ChatGPT Teaches Messi Chess—On a Board It Set Up Wrong, With an Opening That Loses in Four Moves

Lionel Messi posted an ad on Instagram on Wednesday showing ChatGPT teaching him chess. The chatbot, which is worth trillions of dollars, made such big mistakes that people online who know chess cannot stop talking about them.

The chessboard shown in the ad has the kings and queens on the wrong squares on both sides. ChatGPT also tells Messi to start the game with a move that is almost certain to make him lose in just four moves.

The post came from the second most-followed person on the platform, with more than 517 million followers. In about one day, it received roughly 1.9 million likes and 19,600 comments.

OpenAI says more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week. Its latest attempt to attract users shows one of the world's most famous athletes learning chess from a teacher that cannot even set up the board correctly.

If a tool sold as a teacher that knows everything gets the very first step wrong, it is reasonable to wonder what else it might confidently get wrong.

In the post, Messi says he asked ChatGPT "to teach me a chess opening that matched my style." The chatbot suggested the "GOAT Horns," a joke name based on Messi's long-standing nickname. GOAT means "greatest of all time," a term often used in sports.

Messi is known for winning games, of course, not for losing them in record time.

An opening is the first few moves in a chess game. Magnus Carlsen, the world's highest-ranked player and arguably the greatest player in chess history, has played this opening. But he also played the Bongcloud against Hikaru Nakamura in 2021. The Bongcloud is a joke opening in which the king moves out on the second turn. So copying something Carlsen does for fun is not exactly a good lesson for beginners.

In a correctly set up chess game, each queen starts on a square of her own color, with the king next to her. In the ad, the two pieces have switched places on both sides of the board.

This mistake is more than just a visual problem. When the suggested GOAT Horns moves are played on the incorrectly set up board, White's queen gets a clear diagonal path to checkmate Black on move four. That is as fast as Scholar's Mate, one of the quickest ways to lose a chess game.

On a correctly set up board, the same moves do not force a checkmate.

People on Reddit noticed the mistake. "How did no one like, oh I don't know, look at this for less than 5 seconds before sending it to the whole world?" asked a user with the name Cannonheim.

Another user wondered whether there were two possible explanations: "Two options, either they are idiots or they are too clever, which is exactly why people are talking about it." A third person suggested that perhaps the mistake was the fault of some random intern.

Users in the r/chess community on Reddit said an earlier OpenAI ad had made the same mistake, placing Black's queen on e8 instead of d8. One commenter wrote: "Nearly a trillion dollar evaluation and they can't put the queen on the right square lol."

The ad appeared exactly two weeks after OpenAI released GPT-6 with Intelligent UI. This feature lets ChatGPT respond with interactive charts, buttons, and forms instead of just plain text. Messi's marketing partnership with OpenAI began in June, when he shared an image created with ChatGPT Images ahead of the World Cup.

ChatGPT is not a chess engine like Stockfish. In 2025, ChatGPT lost the final of a chess tournament for chatbots hosted by International Master Levy Rozman. During the tournament, it made illegal moves, including promoting pawns that did not exist and seemed to appear out of nowhere.

Thankfully, OpenAI corrected the board in the editing process and changed the pieces in a separate ad for X. The pieces are now correct, but the opening is still a very poor choice, especially for a beginner like Messi.

The original video is still available on Messi's Instagram.