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Comment by oldstrangers | Hacker News Reader

>run by people who aren't good at chess

To be fair, Danny Rensch is a 2402 FIDE rated player. That's better than 99.9% of people on the planet.

Most competitive sports & games are much more cruel than chess, but chess is still very cruel. Can you imagine achieving recognition or winning money as the 3000th best Fortnite player? Or the 3000th best League of Legends player? If so, you'd be winning on personality during streaming but certainly not on competitiveness.

> Can you imagine achieving recognition or winning money as the 3000th best Fortnite player

There are quite a few retired pros still earning in that cohort, so, yeah. The prize pool is pretty deep and 3,000 is still top 0.2%.

"People" on the planet? If that's accurate it's not super impressive, considering that probably 95-99% (or more) of people don't take chess very seriously. I used to be the top 99-99.5% of Counter-Strike players (_very_ roughly obviously), and that wasn't very impressive at all even though it's way past top 99.9% of "people on the planet".

(that being said,

Ok just to be clear you're saying a 2400 rating isn't impressive? I'm not sure this is a hill worth dying on for the sake of useless pedantry.

You can find whatever semantic qualifier makes it impressive enough for you, but a 2400 FIDE rating is extremely impressive and difficult to achieve.

So I posted this without finishing (probably managed to fat finger it somehow). I meant to say that I thought 2400 meant quite a bit more than 99.9%.

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