World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen Is Now World Fantasy Premier League #1 | Hacker News Reader

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen Is Now World Fantasy Premier League #1

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204 pointsthom124 comments

People may not understand how big an achievement this is. Yes you need a lot of good fortune, but there are 7m players of FPL. For most, getting into the top 100k is seen as a good result for the end of the season.

Magus is clearly a massive football fan though - he talks about it a lot on his livestreams etc.

It's mind-boggling to me. I've been a huge/obsessed fan all my life and never got in the top 200k

Someone has always been number 1 though :-). This is only news because he is also world class at another game.

Wouldn’t this also infer that Magnus has understood the mechanics of the game more than almost anyone else?

By which I mean to say couldn’t this translate indirectly to an edge (I realize FPL and predicting individual match outcomes are very different) in sports betting?

I’m ordinarily utterly skeptical of any such suggestion, but Magnus thinks at a level beyond my understanding so what do I know?

Imply, not infer.

But yes, the people who know a knowledge-based game better are better at playing it.

Wow, that really obliterates two major assumptions I had about chess (1) that you can't win without 100% dedication to chess (2) that the skills are highly domain specific and not transferable.

I still think that chess skills are highly domain specific, but it clearly shows he has more than one skill that he dominates.

He might have mastered one skill (or has a trait) that allows him to dominate both chess and FPL.

It's impressive.

I suppose you could say there are some skills from chess that are very transferable to something like managing a fantasy sports team; the ability to predict or prepare for certain outcomes and the ability to manage and minimize risk being two that come to mind.

It also helps that Carlsen is a football fan and has domain knowledge there that assist him in employing these skills.

A previous article on this mentioned his superb memory, which is probably also an asset to both games.

Depends on what you consider chess-related work. I would put sleep, exercise, diet, meditation and other interests as chess-related work for a full-time chess player.

Even if you didn't, studying chess for more than 8 hours a day has diminishing returns, especially for older players like Carlsen.

One of the reasons older players don't continue to get better and start to get worse as they pass 40 is they find it hard to maintain high levels of concentration over a 4 hour game.

This is his account (not updated yet) https://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1908330/event/17

He was climbing really well https://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1908330/history

I'm clueless as well but here is the best thing I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_(gridiron)

To me this sounds a lot like FIFA (the game by EA), which I'm clueless about as well.

FIFA is you playing a virtual soccer team.

Fantasy football is you managing a soccer team roster with points given to your chosen players based on real world performance the past week.

You're still managing a team though

I posted on the wrong top-level comment which might explain the confusion.

I meant to answer to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21791504

Salah in midfield? Say what?

Although he plays in a wide forward/winger like position for Liverpool they classify wingers generally as midfielders. Think of this in terms of the classic 4-2-3-1 position(not something LIV uses a lot). Firmino generally becomes the No 9 and he would be classified as forward. Even Son is classified as Mid.

Though in the 4-2-3-1 Liverpool played today Salah was the most forward player.

It's a ridiculous decision, even the stats disagree.[0]

"Salah was the furthest forward in 8 of Liverpool’s last 10 Premier League games from last season."

I imagine it's done for marketing reasons so more people can fit him into their team; same with Son.

[0] https://www.fantasyfootballpundit.com/mohamed-salah-forward-...

Yeah, ideally they should be classified as forwards. Though I guess Salah being the furthest forward is more because of Firmino being a False 9 rather than a proper No 9, which makes his case for being considered as a FWD even more valid.

This seems to be one of the big loopholes in fantasy football, that sometimes an attacker who isn't usually the number 9 in a 4-3-3 or 4-2-3-1 might be available as a midfielder.

It is interesting to see his choices.

- Picking Salah and making him captain makes sense because of his form uptick and the opposition being someone he scores against.

- So did keeping Leicester and Sheffield players, though he was unlucky with the unexpected result at Leicester.

- I am surprised he kept Alli in but left the Wolves player out, I would expect Wolves to score and possibly win as well. But he is #1, so we will find out tomorrow.

Interesting that he mentions a stats-based approach, calling out provider Opta by name:

https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen/status/1204105872668016642

Sounds like a clever marketing scheme from Opta.

