Name: チェスの指導者だけど質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan
Uploaded: 2025-03-07T10:00:09.000Z
Duration: 16 min
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I'm Levi Rosman, chess educator, YouTuber, and author.

Let's answer some of your questions from the internet.

At Mantosh12 asks, do chess players trash talk?

You can't talk to your opponent during a chess game, period.

So you definitely can't trash talk an opponent during a chess game.

But outside of it, oh, it's some of the best passive-aggressive soap opera drama you can possibly imagine.

Now that we have a young grandmaster like Hans Niemann, who, despite his checkered past, no pun intended, will actually go out of his way to trash talk other people and have more eyeballs on the game.

Says, is there any more satisfying checkmate than this one?

Probably the most satisfying checkmate in all of chess is smothered mate.

When an opponent's king is stuck on the edge of the board, boxed in by his own pieces, and you use this knight, and you gallop into the position, and the king is smothered in the corner by his own army while this knight attacks, and there's nothing that you can do.

At KeenChess asks, was the Hans Niemann-Magnus Carlsen cheating controversy good publicity for chess?

Overall, it was a net positive for chess.

There was a massive controversy between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann, where the young grandmaster from the United States defeated the world champion, and Magnus withdrew from the tournament, basically doing everything but directly accusing Hans of foul play.

Millions of people around the globe started thinking of chess.

They were hearing all of these ridiculous headlines, but at the end of the day, it just sparked their interest in the game itself.

At Neophyte78 asks, okay chess peeps, what's the opening or variation that's the most fun for you to play?

One of my favorite variations to play is when I'm playing with the white pieces, and I open with the king's pawn, e4, and black responds with c5, which is the Sicilian defense.

It's the most popular and combative opening for black, fighting for the center with a flank pawn, a pawn that's not one of the two center pawns.

And now I will play what's called a delayed wing gambit.

I would go pawn to a3, and the idea here is very, very sneaky.

So black is going to take it, and then you are going to take back.

Now black is going to say, wow, what a dummy.

And then you start kicking out the knight, and you get this massive center.

You can even plug another one in, and then you can use all of this open space for your pieces.

And a lot of players get overwhelmed in this position.

Find a chess opening or variation that you like, that you understand, that gets you to a position where you know the plans better than your opponent.

At Eric Farley1 asks, how does the elo rating work?

And elo is the number which quantifies your skill level.

The first letter is a capital E, and then it goes L-O.

And the way elo works is that it goes up and down or stays the same depending on your results.

If you're rated 1,200 and you play a 1,100, you will gain a certain amount of points if you win.

But your opponent will actually gain slightly more because they're beating somebody with a higher elo.

The minimum elo to qualify for Grandmaster is 2,500.

So an over-the-board live chess, the highest ever elo achieved is by Magnus Carlsen.

But online, Stockfish, which is the strongest chess AI in the world, is estimated to be around 3,600.

Then I lost to a bunch of nine-year-olds.

Pems asks, how hard would Capablanca be to beat with modern preparation tools at his disposal?

How good would Capablanca be with modern preparation?

Jose Raul Capablanca was one of the best chess players of his generation.

He was an expert end game player as well.

The only thing that he didn't do was live in the modern century in the age of computers.

He managed to do all of that with chess being on paperback.

Modern preparation tools are just a complete game changer.

They allow you to analyze positions for 15, 20 moves in advance.

The information gap from 1920, 1930 to nowadays is just absolutely absurd.

An 11-year-old now with modern preparation tools could probably beat Capablanca in a match just on the information that is available to the 11-year-old that Capablanca in the 1920s and 30s would not know.

At Anurag Singh asks, what is going on in your mind when you have to play your next move?

Jose Raul Capablanca said, I only think of one move at a time, and it's the best move.

Most experienced chess players have studied a lot.

They have done thousands of chess puzzles.

So I might be remembering something in my memory palace.

I might be remembering there was this game played in 2012 between Grandmaster A, Grandmaster B in this city.

The more you play chess and the more you study, that is how you are going to figure out some of these good moves or an evaluation of a position.

At Your Bud Josh asks, do old people still play chess in parks?

There is no minimum age requirement to play chess at your local public park.

But historically, chess has been associated with old guys at the park.

When I was five or six years old, my grandparents in Brooklyn would walk me to the park where local 70-year-old men would sit there squabbling.

A lot of park chess players are actually really good.

The average park chess player in Union Square Park or Washington Square Park is better than you watching this right now.

And at least here in New York City, it's customary to throw them like $3 or $5 for a game.

At Sebi Lozano asks, hey Siri, how much do chess players make?

Chess players make exactly what they win in tournaments.

Nowadays in 2023, there's also things like endorsement deals.

Magnus Carlsen is famously sponsored by Puma, MasterCard.

You can also get invited to paid corporate or speaking engagements, which a lot of them do because a lot of people respect chess players now.

So it used to be that if you were outside of the top 20 grandmasters in the world, I'm not even sure you would break six figures on a good year.

If you're also traveling the world constantly playing tournaments and you're just not succeeding, there is so much more pressure.

You're probably losing money in a calendar year.

At McKenzie Weber 3 says, learning how to program has changed my perspective on a lot of things.

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チェスの指導者だけど質問ある？ | Tech Support | WIRED Japan

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