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ladies and gentlemen Alexandra bz seats
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middle is this me this is you okay what is this uh red thing for it's a clock
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it's a clock don't worry you won't need to use it for very long oh
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Al oh Al let your Winner's
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ride Rainman [Music] David
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and in said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with [Music]
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iten he's a globally recognized chess player one of the most followed chess commentators online with about 2 million
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followers I think that's more than we have isn't itally uh we're kind of lagging um she
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was a five-time Canadian national girls Champion she won the US girls Nationals at age 15 she achieved her highest fed
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day ELO rating of 2092 back in March 2016 uh she began streaming online chess
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content in 2016 as a a student at Stanford where she studied international relations and she and her younger sister
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Andrea man or is it Andre did I pronounce that right Andrea yeah Andre and she's in the audience somewhere she's in the audience where
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where anyway they managed the popular votes live twitch and YouTube channels together and you know I've I've watched
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it from time to time so very very entertaining she'll take a selfie with you later after she beats you
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and so we're about to do a 4 game simultaneous here do you want to just explain the rules to the audience yes
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and maybe before we get started thank you guys all for coming to chess talk I appreciate it how many of you guys know
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how to play chess raise your hand please whoa okay that's very impressive smart crowd you guys have a great audience um
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so the way it's going to work I'm going to be playing all four of them at the same
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time yeah and if you guys saw the betting line at the betting Lobby in the front
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it's 50 to one for any of us to even have a shot at winning so s you must have a shot saxs saak is actually pretty
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good before I explain the rules maybe you tell them what your chess rating is and we can all talk about the chess experience of it I'm about I'm about a
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1600 yeah it's not that good though but that's can you explain the ELO rating for folks
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yeah 1600 he's probably like in the 65th percentile so he's kind of like Club
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player type rating chamath you've never played before right I I know the rules but I've never played
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okay okay I'm a zero technically I'm a zero okay are you better than jcal though well I'm smarter than Jay
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Cal maybe I can still beat you at chess in poker uh I think I did end up doing
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better in poker than you did though so oh I think you won 30 I won only 12 yeah
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pretty good you want a Prius and i w a first class ticket to anywhere in the world not not bad not bad and and David
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you also are pretty decent at no I'm setting expectations I'm at zero so no what is your actual rating I I don't I
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don't know my rating I'm not going to talk about that right now we're not talking about it why your rating you
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such I I PE at 12200 stop sand Bing what is it I Peak the 12200 okay so you so
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you were basically misdirecting us to think you couldn't play yes no I really do suck I'll be direct he's insecure I'm
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insecure chess yeah okay but he has a problem with women why can't make eye contact that I don't want to talk about
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anything right now I'm just really nervous about this okay well I love that you guys are already I got to be honest this session
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is like my [ __ ] nightmare because I'm so frustrated with chess I got to be honest and I've not been able to have
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I've not been able to get back in my so sitting here and getting embarrassed in front of everyone and putting on the [ __ ] internet it's
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like it's okay to get beaten by a girl it's not about being beaten by a girl it's seeing how dumb I am it's like all
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right let's go let's go so I think he's not faking it it's true we're out of
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here go beat us beat us okay so let me explain the rules really quickly also I know it's hard for you guys but it's actually good if you're going to work
