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8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

chess.com

41–50 of 192 posts

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#41
You can find Top 100 lists at http://www.uschess.org/component/option,com_top_players/Item... and his play history at http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?16649696 .

It is almost precisely a year since his first tournament game so there is no exaggeration. Going to 1473 in one year is extremely impressive especially since early tournaments show loses so it isn't like he excelled but simply wasn't rated.

For reference, Magnus Carlson played since 5 (though not too enthusiastically) and was ~900 at age 9. But he was a 1900 a year later.

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#42
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> #27 in America for eight-year-olds The granularity of this ranking is interesting.

I disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the…

*sandbagging

it's a term across all sports

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#43
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> #27 in America for eight-year-olds The granularity of this ranking is interesting.

I disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the…

minor correction: "sandbagging". the term is common in the scrabble tournament community too, and i'd always assumed it was metaphorically "ambush by hitting someone over the head with a sandbag", but apparently that's only the presumed etymology, and there is at least one other theory out there: https://ridemonkey.bikemag.com/threads/anybody-know-origins-...

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that even grand masters get beaten by cell phone chess games these days.

Probably not that far from truth. Yet I don't see cellphone chess programs make first page, for some reason. Why is that?

Exactly the truth, actually.

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#46
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the…

minor correction: "sandbagging". the term is common in the scrabble tournament community too, and i'd always assumed it was metaphorically "ambush by hitting someone over the head with a sandbag", but apparently that's only the presumed etymology, and there is at least one other theory out there: https://ridemonkey.bikemag.com/threads/anybody-know-origins-...

just a typo :) thanks!

I think chess.com is actually writing code to combat sandbagging. I don't know if they're using machine learning for it yet, but it would certainly be possible for a deep learning system to spot probable sandbaggers, if they have enough history of their games.

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard that even grand masters get beaten by cell phone chess games these days.

Probably not that far from truth. Yet I don't see cellphone chess programs make first page, for some reason. Why is that?

Maybe the same reason you don't see news stories about chess grandmasters beating 8 year olds?

They're out of their class and dramatically outmatched - the cellphone chess programs can't really compete with better resourced chess computers

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#48
I got whooped by a 10 year old girl in a local tournament. And I didn't make any gruesome mistakes, she just out thunk me. Of course it was one of the last games of the day, so there was a big crowd around the board.

Kids like these should be kept to their own age class ... to protect the fragile egos of patzers like me.

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#49

How can we, as a society, support our future during its most vulnerable time (childhood)? How is it possible that we still have homeless children in a country with so much wealth? (I'm seriously asking. I want to know how many other similarly bright minds aren't being supported to their full potential due to circumstances not their fault, and what public administrative techniques have been proven to work or not work…

> How can we, as a society, support our future during its most vulnerable time (childhood)? How is it possible that we still have homeless children in a country with so much wealth? The argument goes like this: > Because why should I care for someone else's child and why should I shell out money because someone decided to have children even though they shouldn't have ?

> Because why should I care for someone else's child and why should I shell out money because someone decided to have children even though they shouldn't have ?

The worst part of this is it naturally encourages classism. Only wealthy people should have children, only wealthy people should have pets, etc.

Re: 8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship

#50
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell is this supposed to be?

It's supposed to be clever, I imagine. It just comes across as churlish, though. EDIT: Even the fact that the comment was edited from some stupid pseudocode, into something that cries "wrongthink" plays thusly...

I'm not sure how 'pseudocode' justifies "what the hell is this"..?
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