Life advice from NYC chess hustlers | Hacker News Reader

Life advice from NYC chess hustlers

annekadet.substack.com

249 pointsgautamcgoel89 comments

They can also teach you how to cheat without getting caught. They will teach you how to double down on the lie when you get caught.

I have played against chess hustlers 5 times in Washington Square Park, caught 4 of them cheating on the spot, and figured out the last one at the end of the game. I'm not an amazing chess player (~1500), but fairly comfortable playing blitz (a bad hobby from when I used to play chess in school). I walked away in disgust each time, and one of them had the guts to threaten me and insist that I was the cheater.

Chess hustlers are phenomenal at cheating, but only okay at chess. These are not admirable people dedicated to a skill. These are grifters.

I agree with this, since I have seen this in action. They cheat a lot, and argue with you when they lose. However:

>But stealing, robbing, lying—if you eliminate that from your program, you’ll be 99% better as a person.

Biblical references apart, this is the key point. The choice they made is a much better choice for most of them, and for the society around them. Playing chess helps many of them to focus on something that is not destructive and enjoyable. It gives them constant excitement and fast-paced action without getting into trouble in other ways.

Cheating at a game when there is money on the line is no less of a grift than robbing convenience stores, and there's plenty of lying involved. That's why they are called "hustlers," not because they do it for money.

Tax evasion (which one of these guys admitted to in the article) is the icing on the cake.

Those are crimes, for sure! I was comparing the former (cheating) with the potential of the same person for committing worse crimes which impact more people more forcefully. Not absolving them of their crimes.

How were they cheating? Moving pieces when you were not looking? Adding more time to their clock?

What I have seen are:

- Illegal moves, particularly with knights.

- Adjusting pieces onto squares they are not on: edging a rook towards another square slowly, then "adjusting" it onto that square to essentially get a free move.

- Dropping pieces and putting them on new squares.

- Double capturing: picking up your piece as though they are going to take it with theirs, then moving one of their pieces to take a different piece.

This summarizes it well. Two more (in fact, the most frequent ones I saw) are:

(1) He moves a piece, accidentally another piece tumbles down on the board, he adjusts it, and meanwhile, one of the opponent's crucial pawns magically disappear.

(2) Same as above, with opponent's pawn (or his pawn) magically moving to a better location for him.

I have played twice with them and they made illegal moves on one and the time ran out on another. I cannot confirm if my opponent was using hacked clock (I strongly believe he was) but I am pretty sure his diagonal move was illegal. He argued his piece was somewhere else and I got fed up and left.

You can see a classic example here (around 2:20): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g

I used to play Chinese Chess on and off in Hong Kong. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi). Just has NY has chess hustlers in parks, Hong Kong has Chinese Chess hustlers in parks. The hustlers were always excited to see me, a white American, stopping by and asking for a game and some tips: I was fresh meat! They'd gather in big groups to watch the sucker. But after my first move (the "P-K4" of Chinese Chess: Canon to beneath the center Pawn) their faces would change radically, as it suddenly became obvious that I knew somewhat how to play. :-)

Now while Chess strategy transfers reasonably well to Chinese Chess, I'm not particularly good, and certainly not better than the hustlers. But I'd often beat them because they couldn't get it out of their heads that they weren't playing an American patsy, and so they kept making showy moves rather than good ones. It was a lot of fun.

How much money was on the table?

I used to play a lot of chess, and it totally took over my life. So I never play it anymore, because for me it's too addictive.

For some people (like some of these hustlers and others who can make a living from it) that's ok, but for me I wanted more from life than just playing chess all the time and thinking about nothing but chess.. but for certain types of people it has a way of sucking you in and can be a way of avoiding life.

However, there were plenty of positive things I learned from chess, like thinking ahead, being able to concentrate in distracting environments, and having lots of patience.

I've noticed that the #1 positive thing I learned from chess is rarely mentioned by others, and I'm not sure why that is. For me it was:

Pattern recognition.

I many cases (at least at the intermediate level), winning/losing games doesn't come down to who can "think three moves ahead," it comes down to whether someone can recognize that a pattern of three moves will result in a particular outcome. It may be a nuance, but it's actually an important one because it eliminates the notion that someone has to be of above-average intelligence and discover new moves on the fly to succeed.

In actuality, that skill of pattern recognition can be practiced, honed, and applied in numerous areas of life. Playing chess is such a pure form of the skill that it opened my eyes to how many other activities can benefit from a similar approach.