Sure, but you can't fake winning.

I doubt it is. Opta is probably what most publications and broadcasters use as well. I don't think there is anyone else who collects stats that deep across so many leagues.

Sometimes even I am surprised the details of those stats, like passes by an individual player, distance covered etc.

It's actually a pretty crowded market at this point (I work at a competitor but have worked professionally with their data). The distance-covered sort of stats come from tracking data (usually derived optically from multiple cameras, giving locations of every player and the ball at 20hz or so), which Opta didn't offer directly until their merger with STATS.

Wow, I did not know this. They have special cameras in the grounds or this is just them having access to raw feed from all regular broadcasting cameras.

I would love to read up on how this is recorded, processed and kept if you have any source.

Most of the big providers require special cameras in the stadium (some up to 16). Some can do this from video feeds (even broadcast quality, which obviously misses some info). You can read about one of the leading providers here:

https://chyronhego.com/products/sports-tracking/tracab-optic...

You have fee access to it through numerous websites, not complete but very throughout numbers. He is calling out opta directly, not sure what kind of interface they offer unless he is reading their xml feeds directly.

Opta is the pioneer and the current standard of detailed football statistics.

Working with their xml data feeds still gives me PTSD.

Amen to that.

Can someone explain what this is and the significance of Carlsen's achievement to someone completely and utterly clueless about football?

Fantasy sports is when you pick a fake roster of players, subject to certain rules. You get points based on how well your chosen players do. Carlsen is the best in the world at this. And at chess.

It's a very luck based game, or so it seems. With 7 million players. But last year the world chess champion was top-100 and now he's (at this particular moment) first.

Being good at managing uncertain outcomes is not luck though, although the difference between that and luck is nuanced and this often gets lost in discussion.

This is very true, which is (for example) where the skill in high level poker comes from.

There is indeed skill in managing uncertain outcomes and being rank 100k or rank 100 is a clear indicator of a skill difference. But there is indeed luck also, and you can't really tell the skill difference between the world first player and probably the first hundred, because the luck factor weight more than the skill difference at this point.

Fantasy sports for money is a huge business here in the states - FanDuel and DraftKings probably do north of $200 million of revenue each in the vertical alone - and almost all of the top players have some kind of data science or math background.

It’s not a coincidence.

Updated the title from 'Fantasy Football' to 'Fantasy Premier League' to stave off continued tedious arguments about international sporting nomenclature.

I'd love to see him take on Magic: the Gathering, especially formats like vintage or legacy.

The top MTG players have mostly gone on to poker, where the prizes are much more lucrative.

Of course a lot of those players have in turn gone on to gambling and hedge funds.

I often wonder about this in the context of musicians and actors. You would have to be a fool to pick such careers, as the prospects are so dim. Yet because of this dimness the selection pressure is very high on the pool of contenders. So our best actors and musicians are fool/geniuses.

Which implies the most innately talented potential musicians and actors are working at a hedge fund or Google DeepMind. And perhaps the odd personalities of musicians and actors is more to do with the bottlenecked selection than some relationship between talent and impulsivity: Only the egotistical and impulsive would step into such fray.

And so we are left not with the best but with the best of a bad lot!

Or, you know, they enjoy the craft/art-form, and want to do it professionally. There's definitely some weird selection pressure in show-biz, and impulsiveness/ego may play a small role, but there's a million ego-maniacs for every Tom Cruise.

People wanting a more reliable job can work in any field with reliable jobs. I dont understand why you picked the most prestigious ones. Aren't they more likely to be farmers or nurses or teachers?

That assumes everyone picks their job as a rational economic actor. This is clearly not the case. Even if it were, if you believe you have a decent change then you might as well give it one shot, and if it doesn't work then you can fall back on something else while you're young.

Note that this is the same rational for starting a startup. Would you argue that all successful startup founders are the best of a bad lot?

Musican and actor are winner take all (or most markets).

Economics would predict the 10 guys really really good at singing would tour, as they make many millions of dollars.. and the guys that are only OK at singing (but also good at math), go on to be accountants and sit in a desk somewhere. Global demand for accountants is much higher than singers.

