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Comment by hassy | Hacker News Reader

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

(only half-joking)

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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-...

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.

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.

what about go?

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

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