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Mind Sports Organisation

Association for promoting mind sports

The Mind Sports Organisation (MSO) is an association for promoting mind sports including Contract Bridge, Chess, Go, Mastermind, and Scrabble. Since 1997 it has annually organised in England a multi-sport competition, the Mind Sports Olympiad. The MSO was founded in conjunction with the first Mind Sports Olympiad.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

1997Founded1
  • HeadquartersLondon1

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The Mind Sports Organisation (MSO) is an association for promoting mind sports including Contract Bridge, Chess, Go, Mastermind, and Scrabble. Since 1997 it has annually organised in England a multi-sport competition, the Mind Sports Olympiad.2

Products and brands

  • Mind Sports Olympiad

Listed on Wikidata.1

Games at the MSO

The MSO consists mainly of single event competitions most of which are for the nominal title of Olympiad champion, though some trademarked games are authorised by the game designer and publishers as the official world championships. All games, whether an Olympiad or the official World championship, can count towards the Pentamind. Medals, and more recently trophies, are awarded for gold, silver and bronze positions in each competition as well as ranks, with similar awards for the top juniors in each event. In early Olympiads sponsorship allowed for generous financial prizes to go with many of the events. In recent years such prizes have been limited to a small number of events, usually as a result of specific outside sponsorship for that discipline.

Notable games include (most other refs mention some of these):

The well-known: chess, bridge, draughts, shogi, backgammon, Chinesechess (xiang-qi), Othello, poker, cribbage, Mastermind

And many newer games such as: Abalone, Boku, Continuo, Entropy, Kamisado, Lines of Action (LOA), Pacru, Twixt

Read the full text

At MSO tournaments, the Decamentathlon is a composite event in which players compete in ten separate mind sports. The following mental skills have always been part of the Decamentathlon: memory skills, mental calculation, IQ, chess, Go, othello, 8 by 8 draughts, and creative thinking. MSO also organises Mental Calculation World Championship separately. The remaining two mental skills have changed over the years and come from this list: contract bridge, Backgammon, Mastermind, and most recently Sudoku.

The MSO introduced the Abstract Games World Championship in 2008.

World Mind Sports Games

The World Mind Sports Games (WMSG) was created by the International Mind Sports Association (IMSA) as a "stepping stone on the path of introducing a third kind of Olympic Games (after the Summer and the Winter Olympics)". with the aim to be held alongside the Summer Olympic Games every 4 years. The first WMSG was held in Beijing 2008 to coincide with Olympic host city; the 2012 WMSG was held in Lille, France.

From Wikipedia’s article on Mind Sports Organisation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3

Timeline

  1. 1997Founded Founded1

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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