That's a well-known aspect of "expert" level chess player thinking! There's a famous experiment that demonstrated this. Researchers briefly showed set-up chess boards to novices (little to no chess experience) and expert players (2000+ ELO) and then asked the players to recreate the board they just saw. If the set-up was from a real game (not necessarily a famous or studied game) experts performed far, far better. However, if the chess board was just a random scramble of pieces, novices and experts had the same recall ability. Essentially, expert players saw the patterns at work in legitimate mid-game set-ups and this helped the recall task.

Yes this is an interesting result that I recall from my days when I was into chess.

But this result speaks to something more general that is interesting as well. It seems high levels of skill in many other fields is associated with incredible ability to recall details about a performance in that field. If I recall correctly, Bobby Fischer was able to perfectly recall positions (and his analysis of them) from games he had played years ago (and consider how many games a professional chess player might play in a career).

The question I have is, what exactly is the connection? Is this association essential? And is it the incredible memory that leads to high skill, or the it's the reverse?

Definitely agree. It’s not even super purposeful recognition. It’s a feeling like “this seems bad”, and looking for why, only to figure out your opponent’s likely plan.

It’s much better to be less intelligent and have that feeling, than be more intelligent and not even know to look for the danger.

Yup

My grandfather said that "Too many great minds have been wasted playing chess.", and so always played checkers with me, always kind and teaching, but never rolling over. It took me years to win, but I still remember the three times I did before he passed away when I was 13. I've hardly ever played again. Played enough chess in HS to learn how, a few openings and just enough games to understand the intensity. I could definitely see what he meant, and it's probably a good thing my passion was already for alpine ski racing, which has similar intensity but is naturally a bit self-limiting (e.g., the lifts close and you have to go in).

I've since read the saying to the effect that "Being able to play chess is a sign of intelligence, being able to plat chess very well is a sign of a wasted life.". Seems to ring true, except for the true greats.

Nah that's bullshit.

"Too many great minds have been wasted programming UIs."

Both quotes are tongue in cheek, you're not supposed to take them seriously.

If you're good at something, fuckin do it.

Seeing a lot of comments in this thread from people who probably consider themselves intelligent, but haven't put the time into understanding chess, so you all have come up with some pretty creative excuses why you don't like chess.

Y'all are just bad at it, and that's ok.

aaannnd . . . . Whoosh!! It isn't about how good you are; in fact it is the opposite.

My grandfather was an engineer and focused on building actual things - being a productive member of society. He was also pretty alert about avoiding addictive things.

His point was that the gifted minds — who can get and ARE very good at chess — tend to get addicted and squander years or decades just chasing the next tournament, the next 100 GM points, the next high, producing nothing useful, and getting no skills applicable to productive pursuits.

He did not want to see me go down a path that could lead to being a chess bum any more than he'd want to see me become a ski bum, join a cult or just become a hardcore partier. All are surely enjoyable, but not a productive addition to society.

(& no, I haven't got a shred of insecurity about my abilities; I was getting good at an extremely satisfying rate, but also saw what it would take to get really good, and that I'd be better off spending my time not memorizing every classic opening and variant, but instead on understanding physics and chemistry concepts ... I absolutely see the beauty of chess, and may well take it up again, but I also am grateful for by grandfather's point, especially considering how addicted I got to the adrenaline of ski racing at international levels...)

And if you enjoy it and have the freedom to do that - fantastic - it's your life, do what you want - I hope you get as good as you desire and enjoy it!

Why is learning physics and chemistry a better use of time than learning chess?

Because I can leverage that knowledge of physics and chemistry to build something useful - and actually do so in my job. I use that knowledge to produce good things for customers, feel the satisfaction of that connection between my study and what I can offer people, and now that I'm writing about it, have a thought that I haven't had in a long time that my grandfather would indeed approve (so double thanks for the question!).

Chess may be more satisfying, but as a career, it's pretty self-satisfying, and only the very top competitors even really provide entertainment for others. That said, chess can teach you a lot about strategy, your own mind, managing your own emotions and skills, etc., and all of those are useful skills to apply to life in general (as long as you don't fall to the addictive risk and make a burnout career out of it...).

First one is Einstein(?) and the second is Paul Morphy

I’ve had my chess learning period followed by obsessive play up to a point that after playing a few hours daily I’d see those patterns in my mind’s eye for a while afterwards. I realized it ‘s not something healthy and I stopped playing altogether.

Recently I started playing online from time to time and want to make sure it never becomes an obsession again. Learning how to lose gracefully is an important milestone in one’s quest for maturity.

Generally chess has some wisdom that can be carried out in other areas of life. One point worth mentioning is that no matter how complicated a situation has become there’s quite often a good way out of it if one keeps calm and looks out for solutions.

