England star Eberechi Eze WINS final of Twitch chess tournament – but takes home less than a day's wages
EBERECHI EZE is already king of the Palace.
But it was his queen to E3 that won him £15,000 in a chess competition on Friday night.
7
7
7
Eze, 26, was Crystal Palace's knight in shining armour as he fired his side into the FA Cup final.
The Eagles star scored a belting opener in last weekend's Wembley semi-final victory over Aston Villa.
But he showed plenty more quick thinking and tactical prowess as he soared to his chess tournament win.
Eze lined up in chess.com's 12-player celebrity PogChamps 6 which ran this week.
After coming through the round-robin stage, he earned himself a bye into the semi-finals where he beat Stephen Nedoroscik 2-0.
Then in Friday night's final, he saw off Sapnap by the same scoreline.
The final was live streamed on Twitch, with Eze sporting a white t-shirt and gaming headset at home - with a piece of artwork depicting him playing for England in the background.
The ten-cap Three Lions hero - playing under the username Ebz Eze with a rating of 1,147 - stormed to the title, closing out the win with his typical class and style.
He moved his rook to the top end of the virtual board, putting Sapnap in check and forcing him to bring his king up.
But that played perfectly into Eze's trap as the Palace man immediately moved his queen into position.
'Raiders of The Selhurst Park' - Bidding war for Geuhi and Eze imminient?
And it meant Sapnap had nowhere to move his king into safety and therefore found himself in checkmate.
When the screen flashed to confirm Eze's triumph, the footballer hilariously shouted "come on" then raised a fist in celebration as he smiled at the camera before bursting into laughter.
Ironically, despite earning almost exactly a day's wages with the £15k prize, the £100,000-a-week playmaker celebrated his chess glory more enthusiastically than his Wembley wonderstrike.
Earlier in the tournament, though, there was major controversy as one of the internet personalities was booted out for cheating.
YouTuber DrLupo admitted he "f***ed up" by reading the live chat to attain "information he shouldn't have had" against a higher-ranked opponent.
Eze, meanwhile, will be hoping for another win on Sunday when Oliver Glasner's side make the trip across the capital to face Tottenham.
But much of Palace's focus is already on the FA Cup final against Manchester City on May 17 - with the South Londoners hoping to win their very first major honour.
SunSport also revealed Eze could be allowed to leave Selhurst Park this summer alongside team-mate Marc Guehi to raise £130million for a squad overhaul.
He has two years left on his current contract but the likes of Tottenham and Manchester United may trigger his £60m release clause.
7
7
7
7
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scotsman
an hour ago
- Scotsman
Jobe Bellingham Borussia Dortmund: Transfer fee, salary, how old is Jobe Bellingham, stats and position
Jobe Bellingham has completed his transfer to Borussia Dortmund from EPL outfit Sunderland. Sign up to our Football newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Borussia Dortmund have completed the signing of Sunderland midfielder Jobe Bellingham after the Bundesliga giants confirmed he had joined the club in a megabucks move on Tuesday afternoon. The 19-year-old has spent the last two seasons at the Stadium of Light after joining the club from Birmingham City for a fee of £3million, playing a pivotal role as the Wearsiders made their long-awaited return to the English Premier League by beating Sheffield United 2-1 in the EFL Championship playoff final at Wembley last month. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Having already made over 100 senior appearances despite his young years, Jobe's impact at Sunderland has been significant, but he has now made the decision to move onto the next step in his journey, departing the club in order to move to the Signal Iduna after they had struck up an agreement with the Wearside club. But how much will Jobe earn at Borussia Dortmund, how much has he cost them, and what are his key stats? Jobe Bellingham applauds the Sunderland fans following their goalless draw at Turf Moor in January (Photo by) How old is Jobe Bellingham? The England under-21 midfielder is still just 19-years of age. He will not turn 20 until later this year, with his birthday coming on 23th September. Prior to his move to Sunderland, he was Birmingham City's second youngest debutant, making his senior bow at the age of just 16 years and 107 days in a FA Cup third round tie against Plymouth Argyle in January 2022. Jobe Bellingham stats and position Despite being 19, he has made a total of 144 club appearances, he has scored 15 goals and and provided five assists, with his entire season being in the EFL Championship, playing for Birmingham and - most recently - Sunderland. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Jobe is capable of playing in a variety of positions, having played in a defensive midfield role (aka in the six), number 10 and even striker during his time at Sunderland. His preferred position is the number eight role, where he excelled last season as a box-to-box midfielder at the Stadium of Light. Jobe Bellingham Borussia Dortmund salary Bellingham's move to the Bundesliga giants will see him increase his current wages significantly. According to Capology, Jobe earns a weekly wage of £12,500 at the Stadium of Light, but this will increase to €67,308 per week (approximately £56,649) at Signal Iduna Park, before bonuses. He has signed a five-year-deal at Dortmund, keeping him at the club until the summer of 2030. Jobe Bellingham transfer - how does it compare to Jude Bellingham Multiple sources have claimed that the Sunderland midfielder gave a 'decision in principle' to join Borussia Dortmund following the conclusion of his season with Sunderland late last month, turning down a move to Eintracht Frankfurt and RB Leipzig in the process. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The 19-year-old is believed to have been convinced to make the move to the Signal Iduna due to the extensive efforts from Dortmund's management team, head coach Niko Kovac, sporting director Sebastian Kehl and CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke, who are reported to have met with Jobe and his family in England and Ibiza in order to outline the club's vision and ambitions for him. The fee being paid by Dortmund for Jobe Bellingham is higher than the one they paid for his brother Jude back in 2020, with the club paying Birmingham City an initial fee of £25million (€30 million). Jude was later sold for a fee of €103 million euros (£86 million) to Real Madrid, but it was reported that another €30m could be added in the form of add-ons. The fee is for Jobe is said to be around €33million upfront, with potential add-ons of €5million, bringing the potential value of the transfer to €38million, including a sell-on fee of 15%, as confirmed by the SunderlandEcho. Jude Bellingham and his brother Jobe have enjoyed a holiday in the South of France. (Picture: Instagram/@ judebellingham) | Instagram/@ judebellingham Jobe Bellingham Dortmund squad number Jobe Bellingham will wear the number 77 shirt at Borussia Dortmund for the FIFA Club World Cup, they have confirmed. Although this has the potential to change once the Bundesliga season starts. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad His brother Jude, who played for Dortmund between 2020 and 2023, wore the number 22 shirt during his time at the club, before switching to the iconic number 5 following his megabucks transfer to Real Madrid. If he wants to pick the same number as his brother, the number 22 shirt is currently available at Dortmund. It is doubtful he will choose this number though, given Jobe's insistence that he does not want comparisons with his brother. At present, Jobe wears the number 7 shirt with Sunderland, and often sports the number 10 shirt for England's youth teams.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Ange Postecoglou's triumphant sacking holds the key to modern football
Enjoy your launch. And for Ange Postecoglou, who always bristled at the idea that his wealth of coaching experience had somehow been earned in inferior competitions, perhaps his departure from Tottenham really can be a kind of springboard: to one of these prestigious, equally demanding leagues he keeps talking about. Maybe the struggling Gamba Osaka. Perth Glory could well have a vacancy soon. Motherwell are still looking. A step down? That's just your old-world, Eurocentric, Prem-brained snobbery showing right through there, mate. And so to Postecoglou's many rhetorical elisions can be added another: the triumphant sacking. Perhaps it was only in this universe – the post-truth universe – that such a feat was even conceivable. Along with the Europa League trophy he so stunningly spirited to north London, this may turn out to be the defining legacy of the Postecoglou interregnum. There have been better Premier League managers. There have been more charming and more entertaining Premier League managers. But there may never have been a manager better at defining his own terms of achievement; a managerial reign so evidently built upon a towering silo of nuclear-strength bullshit. From the very start, Angeball constructed its own bespoke logic as it went along. The journey matters more than the destination. There is a process, and we stick to it. There are principles, and however tough things get, you never deviate from or compromise on them. 