When I interned at a prop trading firm for a summer, I noticed a few copies of Meddling Mage lying around on an unused desk. Turns out that the guy who designed the card (as a reward for winning the Magic Invitational) had previously worked there.

The most popular player never to make it into the MtG Hall of Fame.

Hah... just noticed he's in a "Grandmaster League": https://fantasy.premierleague.com/leagues/35182/standings/c

Sergej Movsesian (FIDE world #136)

Yúlia Movsesjan (Slovakian female #1)

Radosław Wojtaszek (World #27)

Jon Ludvig Hammer (second to Carlsen in WCC 2013)

etc.

For comparison, these are the ranks of the other grandmasters in the group:

  rank       rank / 7,182,778 players:
  ____________________________________
  1 -------- 0.0000139%
  23,365 --- 0.3252920%
  238,352 -- 3.3183818%
  391,870 -- 5.4556886%
  448,139 -- 6.2390763%
  510,354 -- 7.1052454%
  602,723 -- 8.3912241%
  726,511 -- 10.1146242%
  728,141 -- 10.1373173%
  2,011,481  28.0042207%
  2,258,848  31.4481110%
  3,993,041  55.5918755%
  5,015,777  69.8306004%

Towering football geniuses, the lot of them:

https://en.chessbase.com/post/three-million-view-chess-playe...

I wonder how Messi would do on Fantasy Chess League.

Is there even such a thing as a Fantasy Chess league?

Yes, basically every sport now has someone running a fantasy version.

whoosh

People who are competitive at one game sometimes jump to another based on market trends, and although the transition can be rough, enough make it through that it becomes a visible thing.

This is a mild argument for generality of competence.

Is there some skill that links chess to this? Seems to improbable for a coincidence

I would imagine it's that both are game theory on Markov Chains.

General intelligence?

Yes General IQ, concentration, analysis and synthesis of information, a prediction-oriented mind, and plain capacity to do the work.

Whatever the skill, I'd say it's clear its no coincidence and is down to Magnus' incredible mind and brilliance in whatever skills are needed.

Having said that, you might expect to see good showings in the league by other top-level grandmasters with a similar passion for football.

Perhaps his interest in it is unusually keen within the chess world though, I've no idea.

Memory and intuitive reasoning definitely helps in both, though another part is luck: Carlsen's skilled, but he also has made some incredibly lucky guesses.

What do you think luck is?

Dendoncker scoring his only goal of the season so far right as that became beneficial for Carlsen was something no one could have predicted, for example, but it benefit Carlsen marvelously.

Unlike chess, games with humans aren't fixed: there's luck inherent to them.

Carlsen isn't a chess genius. He's a genius who plays chess. The guy can recall chess positions from games he played as a teenager.

(I played a few games of chess today morning and I can barely remember the openings I played!)

To be honest, that's a really common ability for most elite chess players, who by the time they are teenagers are already grandmasters and have been playing for the best part of 10 years. Not to deny Magnus is a genius, though.

It seems fairly pointless and meaningless to argue whether someone "is a genius" or not.

Check out this recent short video of Magnus being shown and recognizing positions from Vishy Anand games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acVvkz4MsKc

Common might be recognizing the opponent and next move (I, patzer, got half right, also that the move against Lautier was h6!), but Magnus also remembers the year, tournament, most of the game etc. He has a remarkable memory, and studies a lot of games, past and present – because he loves doing it.

Bobby Fischer was similar, from what I hear. I've read quite a few stories of people from around the world meeting him and he'd say "I liked your game against X 10 years ago but you should have played move Y" and they were amazed he'd even heard of them, let alone studied their obscure games. (This was pre-internet and pre-computer-analysis)

Do you have a video of other 2700+ players failing to do this? I've watched plenty of live tournament coverage, and it doesn't seem a rare skill. Not claiming they do it as well as the best player in the world, and arguably of all time, but this honestly just seems like table stakes at this level of the game. It's literally their job, every day, to study games and understand and recall new theory.

There are a few videos from the same channel with exactly that, and they do worse. But we can easily argue why Carlsen should excel at this -- he played WC matches against Anand, and he would have studied all of this as prep.