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together here because we are that doesn't work ever no no hasn't worked in
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145 episodes impossible these two idiots are the two that cannot work together David and I have worked together for
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years so we be over here okay I I feel like this is a group therapy session instead of Chess so I'm going to explain
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the rules now when he called me dumb well no I mean you know what podcasting
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means to men right therapy oh yeah no that that that makes sense that makes sense five minutes on the clock
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everybody playing only has five minutes I have five minutes they have five minutes if anybody runs out of time the
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game is over so if they manage to stall me enough and they're just running my clock on one board I can lose every time
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they make a move they get an extra two seconds increment this is just so that if I only have 10 seconds on one clock I
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could at least run there not lose on time and the way it works is they can make moves at any point um I think we're
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going to have a little eval bar on the screen behind so if you don't play chess you can kind of look at that there we
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go there we go so you can look at that if if the eval bar you could see more of
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white than mine doesn't work it's that means I'm uh it's cuz that's an illegal move oh okay that's okay
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it'll work don't worry I'll come all right yeah and and don't worry
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if you don't know chess I will let you know if they make a good move or if they make a bad move I will call it out just
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so that everybody can follow it'll be better be funny okay all right let's get
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started plug in all right are you ready no I'm not good luck good
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luck okay D4 I think I'm just going to do the same first move actually no I'm
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trying to Checkmate you in four okay yes get him good
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luck there we go and you are the strongest of them all
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I'm not going to try to Checkmate you in four I'm just going to play Simple openings here I knew you'd be Speedy
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what when when do I go uhoh do I go okay here we go we're running what do I do
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what do I do what do I do yeah get him David get her wait I
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you're not letting me Checkmate him that I didn't know you're going to help everyone hold on I know what's about to
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happen here so I'm just going let's go here also the clock near the board is
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their R is their time the clock near the outside is mine okay where's my moves guys oh no
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it's there all right well I can't oh the the timer didn't start sorry Alex no
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that's okay I'll reset it oh uh you know what what for fun I guess
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let's just do three minutes on this clock there we go I only count an
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increment of 12 minutes okay there we okay it's my turn
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there we go so you actually can try to flag me faster
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okay I am going to David what do I do I got to here for a second what are
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you going to do I'm standing here to intimidate you are you going to develop that night it's
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working I came up with this myself I can tell he I I can tell you didn't get
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assistance on that one take it take it take it take it yeah I take it yeah I didn't know that David sax would be
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doing a siml of his own here but I guess it works it was actually a pretty good move I didn't know you go backwards I'm
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going wait for you to go there you done what have you done I'm going to go like this yeah why do you keep saying
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it's okay why not it's nice I'm going to have to play faster
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I'm starting to only get three three minutes on each board and nobody has been checkmated
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yet uh okay check what the
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[ __ ] all right you [ __ ] what no check's not a big deal
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okay it's not a big deal I'm going to move this person here look hey hey I'm moving this person to here to block her
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yes okay good okay oh my God how do you have less time
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do two moves U what take your night out you got to Castle you got to get castled
