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 in which ChatGPT teaches him chess. The trillion-dollar chatbot flubbed the lesson so hard, Chess-knowing commentators online are losing it.

The digital board on screen in the ad has each side’s king and queen swapped, and OpenAI’s chatbot recommends Messi open it up with a move that is almost guaranteed to lose in four turns.

The post, from the second most-followed person on the platform with more than 517 million followers, collected roughly 1.9 million likes and 19,600 comments in about a day.

OpenAI says more than 1.2 billion people use ChatGPT every week, and its latest pitch to them is one of the most famous athletes alive getting a chess lesson from a tutor that cannot set up the board.

If the thing sold as your all-knowing teacher fumbles move zero, it’s fair to wonder what else it delivers with a straight face.

In the post, Messi says he asked ChatGPT “to teach me a chess opening that matched my style,” and the chatbot suggested the “GOAT Horns,” a pun on the nickname Messi has carried for years. (GOAT stands for greatest of all time, for those who don’t follow sports lingo.)

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

An opening is just the first few moves of a game. Magnus Carlsen, the world’s top-ranked player and arguably the best player in the history of the game, has played this opening, but he is also the man who played the Bongcloud—a joke opening that drags the king out on move two—against Hikaru Nakamura in 2021, so copying what Carlsen does for fun is not exactly a beginner’s syllabus.

In real chess each queen starts on a square of her own color with the king beside her, and in the ad both armies have those two pieces trading places.

The swap is not just cosmetic, because the Goat Horns moves played from that setup hand White’s queen a clear diagonal that ends up on a check mate on move four against Black—as fast as the Scholar’s mate, the fastest way to lose in Chess.

On a correct board the same moves produce no forced mate.

Reddit noticed. “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?” pseudonymous user Cannonheim asked.

Another wrote: “Two options, either they are idiots or they are too clever, which is exactly why people are talking about it,” another one mused. A third user argued that maybe this whole thing was the fault of some random intern.

Users on r/chess said an earlier OpenAI ad had already made the same mistake, putting Black’s queen on e8 instead of d8, and one commenter wrote: “Nearly a trillion dollar evaluation and they can’t put the queen on the right square lol.”

The ad landed exactly two weeks after OpenAI rolled out GPT-6 with Intelligent UI, a feature that lets ChatGPT answer with interactive charts, buttons, and forms instead of plain text. Messi’s marketing deal with OpenAI started in June, when he posted an image made with ChatGPT Images ahead of the World Cup.

ChatGPT isn’t exactly Stockfish. Back in 2025, ChatGPT lost the final of a chatbot chess tournament, hosted by International Master Levy Rozman, after making illegal moves such as promoting pawns that did not exist but spawned out of thin air.

Thankfully, OpenAI fixed it in post and changed the pieces in a separate ad for X. The pieces are OK, the opening is still horrible to play, especially for a beginner like Messi.

The original video is still live on Messi’s Instagram.