"The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." - Paul Morphy

There’s absolutely no limit to the amount of time your could spend getting better at chess. I personally lost interest due to the excessive levels of memorisation involved, which was also one of Fischer’s main complaints about the game.

"I personally lost interest due to the excessive levels of memorisation involved"

You could play Fischer Random Chess (aka Chess360), which relieves players of the need to memorize openings, as there are way too many opening positions to make memorization practical.

Fischer Random is a much more rewarding game to play imo. There’s a lot less people playing it though.

Same for me but with Scrabble. Saw the same thing in that scene. I don’t necessarily want more from life, but I didn’t want to be obsessed with Scrabble any longer.

And it’s just 100% memorization. The French champion doesn’t even speak French for example.

Don’t want to go too far down this rabbit hole, but it’s definitely not 100% memorization. You have to know the words and which one to play. The “right” one to play is usually obvious, but on 2-4 turns per game, the strategy becomes very very very important.

With perfect word knowledge and garbage strategy you could probably be around the 25-50th best human player and with a fair bit of luck, would win some big tournaments eventually.

I stunk at chess in college because I'd spend my time thinking about how to write a program to play chess rather than my next move. My favorite book was:

"Chess Skill in Man and Machine" https://www.amazon.com/Chess-machine-monographs-computer-sci...

which inspired parts of the computer strategy in the game Empire.

Chess playing programs have gotten so good these days, there's not really any percentage in writing one.

I love this, just subscribed. My favorite piece of advice:

“I’ll give you a lesson, a half hour for $20. I have some children that come just to see me once a week and I give them a lesson—$20 for a half hour. And there’s a lot of NYU students that come by, we give them a discount for being students. One hour for 40 bucks.”

I think (or maybe your choice of quote just accidentally gives the impression) you're interpreting that as making NYU students believe they're getting a deal despite paying the same price as "some children", but actually in the previous paragraph:

> If you want a game, I say one game, five dollars, five minutes.

So the children and NYU Students are both getting a discount (40/hr for both types of student vs 60/hr for non-teaching games). Although I suspect he'd be willing to negotiate to the same 40/hr to play 12x timed 5min games if someone asked.

5min games are up to 10min long - 5min for each player

From what I've gathered (worked with a few good players, but I'm not good), the way to get good is grinding, but specifically known openings and endgames (some version of this is how you get good at anything). The midgame is where the play isn't so robotic. Hopefully anyone paying for lessons is practicing openings on their own (for free).

Yea the middle game is the easy part /s

I used to live in NYC 20 years ago.

I played a few of the hustlers. Some you will lose to, but most aren't actually that good. They are entertaining though.

One moment that I will never forget was watching two hustlers play each other for fun. The position was something like white had a pawn at a4 and a king at c7. Black had a pawn at h5 and a king at f3. Black to move. Black offered a draw, white said OK, I let out an involuntary, "WHAT?" They drew and black said, "You really think white can win here? I'll bet you $5 on that. I agreed so we played.

... h4 a5 h3 a6 h2 a7 h1(Q) a8(Q)+

Black was in check, and no matter where he moved his king, his queen was toast.

Easiest $5 I ever made.

One of the things with hustlers is they need to encourage people to play and bet. So you never know when a hustler is just letting something happen and hoping that when you win a bet or game, it will encourage you to start betting and then they'll make more serious money. Which isn't saying this is what happened, just sayin' you don't know for certain that isn't what happened.

But this is a draw. Black plays Kg2 on any of the first three moves. I can't tell who's hustling whom in this story because as described, none of the three participants can be far above beginners.

Maybe the Black king was on e4 and the story would work?

The problem is, then white queen follows up with checks which eventually also attack the black pawn. Since the black pawn is at a3, there is no immediate threat of queening. If black moves the king away from the pawn, white grabs it. If black keeps the king near the pawn, white forces black king under the pawn, and then moves his king, and black is forced to give up the pawn.

Every continuation is losing for black.

The black pawn is on the h-file and never goes to a3. It's on h2 at the point where White queens with check. Black plays Kg1 and reaches a well known drawing position [0].

This is one of the first chess endgames most people learn after how to mate with queen or rook. Like I said, anyone playing at more than a beginner level normally knows this. Kf2 (instead of Kg2) draws in the same way.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_and_pawn_versus_queen_en...

>The black pawn is on the h-file and never goes to a3.

Meant h3, sorry, result of mental calculations.

I just checked on an analysis engine, and it confirms: every position is losing for black, as long as white does not mess it up, and has the first move.