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what the [ __ ] okay You' survived I'm proud of you
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[ __ ] be uh huh okay I'm easy move for you
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easy David oh okay wait did I did I miss a move or no am I good uh I think you just castled yeah yeah yeah you're good
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David look I'm doing this little Dipsy Doodle here yeah okay I can tell he's not paying attention to you anymore he doesn't care Alex take
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that okay I think I need to bully the weakest link and then focus on the other boards there we go okay so he just lost
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a piece he's lost but now he can try to stall me on the clock stall stall stall okay uh what does this thing want to do
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here okay here hold on I am
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confused okay I'm starting to get two minutes on the clock on most of the boards I'm going to have to be faster
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the [ __ ] do I do now he hey I can't focus on you anymore
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oh Jesus Christ you're such an [ __ ] God this is like [ __ ] 20
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years of our friendship right there that's exactly that was coming okay [ __ ] press
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the clock too can you just look one second no I can't
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Sorry God you're so brutal you're [ __ ] brutal
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ah I I just realized that yeah sorry about that yeah
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okay still thinking here so so far they're actually he just put a queen on
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the board I can tell it's a different color than other
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[Applause] Queen oh [ __ ] she forked me okay there
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I'm forked I'm [ __ ] she forked me so Sax's position is even right now and
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he's up a minute on the clock so he has the best chance so far chamath hasn't gotten checkmated so let's Round of
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Applause and this position is actually pretty even also and I only have two minutes so I'm going to just have to do
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more cardio at some point and take out jcal very soon because he's managed to lose many of his pieces so he's in big
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trouble okay okay nice nice nice I'll be faster
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uhhuh okay I think what I need to do is I need to take them out and then focus on you
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individually because you're playing very well here [Applause]
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uhoh and you're in second place okay let's try
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this um okay I'm trying
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all right we're what I'm talking about I only have a minute on that board cuz I accidentally put three minut give an extra minute if that's what you want no
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I don't need excuses this is competitive come on that is actually a good move oh my
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God I blundered upon Pawn oh God or did
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I okay uh what she do every time I come here I
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can't tell if you made a move because your position is so bad and it takes me an extra second okay I have a minute on this
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board this is getting really dangerous so I need to focus on Friedberg otherwise I might flag and I also have a
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minute here uh so we're just gonna have to make fast moves how much do I have here two minutes okay uh we're g to do
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that uh he's giving me free pieces this is helping I did I appreciate it thank you
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check godam okay we're trying now three minutes here plenty of time
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uh actually I have a better chance to flag jcal than they do to flag me so I'm looking forward to it check oh sorry you
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didn't move yet oh wait you did you just didn't press your clock so now it's on
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you uh 50 seconds here actually if I lose to chamath I'm never going to live
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it down so I should probably Focus uh we're going to take
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here his position is still the best so far take your time I do not know how to
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beat him yet oh that's another free piece thank you oh [ __ ] I saw 36 seconds
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here okay okay okay oh God damn it panicking uh speed chess yes I mean
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there has to be a way to mate here I just don't see it yet so let's try this um you're in check so try TR try
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again that's illegal oh [ __ ] okay okay where do I go I can't go anywhere you can I promise I can't play