Sure, although I've seen Carlsen utterly unprepared against opponents countless times as well (and still win). I am just saying I see Jan Gustafsson (admittedly team Carlsen) doing this on air regularly. Anish Giri does it all the time. I've seen Grischuk do it every time he's in a commentary booth.

I thought they actively study and memorise their own games, games of players they currently play against, and games of past notable players. Part of that study and memorising is practising playing the game through from start to finish.

It's not like they accidentally memorised them after they see the game once.

Indeed. I'm willing to believe Magnus is one of the best at this (posted this link because I'm a huge fan!), but it's his job and has been since he was a boy, it's not really magic. And it's just demonstrably not the case that he goes into every game knowing every topical line, not does he really need to.

I'm a big Carlsen fan, he's currently the best chess player in the world, but not all grandmasters think Carlsen or the other top 10 are the best in history.

I can't make an informed opinion myself, but I can retell the arguments I've heard used.

In the past, players like Bobby Fischer dominated their peers, winning tournaments by 5 games or more. Today, super grandmasters play 20 moves of prep from memory and agree to a draw. When they get out of prep they don't play as skillfully as players of the past, pre chess engine era. Today super grandmasters put all their attention into opening theory. (I'm retelling the arguments I've heard, these aren't my own opinions)

I will say I much prefer to watch a super grandmaster blitz or rapid game over a classical game. Not that I watch them live, but I see the occasional video of a grandmaster analysing them in a 10-30 minute video.

I don’t think it’s true that studies show players play less skilfully. At the very least papers like this exist:

https://content.iospress.com/articles/icga-journal/icg0012

But I also think that in a metagame with less equality out of the opening and more blunders, skill was more rewarded in the past - so just look at Magnus’s blitz rating to compare. Either way, the fact is this year Magnus _did_ regularly dominate his peers, despite them all having big teams with thousands of CPU/GPU hours of prep behind them. I know Ben Finegold is never going to be convinced but whatever.

It seems a lot of top athletes have excellent memory. A lot Formula 1 drivers can recall every turn in a race in detail to their engineers. There was a video of LeBron James recalling a some movie in a game in crazy detail.

I dunno if there's any direct link, but certainly some common advantages from a combination of hard work, lots of reps, pattern recognition, large amounts of self-directed free time, a smart group of people around him, a world class IT infrastructure.

In Argentina, where I come from, a couple of GMs, unable to make ends meet with their chess earnings, switched to poker, backgammon and/or bridge, games in which there is a lot of gambling going on, and they made quite a lot of money.

I understand that these games are much more similar to chess than a fantasy football game, but it seems that some chess calculation skills are indeed transferable.

I think that the chess skills themselves are not, but the training skills probably are.

Like identifying various aspects of the game, figuring out how they can be trained, and then spending 10+ hours a day on them for months.

Or getting a database of games played by opponents and analyzing them for weaknesses in their play, and knowing how to exploit such weaknesses, that can probably also be done with poker.

Imagine if he starts picking stocks?

Checkmate.

Would his skill translate to discovering player talent or negotiating player contracts?

He must watch a lot of games to really know who to pick. As someone that dabbled in DFS for the NFL, the #1 team each week always seem like either pure luck or just someone that submits tons of optimal entries.

Now, EPL is definitely different than the NFL but still amazing regardless.

He's not #1 this week (not even close), he's currently #1 over a 16+ weeks period[0]. Each week's #1 is usually one of many random teams, picked for that purpose.

I have no idea how many games he watches, but watching the games isn't correlated to fantasy football success.

Looking at his team, all the players are in a very hot run of form, or likely to be picked just by studying e.g. Understat.com, or both.[1] Most of them are also likeable, and could be suggested by a football fan unaware of fantasy football specifics.

[0] 17th "gameweek" isn't over yet.

[1] Except for goalkeepers. His goalkeeping choices have been awful.

A previous article on this said he watches a huge amount of football.

Dumb question here, does he get paid for this or earn prize money?

There are some prizes https://fantasy.premierleague.com/prizes

But it's a long season, there are 38 rounds and today was the 17th

Umm.... can we get back to the football/soccer article?

Is this american football or regular football?

