221–227 of 227 posts
I recently screened a few intern resumes that listed chess rankings/scores/clubs—in a world of too many boring & plain resumes that fail to show aspects of your character, this was a welcome addition of variety—but sadly they were primarily only cultural fits on my team, not technical fits.
Hiring people because they share your hobby is tacky and bad business.
I liked it for expressions of their character.
Chess is having its soccer moment now. Here is why: 1- The entry cost has fallen dramatically. Before at a minimum you'd need to afford a chess set and a couple of books. Now, all you need is a parents phone. This is similar to soccer, where the entry cost is any ball you can find. 2- its egalitarian. Your size, sex, height, and even age do not matter. This has always been true but now its more pronounced with apps b…
That was all true ten years ago too so I don’t think that’s it. What changed is the Queen’s Gambit got popular, then covid caused online gaming to become even more popular, and then there were some things that made chess popular recently like chess boxing with streamers on YouTube.
I'm not sure if The Queen's Gambit is popular viewing with the 11-14 year olds obsessing over chess in my local middle school.
Twitch? Yes.
They had to stand up four separate chess clubs because one club with 300 members (about half the student body) was too much to handle.
So now there are intense intra-school rivalries like with Hogwarts houses-- never mind inter-mural competition.
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In high school usually there is some kind of a social class pyramid built on how good you can play football(not in the U.S.). The best one is the coolest and so on. While people who don't play are constantly bullied.
In what school, today, are kids who don't play football constantly bullied? The only place I've seen that happen is in movies from the 80's early 90's.
I've recently started playing chess again a bit (after doing it a bit when I was a teen), and there's an interesting aspect of online chess that I began to realize: When I was young you needed a local opponent to play chess, and that wasn't always easy. Why? Because most people around you were either significantly better (you always loose) or worse (you always win). It's not an interesting game if the outcome is almo…
The other fundamentally different thing is the learning tools. As a kid, I had one book on one opening and I had to sit by a board reading it to make the moves to try to dial in the learning. It was a slow and laborious process. I tried checking out another chess book from the library, but had to return it before I made significant headway. There was also one chess puzzle in the newspaper per week, which was fun, but…
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I think matching by level is quite psychologically destructive, and should be avoided. People grind for hours and they see no sense of progress as they keep always being around 50% winrate because the stronger they get, the better the opponent get. And inversely they can play drunk chess and still win 50% and burn time pushing random pieces for a little short-term fun. It probably depends on people but I think the av…
That's a very elaborate way of saying that competitive players should delude themselves to cope with their weak mental game. > Anything below 80% winrate, means it becomes hard to distinguish the learning signal from the variance of the matching. Using winrate as a learning signal is your first mistake. You're making a million different decisions per game, and then decide to summarize it with a binary W/L? If you wan…
You do realize that a lot of players play for their definition of fun and don't derive or base their personality around their strength as chess players, I hope?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what school, today, are kids who don't play football constantly bullied? The only place I've seen that happen is in movies from the 80's early 90's.
It depends on where you live really, its still going on in a lot of countries.