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it for you though cuz I'm going to lose on time seconds where five I goam oh
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chaman you have 10 seconds good luck no I'm inan you got me this is
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Checkmate right uh no you're not even in check it can't be Checkmate also it's your
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[Applause] turn um he's a very tricky player
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oh this is tricky oh my God I'm gonna lose on time
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okay I have only eight seconds here I don't know how I'm going to do this uh okay
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check 17 seconds uh that's a good move actually I saw the audience yelling okay
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I need to try not to flag here I don't know if I can pull it off
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uh take okay go oh God this is really
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stressful take I'm GNA oh you're you're out of time you lost sorry I didn't even realize you flagged you flagged okay and
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I am BL and I blunder this board she won uh huh not bad I
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survived okay I only have four I lose already yeah you did you did so I'm going to focus on these for a
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second cuz I only have four seconds and how much do I have there I
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have 50 seconds uh oh okay I might lose this one because I'm trying not to flag
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the other one and then I just I'm going to let J Cal breath for a second look at you you're so intense uh yeah I don't know
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if I can do it ah 6 seconds so how is your day don't get
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distracted stay focused I I'm I'm missing three things she's concentrating make a quick move
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she's concentrating 5 Seconds how much do you have oh my God I have a minute here too and you're checking
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me she's [ __ ] with us oh thank God a queen I really needed that I pre just kidding he took his hands off the piece
00:15:46
he moved it and then took his hands no no no you're good you're good we're not playing what are you a rat we in check
00:15:53
guy's a rat I asked her not playing touch was your Rook there yeah
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okay I have to go here I have 37 seconds and I'm going to lose on here too but you haven't made a move
00:16:05
yet okay taking four seconds I blunder so badly at this
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game ah I have one second left thanks
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Andrea oh I flagged you won you you won on time good
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job okay we do
00:16:31
it you see how bad I blundered that Queen he did blender a queen but he won
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on time so it doesn't matter 25 seconds there okay I should probably make a [Music]
00:16:43
move how terrible my board is I need to check oh wait he might lose
00:16:49
on time actually so I can come back here uh
00:16:54
probably check take it I dare you
00:17:00
take it take it David take
00:17:06
it yeah that that was a good move I'm actually completely lost on this board
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because I was trying not to flag on the other one how fun is this
00:17:20
a let me give you you're so close to being made it but you're not yet wait I can't no not yet no that's illegal put
00:17:27
your king back check oh my God I have nothing to do here what you doing are you done you got
00:17:33
it you got the mate I lost like minutes I lost that with Sissa Le spe
00:17:42
JC and you are getting mated in one move almost but you solved it which is good
00:17:49
but I'm running out of time and you flagged but that's okay I flagged there as well okay you guys went 22 that's
00:17:56
pretty good yeah [ __ ] yeah I me 8 seconds oh my God we were better
00:18:03
than you thought are you [ __ ] with us it was it was just tough setup for you no it I I I was running out of time so I
00:18:09
had to keep running there so I made a move without seeing what it was so saaks took me out on that one and then this
00:18:14
one I was winning but I wasn't fast enough F he won on time he won outright yeah I know saak won outright Round of
00:18:25
Applause thank you for the game yeah so we weren't actually that bad no I mean
00:18:32
we wer terrible no you guys were good you guys were like the Minions that the good players put out to stall while the
00:18:37
heroes go in I like and it worked really well you're saying we worked as a team you actually did I was surprised I W on
00:18:45
time but I blundered my queen but you won on time I won on time uh and you were also like too very close to getting
00:18:51
checkm but again you time who are you playing let me ask this who are you playing the hardest against um SE
00:18:59
well I was trying to play the hardest against sex but I think it was just really difficult because at some point I
00:19:05
had like 20 seconds on both clocks and I I was trying to pay attention to who made a move to not L your time
00:19:10
management was your weakness yeah exactly the time management was extremely difficult because it's hard to see how much you have there and get back
00:19:17
in time so for us this is an incredible Victory but for you this is actually going to make you grind your teeth all
00:19:23