You can try it out here: https://www.chess.com/analysis

Load FEN: 8/2K5/8/7p/P7/5k2/8/8 w - - 0 1

> every position is losing for black, as long as white does not mess it up, and has the first move.

But white doesn't have the first move. From the post:

> Black to move. Black offered a draw...

> I agreed so we played ... h4 a5 h3 a6 h2 a7 h1(Q) a8(Q)+

If white was to move the story would make even less sense. You can try it out by changing "w" to "b" in your FEN.

I missed this part "Black to move. Black offered a draw" - thanks for pointing that out. In that case, it is a draw. Of course, unless black messes it up!

That’s wild! I’m not very good but if black offered me a draw in this position my thought would be “his pawn is faster, so why would he offer a draw? Unless he thinks he’s losing for some reason…” which would be the hint to look for the tactic.

I guess in many queen/king endgames you can have perpetual checks, but accepting the draw wouldn’t be my first instinct.

Their thinking was, "We both queen, and queen+king against queen+king is a draw." And normally it is.

Do you remember the complete PGN of the game?

I have no clue. It was a blitz game and I was just a bystander.

I assume there were still other pieces? Otherwise he can just trade queens and it would still be a draw.

It's a skewer – the White Queen on a8, the Black King on f3 and the Black Queen on h1 all lie on the long diagonal. The King has to move and it can't protect the Queen on h1.

Ah now I see. I didn't visualize the board enough and only checked that none of the kings were close to the promotion squares. Thanks for explaining :)

Isn't that essentially the same endgame at the ending of Searching for Bobby Fischer?

Yes the same. The pawn race and subsequent diagonal pin are the same.

I had a chess phase. I used to play a guy with some national ranking. He wiped the floor with me. He told me my game pretty much sucked but he enjoyed playing me because I was always seeing and doing things that would have never occurred to him. And that was the apex of my chess career...

Heh that sounds just like my story with my dad. He was national champ in the 80s. I never had enough interest in the game to get good, would rather play Doom on his DOS computer than chess.

But whenever we did play I'd make brainless moves and he'd get this puzzled look on his face and start thinking. He once told me the same thing, that I make unusual moves that forces him to rethink his strategy.

In jest, I had a teacher say something along the lines of “Nobel Prize winners are experts at the end of their careers or the novices at the beginning.” Thinking outside the box can be made so much easier when you don’t know where it begins and ends

thanks for sharing

E.G.G.S. was my favorite:

"This guy over here, Abdul. He’s Vice President of the Pace University Chess Club. Now, you hear somebody tell you they’re the vice president of a university chess club, you’re going to automatically think they’re good. So when he tells people they have a 95% chance of beating him, they think he’s hustling. But it’s actually the truth. He’s not very good."

I’ve played in the NY parks, Marcel is the best player of the bunch interviewed here. Sadly, after COVID most of the Bryant/Union Sq games seem to have disappeared. It’s mostly Washington Sq now.

But there’s this one guy who comes and goes. Always wears these dapper, beautiful robes, and plays up to $100/game. I’ve yet to work myself up to step up to play him…

Can’t wait to visit the park games next time.

There were a half dozen or so tables in Union Square a week ago. Bryant unfortunately wasn't happening, though I noticed the chairs on that side of the park were chained up, so maybe they haven't opened it yet.

Thanks for the update. The last time I was in Union Sq was Aug 2020 and it was empty, glad to hear it’s still thriving!

I would play chess against my mom as a kid. She'd read a book while playing. I'd spend a long time considering my next move, and she'd just look away from her book for a moment for hers.

She always won handily :-)

Much later, it occurred to me to wonder what her chess playing past was, but by then it was too late.

This is great, thanks for sharing. I've always walked by these guys but never expected that the roots ran so deep. I also love this little bit near the end: "To me, the Bible is Basic Information Before Leaving Earth—B.I.B.L.E."

Not sure if this is the genesis of that acronym but that is a song on GZA's classic album Liquid Swords [0]. Interestingly, the album cover [1] and lyrics include chess references throughout.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Swords#Track_listing

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e2/GZALiquidSwor...

Thank you for reminding me to play this song.

I've been lucky enough to see most of Wu Tang live, ODB died too young, so I never saw him.

> And let me tell you something. People make mistakes early in their life. I made mistakes early in my life. I got locked up when I was living in Maryland, selling drugs and stuff. But that doesn't mean that the game was over. That's how I equate chess with life.

Maybe true in life, but not really true in chess. If you blunder early against a decent player, your chances of winning are very low!

