Georgia Tech Graduate Student Wins GeoGuessr World Championship

With a keen eye and a passion for geography, Radu Casapu, a graduate student in the School of City and Regional Planning, won the 2025 GeoGuessr World Championship in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The online game challenges players to identify specific locations using Google Street View in a race against the clock and - in multiplayer mode - their opponent. The World Championship tournament brought together the world's 16 top players, and Casapu entered the tournament as the No. 1 seed after winning the Americas Regional in May.

Each round is a best-of-five match. Casapu hadn't lost a game in the first three rounds of the tournament entering the final round, which came down to the wire. Tied at 2-2, Casapu correctly identified a Chilean landscape to win the decisive final game and the $50,000 prize.

The Suwanee, Georgia, native has been playing GeoGuessr for nearly a decade, but it wasn't his first foray into competition. Casapu participated in geography bees in middle and high school before earning his bachelor's degree in geography from the University of Georgia. Outside the classroom, he says the game becomes a resource that challenges him and helps him learn.

"GeoGuessr is such a holistic game, just like geography is a holistic subject that includes not only physical geography, but also cultural and human geography around the world. The game helps you to study these concepts as well as other areas that provide global context, like architecture, ecology, botany, and other things that I would never have thought I'd start noticing. It gives me a lot of perspective in my own line of work in planning," he said.

As a first-year graduate student at Tech, Casapu is familiarizing himself with his surroundings. Should he come across a campus location while playing the GeoGuessr, he believes he'd first recognize the architectural style and the brickwork of the Institute's historic buildings.

After completing his master's degree, Casapu will pursue a career as a planner at the city or regional level.