night yeah I'm going to cry myself to sleep after this one no but honestly you thought thought you would demolish us I
00:19:30
demolish me I I thought there was a chance I would lose with the clocks okay um so I thought the timer would make it
00:19:36
interesting yes got it so you set it up that we had a little bit of a chance to have this outcome we and we appreciate
00:19:43
that she was even considering giving us a piece and we were talking about the setup but this was obviously really the only problem was I had Brooklyn style
00:19:49
ready to go but the pieces I had were black I can tell so it was kind of like
00:19:55
not a great crime yeah yeah yeah you know like usually I'm good at crime and this was like one of the few instances
00:20:02
where I didn't think it all the way through because you're the person running chest.com I was like do you have extra you have an extra board she like
00:20:08
yeah we have a backup board I was like can I see it I just want to inspect the board she's like okay don't then it's okay and I looked and she's Russian and
00:20:14
she's like did you take two pieces and I said no and she said well the two pieces are missing and they're in your pocket
00:20:19
and I said don't worry about it I'm going to make the audience laughed she's like but it will screw up whole game and I said that's my
00:20:25
idea I'm the Joker that was good but you also put it right as I was on the board so I thought you had turned around so
00:20:33
yeah it wasn't a Perfect Crime I'll give you that guys I want to thank test.com at first applying with dgt board we are
00:20:38
gonna uh I just want to say Alexandra's got um you know subscribe to her Channel
00:20:44
yes got but we're also going to come back and chat with her for a few minutes uh when we wrap this up uh because she's got a lot more for us to talk about
00:20:50
we're really excited to do that so we back in one minute to have a conversation with Alexandra good game and congrats for the
00:20:57
two [Applause]
00:21:04
too what's how many people watch you first of all thank you for picking a clip of me I I picked that clip because
00:21:11
I figured you were going to demolish all four of us and we had to get one showing that you might actually lose a match so
00:21:16
what a joke well that's okay um I think we have around like 6,000 average people
00:21:22
who tune in to the live streams got it yeah awesome and do they just like donate coins to you and like how much
00:21:30
money do you make playing chess on I can tell you're a boomer by saying donate
00:21:35
coins on I mean I know they they flip coins and you know whatever why don't you like she she's got a pretty
00:21:41
sophisticated business I mean why don't you hear a little bit about I think there's a lot to it so okay let's let's
00:21:46
start with the teup because Alexandra for those who Sor I didn't know you were doing in yeah 2017 um co-founded crowd
00:21:52
amp which was a VC funded social media company which you shut down in 2019 um
00:21:58
you're uh you went to Stanford right undergrad Stanford and you started this company after Stanford not I actually
00:22:05
started it while I was at Stanford uh I was doing an internship at a VC fund at
00:22:10
light speed and I actually incubated it with them while I was a student and it was a I'd love to talk about it it's
00:22:16
social media company and then after you shut it down you started doing chess live streaming obviously built a a
00:22:22
sizable audience Canadian and and the the the thing we're all excited also to talk about is your foray into poker and
00:22:29
where that's going so would love to hear a little bit about your startup experience and kind of what happened and how that got you into chess and yeah I
00:22:35
know that sounds good um so the startup was actually related to chess in a way while I was in college I had around
00:22:41
30,000 followers for chess and I would get tons of messages every single day for chess advice like how do I get
00:22:47
better at chess can I play with you um and I teamed up with one of my friends who was incredible at computer science
00:22:53
and at Ai and we basically wanted to try to find a way to scale personalized
00:22:58
conversations between creators and their fans which sounds like an oxymoron um but it ended up working
00:23:05
pretty well at the start we worked on it for three years we went through light speed y combinator raise some VC funding
00:23:12
and then when it didn't pan out I had started streaming chess for fun once a
00:23:18
week because I missed the game and weirdly I didn't feel like we had product Market fit in our startup but I
00:23:24
felt like I had content Market fit in what I was doing cont wise so I decided to take another risk and go full time
00:23:31
into streaming and I only had 200 viewers at the time when I went full into it that's kind of like J K's an
00:23:39
investor yeah he mentioned he invested in Uber like six times when we played poker actually
00:23:46
waset was talking about having this legendary investment and going 200x I just thought to myself wow onethird less
00:23:52
than my investment in Uber but who's counting it's just math
00:23:58
returns and you're right yeah so and can you tell us what your streaming business has turned into and kind of all the
00:24:03
different aspects of that as a business for you yeah um so it started with just me streaming on Twitch and I actually
00:24:12
convinced my little sister to not go to college and come join me and and come to
00:24:17
the channel she's right there in the corner shy um so we joined the two of us
00:24:23
and it basically grew from something where we started on Twitch and then we went to all plat form so we expanded
00:24:28
onto YouTube onto Tik Tok and then we also started expanding genres so I've been doing more poker my sister's been
00:24:35
getting more into DJing we've been putting on some really big events we threw a chess event on Twitch that broke
