The tables are in place and the pieces are on the boards.
The amateurs are sitting in front of the black pieces and are waiting for the champion who is about to play against a number of players.
What is a simultaneous exhibition, or simultaneous display? Are there any special rules? There are! The simultaneous exhibition, also called simultaneous display is a good opportunity for amateurs to play against a master.
The champion generally plays against 20 or 50 amateurs and traditionally plays with white, unless he is a real gentleman that loves risk taking and decides to play all black, or to switch between black and white.
But it is rarely the case.
In a standard simultaneous exhibition, the champion will play white and will make his first move on the board number 1, then number 2 and so on.
When he has finished moving, and he is back at board 1, it is the amateur's turn to move.
The amateur has to move when the champion arrives at his table.
He is not authorized to move before the champion sees the move, and he is expected to move as soon as the master is at his table.
That means that the amateur thinks about his next move while the champion is playing against the other participants.
If everything is going as planned, the champion generally plays his second move quickly and goes to the next table and continues all the way around.
When the seance is in mid-game, the champion doesn't think longer than 30 seconds.
If he goes over one minute of thinking time, that generally means that he is about to lose this game.
There are different world records for simultaneous exhibitions, but they don't mean much because it is always much easier to win against 40 beginners than against 10 competition players.
Still, there are some cases worth citing.
Firstly, there was Capablanca who played against 103 opponents in 1922 in Cleveland (Ohio).
After seven hours, he had 102 victories and one draw.
January 10th, 1988, the Dutch player Hans Bohm played against 560 opponents.
After 25 hours, he had 509 victories, lost 13 games and had 38 draws.
It is not considered as the biggest simultaneous exhibition because, to avoid walking to much, he was playing against "only" 12 boards in the same time and at the end of the game, the amateurs were replaced by new players.
So the record (as of 2011) is Kiril Georgiev, a grandmaster from Bulgaria, who played a total of 360 games simultaneously (winning 284, drawing 70 and losing six) during an exhibition that lasted 14 hours and 8 minutes.