Norway challenged the world to a chess match… and the Internet trolls won

Remember that crowd-sourced chess match we told you about earlier this week?

Norway was going to take on the world — via tweets. Anyone with a Norwegian Internet address could vote on Norway's moves. And anyone else could vote on the world's next move.

Well, Norway's Aftenposten newspaper had to pull the plug on its online chess tournament.

Editor Kjetil Kolsrud says it didn't take long before both sides were plagued by deliberately bad chess moves.

“After a few hours, we noticed that some very bad moves were getting a lot of votes and, after some research, we found this chat room where people had apparently mobilized people around the world to cast votes for particularly bad moves to influence the game," he said. "We just realized that we weren't going to be able to stand up against it and we shut the game down."

Kolsrud says he doesn't really care that some saboteurs wrecked his chess match.

“Trolls, I guess," he said. "As a father of two kids, I'm always happy to see that people have a lot of spare time."

A little too much spare time, apparently.