00:24:40
the record ship number and we had almost 100,000 live concurrence watching wow so a lot of it has kind of been expanding
00:24:47
and now I'm getting a little bit pulled back into the entrepreneurship side of things so I've been working on actually
00:24:53
a chess 2.0 startup company um and I'm just just excited to keep going and mixed content with hopefully also more
00:25:00
in the future um Jimmy Donaldson's going to be here in the afternoon who you know Alex um can you just
00:25:08
explain what the Creator economy is like why has it just blossomed like this and
00:25:14
like what is the ultimate goal at a meta level is it just that like to to break
00:25:20
the distribution model so that you're like just explain what that movement is and why so many people are part of it so
00:25:27
people recently discovered that creators are pretty similar to small and
00:25:32
mediumsized businesses or in Jimmy's case like an actual legitimate huge business he's going to be speaking later
00:25:39
um but basically what they learned is that it's easier to turn attention into
00:25:45
Capital than it is to turn Capital into attention and what that means and what
00:25:51
that means is when you have an audience especially if they're around a particular Niche they can also be kind
00:25:56
of like the f customers to your product um and that's why you see people like Mr Beast starting febles or Logan Paul
00:26:04
starting Prime but I think one of the trends that we're going to increasingly see is Founders connecting with some
00:26:11
kind of Creator partner for organic distribution but also to kind of get more insight into product development
00:26:18
because those creators are not just marketers they're people who live and breathe their audien's feedback and are
00:26:23
really aware about the specific Niche they're working on just say a little bit more about that what what like how do
00:26:29
you see that playing out so I I can talk in my particular example right now I'm I'm one partnered with chest Doom but
00:26:36
I'm also working on a startup that's trying to reinvent chess by adding some video game elements we're calling it
00:26:41
chess 2.0 so when as a co-founder in this company there's the operator and
00:26:46
there's myself as the second co-founder and what I'm going to do is help with the distribution when the product's out
00:26:51
but right now in all the play testing um I basically have people from my community who can be beta testing and
00:26:57
being able to give feedback but I really have seen the trends of what works in chess so I've basically talked to like
00:27:03
dozens of companies that are trying to uh start something in the chess space I've seen what works and what hasn't I've seen what my audience has responded
00:27:10
to so then when I'm partnering with a startup it's not just like hey post this on your story get people to go use it
00:27:16
but it's more like what does your audience actually like what products that are different to chess have they used which ones Works which ones haven't
00:27:22
so Step One is distribution you have to get it and then you can figure out how to convert that to different things
00:27:28
right M um do you how do you you get pulled in a thousand different directions like oh wait hold on I need
00:27:34
to now repurpose this for Tik Tok and oh hold on I need to do this on X and wait the the twitch economics are kind of
00:27:40
crappy like just explain the day-to-day of like how do how do you build distribution yeah so I think one of the
00:27:46
things that is the trickiest is when you start on one particular platform and learning how to expand outwards so for
00:27:53
me I started on Twitch which is basically you're streaming for eight hours a day day you're talking to the
00:27:58
audience it's not filtered you're just being yourself YouTube as you'll also see from Jimmy later is completely
00:28:05
different the best YouTubers in the world they're planning out their thumbnails before they're planning out
00:28:10
their titles they won't even put a video out if the thumbnail and title aren't good whereas with streaming there's no
00:28:15
thumbnails there's no titles it doesn't really matter so what creators usually do at the start is they try to repurpose
00:28:22
their content and put it onto other platforms and that's what we did as well we would just take our twitch stream and put them on YouTube and that's a good
00:28:29
way to get started maybe get to the first like couple hundred thousand of followers but when you actually want to grow on a platform you have to make
00:28:36
content that's organic for it because it'll do 10 to 100 times better so it's actually a skill where you have to learn
00:28:42
how to turn your content and make it work on all platforms and then once you have the knowhow you can hire people to
00:28:49
Outsource it who can then do it for you and so going back to your previous point about being involved with building this
00:28:55
new startup you're effectively the Chief product officer you get to set the direction of the product and drive it
00:29:01
versus what used to be the case that brands of of uh consumer products would
00:29:07
go and get endorsement deals with celebrities and they would say hey you're a famous person here's a pre-made product will you put your stamp on it
00:29:13
and say that you like it and that's really what's changing right now in the creater economy which vertical
00:29:19
integration right and gives them gives you Equity Mr be do this with candy bars yeah Jimmy did it with candy bars but I
00:29:25
think what Alex is saying the generalization is if you were the one that builds the attention it's very easy
00:29:31
not easy sorry but it's very possible to disrupt these Legacy Brands because you find out that their brand loyalty and
00:29:37
Affinity is actually quite low like nobody really prefers Hershey's or nobody prefers XYZ namess nameless and
