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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

The Youtube version of this video was released a while ago. The video fails to answer the more meaningful version of the "why": The "why does it have to".

There is no limit to how expensive you can make a chess set (Fill it with diamonds, pay the Queen to piss on it, use wood smoked on burned dollar bills).

But why does a championship chess set need to be produced expensively?

That was the question I was hoping for, when I watched this video a long time ago, and now I dislike all the videos from this series when the appear on my recommendation feed on YT.

You can always make an expensive version of something. It is interesting to know _why_ something has to be expensive.

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It also doesn't need over seven minutes to explain why they cost $500. I'll do it in seven words: they are handmade with high quality standards.

I don't know who this 7min square video is directed at - hosted on twitter the worst video platform on the internet (scroll stop video)

>But why does a championship chess set need to be produced expensively?

In a word: Regulation. You have to use one of the specified sets from a specified manufacturer not just any. Fewer manufactures means less competition.

This still doesn't answer the why though: "because it's the rules" leads us to want to understand how the rules came to be. Is the president of FIDE a shareholder in the approved manufacturer? Or is their cousin? Or did they fall out with a different manufacturer? Or is that the only manufacturer that makes the sets in a particular way that benefits championship chess, and if so in what way is that a benefit? Why not just mandate that form of construction?

Maybe you shouldn't be asking 'Why' repeatedly (that sounds threatening but isn't meant to be). Regulation is sufficient explanation for why something has a minimum price. By all means delve deeper but by going deeper you're changing the topic at hand. Why does regulation affect pricing of a good or service? That's another topic tangential to the one we're discussing.

Feynman on 'Why':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

Feynman doesn't argue against asking why; he just says that you'll eventually reach a question he can't answer in the allotted time, or perhaps that he can't answer at all. If he didn't think recursively asking why magnets repel each other as in the video was a good idea, he probably wouldn't have won the Nobel prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics.

> Regulation is sufficient explanation for why something has a minimum price.

I read the original question of "Why are championship chess sets so expensive?" as two questions:

1. Why do chess championships use specific chess sets?

2. Why are those chess sets expensive to make?

The second question is easily answered, but I'm more curious about the first, and I think others here are as well. I'd probably be content with just one layer of why, such as "the regulators have an interest in the company that makes them" or "in the X year championship, Y problem occurred due to a substandard chess set".

They even go as far to say that it can affect the game. But they don't really articulate why or how. They sort of imply that it's less likely a player will make a mistake mixing up the pieces - but I find that incredibly hard to believe for this level of players.

Cf. the Columbo episode "The Most Dangerous Match", where snail shells on a checkerboard tablecloth suffice,

I would guess, differently looking pieces would mess up with their visual memory. Visual memory matters a lot for chess.

Someone else linked https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IowQeiC4V8I. I think if you watch the full thing, Hikaru Nakamura’s explaination is a reasonable take. BI reports it as if it’s comparing against other modern day sets but the person being interviewed who makes them is actually comparing against sets from much longer ago when the pieces were not easily distinguished from each other. Otherwise the claim that it can impact gameplay is complete bunk which is why he laughs so hard at it.

Some of it may simply be volume. They make 250 of these sets a year, @$500 that's a gross of just $125k. The actual revenue for the factory must be much lower. It's hard to imagine maintaining a reliable supply at a lower cost.

I think they said the factory makes other kinds of sets too. They said they can make 200-250 of the lesser kings a day but only like 30 of the championship ones.

Yes it’s bizarre the journalist didn’t think to ask ‘but why?’

I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect answering that question would take longer and all they needed was enough material to justify the title, which was the real value proposition all along, as the title was enough to get clicks.

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