I’m confused about what sort of person (a) refers to soccer as “real football” but (b) doesn’t know what Premier League means.

This guy’s mind is amazing

Just to clarify, as I myself was confused, this Fantasy Football is not American Football, but ... actual football which Americans refer to as soccer.

And Australians... and Canadians say soccer.

Australia and New Zealand are officially now using 'football' rather than soccer for association football.

The Australian football or footy is something else, a bit like rugby.

Yes but their National 'soccer' association now calls themselves Football Federation Australia, in line with international usage.

And the national team[1] is “the Socceroos”

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_national_soccer_te...

If you're talking about the shape of the ball, yes. Otherwise, no.

But with Orcs and wizards? I'd expect something like Blood Bowl from that name.

5.7 billion people refer to it as football, 300 million refer to it as soccer. Any time you see the word football and any non American person, it's probably talking about association football.

But that doesn't correctly represent the proportions of hacker new readers that would call it soccer. Since this web site was started in the u.s. and is almost entirely English speaking that heavily selects users from English speaking countries, both north America, and in particular the u.s., and especially silicon valley.

I would't be surprised if majority of HN views are from outside North America as of now. There are likely more English speakers in Bangalore than in Silicon Valley.

So what? A thousand trillion people could speak some way, and it wouldn't make it somehow illegitimate for a village of 100 people to speak a different dialect.

More people in the world eat rice than bread, does that mean cultures that eat bread are wrong?

In English, though, the distribution of meaning of the word “football” is more like:

340 million: Grid Iron

60 million: soccer

15 million: Aussie Rules (proper footy)

10 million: Rugby League

5 million: Rugby Union

Probably some Gaelic Football in there too for good measure.

So does this mean Deep Blue can beat Magnus Carlsen in fantasy football?

I'm a bit confused.

Either chess is harder than fantasy and the top 100K players should all be bots, or fantasy is harder than chess and so why is Carlsen and others wasting time on professional chess?

Fantasy Soccer.

"Football" is the proper name for hundreds of millions of people, and literally anyone outside North America.

And yet so many of them know so little about the history of the name and think that they are “correcting” Americans who call it soccer.

The second part is not quite true. It's called soccer in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (and sometimes in Ireland), Calcio in Italy, Sakkā in Japan, Zu Qiu in China...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football

In Aus and Nz, the recent trend has been to use Football than Soccer, the national associations has been renamed accordingly.

Maybe among soccer fans, but the term “football” is rarely used in au and nz to mean soccer.

It’s known as fantasy football to anyone outside of North America.

fantasy Association Football rather than Gridiron Football. apparently Soccer comes from asSOCiation.

I’d wager the majority of both the readers and commenters on this site are American legal residents so using “soccer” would be the democratic choice.

Your comment got me curious about this. The closest thing I could find is an old HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3298905

According to that one ~2/3 of HN visitors are not from the US. It’s old though, and now I’m wondering what the current statistics would look like.

Based on that post more than 50% would use the term soccer.

Opt-in polling is notoriously unreliable but even that poll backs up my claim. You need to add the multiple parts that use “soccer” (which includes Canada) that combined total to about 54%.

Regardless, the parent comment was useful to me and I assume others. Perhaps I should have assumed association football was meant, since Magnus is European, but for whatever reason I didn't.

Fantasy American football is extremely popular in the US, so I think a lot of people would automatically assume that's what was meant.

And yes, we're aware that people in different countries use different words for things.

(And no, actually, it's not called "football" everywhere outside North America. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football)

Fantastic, if you're aware that people in different countries use different words for things, then you can also recognize that GP condescendingly correcting to "fantasy soccer" is unnecessary.

It didn't read to me like a correction; rather, pointing out what the article was about to people who might not have immediately realized.

I have absolutely no problem with people calling it football, soccer, calcio, or anything else.

Fantasy Premier League, in fact, which clears up confusion/bickering, is more accurate, and is the actual text of the OP.

It is now, it wasn't always, and I apologise for the oversight. I watch this argument unfold a few times a week on Twitter, despite everyone in the UK watching TV shows like "Soccer AM" and "Gillette Soccer Saturday" every week of the season.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com