Lionel Messi posted an ad on Instagram on Wednesday in which ChatGPT teaches him chess, and the lesson went wrong in more ways than one. The digital board on screen has each side's king and queen swapped and OpenAI's chatbot recommends an opening that, from that misconfigured setup, allows a forced checkmate in four moves.

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's official ChatGPT account also shared the clip on X on October 22.

In the ad, Messi says he asked ChatGPT “to teach me a chess opening that matched my style.” The chatbot suggested the “GOAT Horns”—a pun on the nickname Messi has carried for years, with GOAT standing for “greatest of all time.” The recommended line runs 1.e4 a6 2.d4 c6—White stakes a claim in the center while Black answers with two flank pawn moves, an unorthodox, passive setup that is an unusual pick for a novice.

Messi asked ChatGPT to teach him a chess opening that matched his style. It suggested Goat Horns 🤘 pic.twitter.com/7w25w8LEZP

— ChatGPT (@ChatGPT) October 22, 2026

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. The stumble comes from a product marketed as an all-knowing teacher—and fumbling move zero, as critics were quick to note, invites the question of what else it gets wrong.

The mistake is easy to check against the rules of the game. In standard chess, each queen starts on a square of her own color—d1 for White and d8 for Black—with the king beside her; the beginner's mnemonic is “queen on her own color.” In the ad, both armies have those two pieces trading places.

The swap is not merely cosmetic. Played from the swapped position, the GOAT Horns moves hand White's queen a clear diagonal that ends in checkmate on move four against Black—as fast as Scholar's Mate, the classic four-move checkmate that targets the f7 square. On a correctly set board, the same moves produce no forced mate.

An opening is just the first few moves of a game. Magnus Carlsen, the world's top-ranked player, a five-time World Chess Champion, and arguably the best player in the history of the game, has played this opening. But Carlsen 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. Messi, of course, is known for winning games, not losing them in record time.

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.

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

Users on r/chess also said this was not OpenAI's first ad with a misplaced piece: an earlier spot reportedly put Black's queen on e8 instead of d8. “Nearly a trillion dollar evaluation and they can't put the queen on the right square lol,” one commenter wrote.

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, 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, the open-source engine that has sat atop computer chess ratings for over a decade. The two approach the game in fundamentally different ways: Stockfish evaluates positions by calculating concrete moves on a board, while ChatGPT generates text by predicting words—a gap that surfaces whenever general-purpose chatbots are asked to actually play. 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.

For a separate ad on X, OpenAI fixed the footage in post and changed the pieces so the board was correct. The pieces are fine there—but the GOAT Horns itself is still a horrible opening to play, especially for a beginner like Messi.

The original video is still live on Messi's Instagram. Whether it receives the same post-production correction remains to be seen.