gallery over the course of the festival — set against the museum's own paintings as often as against the crowds using it. A few more frames from the day:

The giant clock and the giant set, set up in an empty hall before the crowds arrived.

A close-up of the clock's double dials, in front of the gallery's own 19th-century portraits.

Another angle on the blindfold exhibition, from the main stage.

The calm before opening hours, mural and clock alone in the hall.

The clock against the gallery's red-walled portrait room.

And once more, in a quieter corridor of the museum.

Michał Fudalej at the festival's own photo point — #ChessConnectsUs.

Judit Polgár working out her next move during the simultaneous exhibition.

With Juga Di Prima, the singer known as the Chess Artist — not our first crossing of paths; she once helped us get a ChessboArt set all the way to Easter Island.

With WCM Hannah Sayce and WCM Alexandra Prado Serrano, two of the five community teams that sat down against Judit that afternoon.

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See you next year

Not far from the giant set, a ChessboClub — our most club-like set, the one built for a room where a game is meant to actually be played rather than admired — stood beside Juga Di Prima, the singer-songwriter known online as the Chess Artist, as she performed songs built around chess and the story of the immortal game, a small ChessboPin set placed right next to it. It wasn't the first time our paths had crossed with hers — a while back, she helped us get one of our boards all the way to Easter Island. That whole corner of the National Gallery stayed busy from morning to evening: a lot of children, a lot of movement, a lot of genuine enthusiasm from people just passing through the museum who stopped because a chess set had caught their eye.

The festival ran from 10:00 to 17:30 sharp, and by the time the closing screen read "Találkozunk jövőre — See you next year," the giant chess set's floor squares had been walked over by more people than we could count. Afterward came the part that never makes it onto any program: a short, informal afterparty just for the day's participants — the community players from the simuls, Judit, Sofia, the grandmasters, and everyone else who'd given their day to the festival.

A personal word, if you'll allow it. Every year I think there's no way they'll top the last one, and every year I'm wrong — the whole thing is, as always, organized to perfection. This year we had a record number of our boards on site, and Judit's team has already asked us back for next year; we're already turning over what we might bring. Maybe next time it's ChessboArt that arrives with an idea of its own, rather than answering one of theirs. Either way — thank you, Judit, and thank you to your entire team. Three invitations in three years, one of them by coincidence and two on our own merit, is a record that's a good deal harder to earn than it looks from the outside. See you next year.

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Frequently asked questions

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