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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

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paulddraper

Watch grandmasters. Especially playing bullet/blitz.

These are just a different species of human.

The "I'm intelligent and I know the rules" is rated 800.

The "I'm pretty good at chess" is rated 1200.

A 1600 player will beat a 1200 player 9/10 times.

A 2000 player will beat a 1600 player 9/10 times.

A 2400 player (grandmaster) will beat a 2000 player 9/10 times.

People like Eric Rosen and Levy Rozman base their entire career around studying, playing, and teaching chess on Twitch and Youtube. Hours and hours a day. They are really, really good and play in competitions.

But even they are not at the grandmaster level.

EDIT: To use an analogy, reaching grandmaster status is comparable to playing in the NBA.

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When I watch super grand-masters calculate tactics, or play simuls while blinded, I know that they are just built different in a way that I was either never built for, or would have had to begin my training early during development.

Even an IM (International Master) is blown away by the waya GM (Grandmaster) thinks/analyzes. Levy does a video with Hikaru and he looks like an amateur in comparison.

I was trying find that video.

I think Hikaru plays him at rook+knight odds or something.

The video where they analyze tricky positions on their own and then compare notes is pretty illuminating. Hikaru's thought process is just different from an IM.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dQzTnvsNG4

To be fair to Levy, Hikaru is the best blitz player alive and one of the top 20 classical players. Hikaru is better than your typical grandmaster by about the same amount that a grandmaster is better than Levy (250 rating vs 150 rating points).

A 2882 player (Magnus Carlsen) will beat a 2400 player 9/10 times.

A 3544 engine (Stockfish) will beat a 2882 player 10/10 times.

Maybe not fair to say "beat". Probably more fair to say "beat or draw"...

Why? At equal level, sure, but when so far above it'd be surprising not to win.

I think the context here is it's an average win rate across multiple games (i.e. playing both white/black an equal number of times per player).

A draw counts as "half beaten."

So 8 wins and 2 draws is winning 9/10.

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A 660 point difference between Stockfish and Carlsen should be a 1 - 10^(-662/400) = 98% win rate for Stockfish.

More than likely, that's 96% win, 4% draw, 0% loss.

> Watch grandmasters. Especially playing bullet/blitz.

Or even Minefield: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EtKWLgOX60U (I don’t think Nakamura is playing optimally w.r.t. being in a guessing spot, but he’s fast)

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