For those of you who like this stuff, there are loads of those sorts of games on youtube, e.g. the Coffee Chess channel, which has recently been featuring Hikaru and the Botez Sisters (who themselves have been touring various places including the famous NYC hustlers).

Coffee Chess:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq6gYeqi8RIvVeF-sJwdaBg

I have played a chess hustler in Chicago a few times when my parents took me to the air and water show when I was in high school. Note that these chess hustlers were playing at around $1 dollar a game. I would say that the average person doesn't even understand how to get into checkmate (even fools / scholars mate). So the game against most people is much less than five minutes.

But, I was rated in my prime around 1000 ELO. The hustle has to conclude within five minutes or less. If you get past that state they basically either won't play with you or let you use one of their boards. The easiest way to do this is to lock the board and don't get into any situation where a piece is capture and don't capture the their pieces. In Chicago the hustler was playing multiple people I believe (simul) which their rating would be at minimum 1000 ELO

That was a nice read. It felt like I was taking a stroll through a New York city park.

Comment from my 87yo father in law, a retired attorney: "Years ago I represented Yasser Seirawan, then the U.S. chess champ. He was interested in the Washington Square scene so I took him downtown. Of course, the hustlers were after him: he looked like a reasonably prosperous guy. He accepted after playing a little hard to get. The shock was obvious when he played much faster than the clock and won easily. He wouldn't take their money and when he told them his name they loved having played against him especially since he didn't complete the hustle by taking their money."

My theory here is that make the vast majority of money playing against people like me.

I roughly know the rules of Chess. I consider myself to be a smart person, but I have never been good at chess. Or checkers for that matter

There's also a guy who plays in Times Square in the evenings who's really fun to talk to. I've played him twice and lost badly both times, but one day...

SW* corner of Washington Sqr Park :P

That was a really nice read. Thanks.

How's this tax free?

I guess he meant "tax free" as in "cash only" - not something I'd want to say in public, but what are the chances IRS will pursue these guys.

Things you shouldn’t post while using your real name; that you have a side job that you don’t report income.

Cash under the chess board.

The tax code isn’t enforced at the cash / low income level.

Thus you can vote for increased taxes to fund increased social spending and not actually take part in the taxation. In fact, you’ll likely even get additional money back filing taxes when there’s no record of your cash income.

Convenient, eh?

And yet the poor get audited more than the rich ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-audit-eitc-five-times-as-li...

No they don't. People abuse statistics to give this impression but the IRS is pretty clear that it is simply untrue. A great deal of the deception comes from the fact that there are many more poor people than rich people, so on the face of it it's easy to mislead people into thinking that the IRS goes mostly after poor people, but when you normalize against income distribution, the IRS is far far far more likely to go after you if you're rich than if you're poor, and the results come directly from the IRS:

https://www.irs.gov/about-irs/irs-audit-rates-significantly-...

A large portion of that auditing is fraud/error involved in earned income tax credits, where you get paid special credits to make less money. Also for various reasons, being poor can often go hand in hand with being both unable to file a return in a way that looks correct and being unable to hire a professional to do it on your behalf.

There is an incentive to look poor even if you are not so poor, when filing taxes. It's those who file as poor who aren't so poor, not those who are as poor as they say, that are the more likely culprit of these audits.

At low incomes, your tax return is highly likely to be incredibly simple. If you’re doing something so wrong that it generates an audit, the IRS clearly knows they’re going to strike oil with the audit. They aren’t stupid.

What’s your solution? The poor should be able to commit tax fraud because going after millionaires is more important?

Everyone should have to follow the tax code we’ve collectively created. It makes changing it far simpler when everyone is impacted equally.

since you asked, my solution

1) VAT to replace income tax for bottom 50% or so

2) simplified income tax only for high earners (for normies consumption is an excellent proxy for income)

3) don't privilege capital income with low rates and infinite deferral

4) no corporate income tax which is a poor substitute for 3), and anyway corporate income is mostly accounting fiction

“Gotcha!” - Lucky Ducky

https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2003/06/14

I don’t know about the guy who was quoted, but I think that some people who are accustomed to normal jobs with tax withholding are actually unaware that they are obligated to pay taxes on cash income. For many people the only purpose in filing a tax return is to get a refund, as most people with normal jobs are victims of over-withholding.

Aren't gambling winnings tax free? They are in Britain.

In the United States gambling winnings are fully taxed as income (and gambling losses are deductible).

Not in the US. Officially you are supposed to voluntarily declare all income, even crime: they caught Al Capone on tax evasion, not his main business.

If you win from company like a casino or lottery, the company withholds the tax and you report it when you file.

Side bets would be gambling, but player take would be income (skill).

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