Executives who are exceptional at chess | Hacker News Reader

Executives who are exceptional at chess

chessbase.com

61 pointssethbannon31 comments

"Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be."

- Garry Kasparov

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che...

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. What do all these execs have in common? An obsession with chess as a youth.

I bet 90% of successful execs had a sweet baseball card collection when they were 10 years old, too.

Realize that the difference between 2500 and 2200 is truly remarkable.

Those under 2000 should probably be considered enthusiasts rather than exceptional.

Yes, indeed. Breaking the 2000 barrier is really hard. But becoming a grandmaster is unimaginably hard. There are only a thousand living grandmasters on the planet today (the highest there has ever been in the history of humanity) out of 7 billion people. In 1972 there were only 88.

Agreed. <2000 is pretty common.

chess is old school. i want to see a list of founders who are exceptional at starcraft.

(only half-joking)

I much prefer seeing champion poker and starcraft players rather than champion chess players when looking for real world skill capable people.

Can you elaborate on this?

I'm not sure why it would make much of a difference whether someone excels at chess or poker.

This is an excellent argument for why Poker is more correlated to business skills than Chess or Go: http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-think-like-a-Go-player-...

I don't know gte910h's reasons, but I'm also curious to know how many executives are excellent poker players. Poker has elements of chance, betting, and partial-information that make it a great environment for exploring game theory and information theory. Optimal strategies have to have a solid mathematical foundation, but must still be flexible depending on opponent's experience and demeanor. Good players know when to fold and when to bet, even if it hurts to think about the risk. They have to become comfortable losing money occasionally, knowing that if they continue to make good decisions, they'll come out ahead in the long run.

Chess is perfect for a world where we make our decisions with full information in a deterministic environment. For the partially informative, stochastic world that we live in, I'll choose poker.

Backgammon sits nicely in-between chess and poker; Players have perfect information, but there is well-defined element of chance in it. Dan Harrington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Harrington) famously excels in all three games (chess master, champion backgammon player, world champion poker player) suggesting a link in proficiency.

However, Backgammon is really only useful for figuring things out about people who were alive in the 70s, as no one else plays it. It's a VERY boring game without gambling, which is illegal many places (the doubling die doesn't matter really without money).

My brother-in-sin was a professional backgammon player at one point. What he said killed it was the development of a computer program that played perfectly. Prior to that someone would learn to play, and you had a long time to keep profitably exploiting their small flaws as they improved. After the computer program came out they would start to play, learn about the computer program, then fairly shortly after would play as well as you did.

A classic example of efficiency (in this case of learning) can result in decreasing profit opportunities.

You don't play a match in one game. You play five or seven. The doubling cube speeds up play and has a critical impact on the whole game.

There's plenty of online backgammon gambling.

You have most of it.

More importantly: You always do X Y and Z in poker (many times), even if you will probably lose the current hand, because X Y and Z are all positive expectation, even if the current result of that particular instance turns out bad. This skill cannot be undersold in real life. It's the key to sales pitches, job interviews, getting raises, running departments, etc. It's the key to fairness to people who did something that got a poor result (but was a good way to do something), etc.

Poker is far more about making risk reward calculations.

Chess is far more about pattern matching.

Starcraft is about planning a strategy then executing it on many many fronts at once.

More importantly, both Poker and Starcraft have you make decisions when your information is incomplete which is crucial in startups.

what about go?

Exactly what I wanted to ask, but you'd probably find that list on a Chinese/Korean/Japanese website...

I guess it probably depends on what you mean by exceptional. The real top players seem to be entrepreneurial within the e-sports space but I don't know of much branching beyond that. If you look at simply high ranked players (masters or grandmaster) it might be more interesting.

My anecdotal experience, I only competed locally in Washington DC, was there were a lot of developers or technical people (~75%). It was also disproportionately asian (~50%). And Male (~90%). Pretty much every stereotype about who was playing was my actual experience.

The better players (masters or higher+) were all technical people of some sort that I can recall. 4 were developers. 1 in grad school for machine learning. 1 biochem engineering.

It wouldn't shock me to see some talented starcraft players who also are founders. I just am not convinced that being a good starcraft player has any/much effect on being a successful company. Correlation != Causation and all that. It may just be a common hobby among the demographic we're interested in.

I think this is insightful. Starcraft is a game of making split second decisions based on extremely limited information. In fact, getting information is often expensive, so what you have to do is try different attacks (experiments) to penetrate the defences (market). I played Starcraft 1 more then I'd care to admit and even won some minor tournaments. Starcraft 2 I played at masters level which is roughly equivalent to 2000 elo in chess (Read: huge difference to the pros). The skills learned from Starcraft and Poker are definitely highly applicable to building Shopify.

Being excellent at a single thing rarely correlates to anything meaningful in life. In real working conditions you need negociation skills, relationship skills, team-working skills and a well rounded knowledge about a number of things. I don't see why someone would be looking at a single factor to judge someone else's abilities.

heh that's interesting i went to high school with vivek rao, he was a couple years behind me iirc. he said once (i think he was quoting someone else):

a good chess player is the sign of a good mind. a great chess player is the sign of a wasted mind.

a little research turns up: "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

If he chose bridge rather than chess, there'd be some really high-recognition names on the list: Bill Gates (a good enthusiast), Warren Buffet (an excellent player), Jimmy Cayne (former CEO of Bear Stearns, a national champion), and many others.

I wonder what the Go list would look like. US-only, probably somewhat random and maybe even obfuscating, but world-wide is a far more popular game.

The lower rated players on this list tend to be cofounders and CEOs while the higher rated players tend to work in finance. I wonder if that's a coincidence.

I don't think it's a coincidence. The blurb for Norman Weinstein says that after he was hired by Banker's Trust, "He was so successful that they kicked off a recruitment program for other strong chess players..." and then it lists a few people they recruited afterwards, with even higher scores.

The connection between chess and finance/trading seems strange to me.

I think there's a selection effect at play. There are many more lower rated players, but fewer CEOs and cofounders. Remember that this list is about executives. As they go up the list, the pool of players narrows. And thus, they have to dig a bit farther down into corporate ranks to find their execs.

However, the finance correlation would be unaffected by this effect.

If anything, it seems like an enthusiasm for chess may be a good way to get introductions or jobs. That's good news if you're not into golf.

really cool

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