'Even if we go down to five men, we will have a go,' he said after his nine men were defeated by Chelsea in November 2023. The idea of Champions League qualification as a goal in its own right, unaccompanied by broader progress: 'meaningless', as he put it in March 2024. In January 2024 he rejected the idea that a single trophy could ever constitute satisfaction or atone for mediocrity elsewhere ('You can't just sit back and say: 'I've just delivered a trophy, shouldn't I have some latitude to not be successful?''). In October 2024 he insisted that Tottenham's league performance should be regarded as the 'most meaningful' measure of his side's progress. Ange Postecoglou 2023-24: meet Ange Postecoglou 2025. The coach who promised to attack in all circumstances, who disdained the transformative effect of a single trophy, has just won a trophy with the lowest possession recorded in a European final because sometimes – as he put it in Bilbao – 'you have to change your approach'. A coach who urged us to judge him on the league now no longer judges himself on the league. A coach who blames Tottenham's abject league performance on a freak injury crisis also takes no responsibility for that injury crisis, for a style of play in which Tottenham comfortably spend more time in high-intensity sprints than any other Premier League team. A coach who claims he takes no notice of what is said and written about him has spent a suspiciously high proportion of this season reacting to things that have been said and written about him. None of this is a character judgment or smoking gun in its own right. Changing your mind when the facts change: this is, in fact, entirely normal and rational behaviour. Hypocrisy is what makes us human. Go back through everything I've written about Postecoglou over the last two years and I'm sure you'll find it riddled with compromising contradictions. For what it's worth, I think the decision to sack Postecoglou now is a big error on Daniel Levy's part. At a time when Spurs are undergoing all shades of upheaval off the pitch, trying to bolster an underpowered squad, a managerial search and a vibe shift is the last thing they need. Beyond this there is an enduring fascination to Postecoglou, the animal magnetism of the true ideologue. He came to the Premier League with no great reputation or playing record behind him. Tactically, he offered little groundbreaking or novel beyond a hard-running, hard-chasing dogma in which the only solution to every problem is to believe harder in the dogma. The dogma will win your duels. It will head away set pieces for you. And if it doesn't, it was ultimately your fault for not believing sufficiently in the dogma. In an important sense Postecoglou marked a continuation of the Mourinho-Conte axis: the latest in a series of coaches convinced that their own principles were stronger and worthier than those of the club, determined to prove to the world that Tottenham was terminally sick, yet they alone had the cure. All of a sudden, one February morning, the league is gone; survival secure. The new dogma is defending like hell against continental Europeans on a Thursday. In fact, scratch that: this was always the dogma. There was no old dogma. This was what you were trying to build all along. Of course this has always been Postecoglou's real superpower: the cult of personality, the ability to render words convincingly true simply by emitting them from your mouth, to build castles and citadels of bullshit, an apparatus of demagoguery so potent and alluring that it supplants all previous logic. Which – and no moral judgements here – is quite interesting, right? A 57-year-old Australian bullshits his way into a Premier League job, to spectacular away wins at Manchester City and Manchester United, to some of the most entertaining football ever seen from a Tottenham team in my lifetime. He convinces players to run themselves past the point of wellness. He convinces them to stick together amid a frightening assemblage of centrifugal forces. He convinces a significant part of the English footballing public that league tables are a form of fraud. And finally to a European title. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Plot twist: the bullshit works. This isn't a cheap con job. This is talent, as surely as substitutions or being able to put on a small-sided coaching session is talent. And what it exposes – perhaps 'indicates' is a better word – is how much of modern football is essentially an act of persuasion. Agents bullshit. So do analysts and marketers and journalists. An entire industry built on pure narrative skill, the ability to make things up on the fly and bring people with you. What matters is not what you say, but the conviction with which you believe it to be true at the time. And so the Postecoglou who declared at Celtic that he was 'exactly where I want to be' now seeks another fresh start. Perhaps a sideways move to another Premier League club, perhaps even a step up in class to the Greek Super League, the Korean K League, the League of Ireland. This part will not be a problem. Football has no shortage of soiled dreamers, clubs who missed the gold rush, fans whose only real desire is to feel something again. Marseille, Roma, Benfica, Schalke, West Ham. Leeds sacking Daniel Farke in November and going all in on Angeball feels like a perfect fit. There is of course an irony here. In his meticulously cultivated personal branding, Postecoglou often likes to paint himself as a throwback, an outsider, a counter-culturalist, the grizzled underdog. But in his reliance on patter and persuasion, bluster and bluff, he is in fact a very modern footballing phenomenon. This is Ange's world now, and we're all bullshitting in it.