00:29:44
faceless have you guys thought about um creating a physical world product Yeah we actually already have so we have our
00:29:50
own a bot has live branded chessboards pieces hoodies things like that um we
00:29:56
actually just took some photos with Magnus and we're going to pump them out so I'm super excited for that um so we
00:30:01
do that and a lot of creators put out their own merch but I think the ones that do it properly is they build a
00:30:08
brand bigger than themselves and they partner with the right people have you thought about doing Live Events because
00:30:13
it does seem like you have a strong audience and when you bring Community together like this I could see a a chess Festival doing extraordinarily well I
00:30:20
actually am talking to people about a chess Festival but as you guys know this is so incredibly difficult to pull off
00:30:26
properly I'd rather not do it unless we can get proper sponsors and just make it an incredible experience but we do a lot
00:30:33
of in-person Chess meetups and those are always really exciting my sister started DJing and she's brought our chess crowd
00:30:40
sounds hard to believe into DJ boiler rooms where they're just you know partying all night and actually it's
00:30:46
been an incredible turnout even for events like thatting yeah I I also saw your sister kick someone's ass on um on
00:30:55
uh from your YouTube channel are you like a a professional fighter people
00:31:01
boxing boing okay I mean it was like amazing and and you're getting
00:31:07
into and you're getting into poker I have been getting into poker I got
00:31:12
invited to a tournament two years ago and they gave me some formal poker training I was like wow this is so fun
00:31:18
you never play prior um my dad had taught me how to play so I knew all the rules and things like that but I didn't know anything about ranges or bed sizes
00:31:25
and that's when I learned for the first time and then a year later I got invited to this crazy $100,000 poker buying game
00:31:32
with Mr Beast and Phil helmuth and other pros and a mix of creat how take off Phil um at least a couple hundred
00:31:39
thousand yeah okay yeah just like us um so I know Phil is shas's best friend no
00:31:46
I have a question we were talking he is not my best friend we U talking at poker
00:31:51
the other night and that's so hurtful I think it's super interesting to talk about your dad for a second because I
00:31:58
asked you how'd you get so good at this and you said well my dad loved to play games with me and we had Jenny Jess yesterday talking about hey more women
00:32:05
should play strategy games so I was wondering if you could just unpack how you were raised and what gave you the
00:32:11
love of competition games and strategy so I'm from a Romanian family and my
00:32:19
parents immigrated to the US and then to Canada basically the rags to riches
00:32:24
story where they came here with nothing but one thing that my dad really loved and is really common in Romanian culture
00:32:31
is games and chess in particular so when I was six years old my dad started teaching me how to play chess and I
00:32:37
really loved it because it was something that we would do for fun um he would trash talk me as a six-year-old if he
00:32:42
would ever beat me he would make me write him notes saying like I lost to the beautiful gorgeous Master my dad I
00:32:48
will never be better than him and he would frame these so he tortured you he tortured me so like all good fathers do
00:32:54
to their overperforming children yes and I and it made me maybe too competitive
00:32:59
to this day and I blame my dad um but then he also taught my younger sister and we both got some pretty good results
00:33:06
early on my dad even taught me how to play poker when I was like 10 years old CU he would play with his colleagues
00:33:11
online and when he had to leave early he would let me play for him I've been told not to say that cuz it's whatever
00:33:17
illegal um he he would let you play his stack he would let me play a stack and I didn't know the rules but I remember one
00:33:23
time I beat all of his colleagues cuz I kept bluffing thinking I knew what I was doing and then he went to work he's like
00:33:28
my 10-year-old daughter beat you all so he was just that kind of dad uh when you
00:33:34
started to learn uh poker tell me what lessons from chess carried over and what
00:33:40
didn't so the most common question I get is what from chess applies to Poker and
00:33:45
it makes a lot of sense because there's so much overlap but I think the truth is it's not causation it's not like cuz
00:33:51
you're good at chess you'll be good at poker but it's more like the kind of people who are good at chess tend to be
00:33:56
good at poker I mean for chess people you've spent Decades of your life trying to get good at a board game that makes
00:34:02
no money so that's insane but then you apply it to Poker and it's like wow I
00:34:08
really love learning the strategy of this and now there's also some higher Stakes to be had can you break down just
00:34:14
for those of us that don't play what does it take to become very good at chess like is it that Magnus
00:34:20
Carlson has essentially and I'm just going to use the word but you can tell me it's wrong memorized all the
00:34:26
distribution of movies possible for every sequence like is it is it just like he has a capacity to remember that
00:34:32
makes him great so a lot of chess players are lotted for their memory and
00:34:37
there's actually been studies uh where they went with one of the Polgar sisters and they tested her memory one with
00:34:44
chess positions that came from actual games and one with positions where the pieces were just randomly placed on the
00:34:50
board and when they were randomly placed on the board she did pretty similar to most people even though again the Polgar