Daily Mirror
an hour ago
- Daily Mirror
Prince Harry and Meghan's single word that left late Queen fearing 'disaster'
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle never intended to leave royal life altogether, but one word in their sensational statement lead to an ultimatum from the Palace, according to insiders Prince Harry and Meghan Markle completely quitting their royal roles came down to the use of a single word, according to an insider. Now five years on from them sensationally stepping back as full-time working royals, the Sussexes appear to have left their former lives well and truly behind them. The pair have both been focusing on their commercial endeavours with Meghan sharing more and more of her life behind the scenes on Instagram, including a recent video of her twerking alongside Harry as they awaited the birth of their daughter Princess Lilibet. However, when they first announced their intention for change more than five years ago, it seemed that they did not want to quit royal life completely, instead saying that they intended to "carve out a progressive new role within this institution". But it appears a throwaway, single word in that very statement paved the way for an ultimatum that there would be no half-in, half-out arrangement for them. In the statement announcing their stepping back, the Sussexes said at the time: "We will continue to collaborate with Her Majesty The Queen, The Prince of Wales, The Duke of Cambridge and all relevant parties." And according to the Daily Mail, the word 'collaborate' is what raised eyebrows, with a source telling the publication: "No-one 'collaborates' with the Queen. This is not one of those 'Kate Moss Top Shop tie-ups'." And with the Sussexes, most notably Meghan, forging a very different path compared to the one she had in the Royal Family, the insider added: "This is exactly why Queen Elizabeth knew this whole half-in, half-out version of royalty they were lobbying for was never, ever going to work. "Harry and Meghan were a law unto themselves from the start, pushing and pushing the envelope to their own professional and financial advantage. Her Late Majesty was nobody's fool and knew that the chances were, it would all end in disaster." In the dancing clip from last week, a heavily pregnant Meghan twerks to the Starrkeisha song Baby Momma, lifting her skirt above her knees, raising her hands in the air and wiggling low with her hands on her hips and legs. Meghan shared the clip on Lilibet's fourth birthday, saying: "Four years ago today, this also happened. "Both of our children were a week past their due dates… so when spicy food, all that walking, and acupuncture didn't work – there was only one thing left to do!" And for royal expert Jennie Bond, she believes it is an "astonishing video on any level" and reveals what the King would have thought of it. The former BBC royal correspondent told the Mirror: "The hours before you give birth are some of the most personal, intimate and private in the lives of any couple. "And women are perfectly entitled to do whatever they feel like to get through the waiting, and the pain. Giving birth is a serious business, and anything to lighten the mood is welcome. "However - to share those scenes with the world is utterly bizarre and, in my view, takes away all the magic of the moment. I cannot imagine why she chose to release it. Maybe show it one day to your nearest and dearest— but to anyone and everyone who wants to click on it? "If the King has watched it, which I doubt, though he can't have missed the headlines I'm sure he would be horrified. Royalty has to carry with it some measure of dignity." But she added: "Having said all that, there's no doubt that videos like this connect in a very real way to young people. And perhaps that's what Meghan is trying to do. "My own daughter thought the video humanised both Meghan and Harry and was light-hearted and hugely relatable. It reminded her of her own pregnancies and labour and she thought it was rather charming."