00:34:55
sisters have like one 60 plus IQ so they're very very smart um but then when it came to the chess positions they
00:35:02
could remember those by heart so I think a lot of what it is is trained and applied memory um but the truth is the
00:35:08
best chess players in the world one they were extremely talented they were been playing from a young age that's all they've done for their entire life and
00:35:15
then they've put in so much intense work and it's honestly more understanding
00:35:20
than memorization because by move 20 you've almost completely deviated from every other game but then a lot of it is
00:35:27
pattern recognition where you've deviated but there's this slight change that maybe makes it so that you can move
00:35:33
on one side faster so it's really trying to figure it out on the board and having trained as much as possible as you can
00:35:38
before and that's in memory chunking and that's where people confuse maybe
00:35:45
intuition with actually pattern recognition or chunks of moves and that is the best way from what I understand
00:35:51
to get really good at chess is to understand those sort of situational chunks of moves like when you hit me with a nice fork and I lost my Rook yeah
00:35:58
exactly exactly and Magnus the best player in the world he's extremely good at end games because again he knows the
00:36:04
foundation of end games really well he's had a lot of practice and he also just has crazy Natural Talent at figuring them up so speaking of Magnus there was
00:36:12
a a chess Scandal that we talked about in the Pod some ways back involving Hans Neiman a player who has kind of kicked
00:36:19
off chess.com and maybe some other places too for alleged cheating Magnus said he wouldn't play with him now I
00:36:25
guess there's a statement that chess.com is allowing him back Magnus said he will play with him can you give us an update
00:36:31
on like what the Chess World thinks happened there yeah and maybe I'll give some general background a little bit
00:36:37
more so the audience has it too basically the best chess and I know they talked about it on the Pod but just in
00:36:43
case um so the best chess player in the world was playing against a talented junior he was in the top 50 um of all
00:36:49
players in the world top 10 for all Juniors and he was this chess player who had risen really quickly like 100 to 200
00:36:56
points which was unheard of for his skill level and he ended up beating Magnus and Magnus the next day withdrew
00:37:03
from the tournament which is the first time Magnus has ever done anything and it basically led to Magnus accusing him
00:37:09
of cheating and Hans coming out with a public interview saying he's never cheated on the board but he has cheated
00:37:15
online when he was you know 16 or very young chess.com saw this and because he
00:37:20
said that information about cheating on their site they wanted to correct the information so they came out and they
00:37:25
said actually he's cheating online in hundreds of games including events that were for money um and then he got
00:37:31
Uninvited from some larger tournament and basically what ended up happening is
00:37:37
it blew up into this giant controversy where people on hans's side was saying they haven't been able to prove the
00:37:43
cheating over the board he admitted to online that's very different and then uh people on magnus's side were just saying
00:37:49
you know if the best person in the world thinks he cheated he has really good intuition this was recently resolved
00:37:55
where Hans has been a able to get back onto chess.com chess.com uh I spoke to them the day he got back on the website
00:38:02
the way they saw it is we just want the world to move forward we don't want there to be drama in any sport somebody
00:38:07
can get a penalty but they should be allowed to come back in um and Magnus agreed to play him back over the board
00:38:13
and then just a day ago another world chess champion accused him of cheating and uh made a YouTube video on it for
00:38:20
what it's worth he accused him of cheating because his timing was really weird in an online game but this 19-year-old was like changing music
00:38:26
talking to his chat so that's probably why but because of computers it's just really easy to be suspicious now and but
00:38:33
didn't some of the cheating occur in person and they were thinking he might have had some sort of signal and somebody was you know maybe an is shuer
00:38:39
or something like that maybe you could talk to that because that seems yeah that's what Magnus was accusing him even
00:38:45
when the chess.com report came out chess.com said they found no evidence of cheating over the board and there still
00:38:52
has been no cheating no evidence of cheating over the board so that hasn't been proven
00:38:57
that being said it's extremely difficult to catch people who cheat because it could be as simple as an Arbiter you're
00:39:03
working with scratching their head when you have a winning move and that's it so it's really hard to catch not saying
00:39:09
that he did cheat but that's the difficulty of catching cheating at Elite at tournaments are they now going to do them like in a sealed room so that
00:39:16
nobody can be watching and present in order to keep the Integrity of the game I mean they do metal detectors and all
00:39:21
of the Arbiters now you know they they check them a lot they're doing statistical analysis they they look over
00:39:27
their game and things like that so they're doing all of the tools that they can right Alexandra um thank you for
00:39:33
bringing chess to the world I think you've been an amazing Ambassador and thank you for joining us today congrats
00:39:39
on all your success thank you let your winners
00:39:45
[Music] ride and in we open source it to the
00:39:50
fans and they've just gone crazy with it love you queen of
00:39:58
[Music] Winer
