Levy Rozman returns to answer more of the internet's burning questions about the game of chess. What does he make of the Carlsen vs. Neimann controversy? What's the greatest chess move of all time? How are chess bots able to analyze an entire game? Levy answers all these questions and much more!
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Francis Bernal
Editor: Louville Moore
Talent: Levy Rozman
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: D. Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Brittany Berger
Gaffer: Mar Alfonso
Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino
Production Assistant: Albie Smith
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Paul Tael
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Director: Lisandro Perez-Rey
Director of Photography: Francis Bernal
Editor: Louville Moore
Talent: Levy Rozman
Line Producer: Joseph Buscemi
Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas; Brandon White
Production Manager: D. Eric Martinez
Production Coordinator: Fernando Davila
Camera Operator: Brittany Berger
Gaffer: Mar Alfonso
Sound Mixer: Michael Guggino
Production Assistant: Albie Smith
Post Production Supervisor: Alexa Deutsch
Post Production Coordinator: Ian Bryant
Supervising Editor: Doug Larsen
Additional Editor: Paul Tael
Assistant Editor: Billy Ward
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00 I'm Levi Rosman, chess educator, YouTuber, and author.
00:03 Let's answer some of your questions from the internet.
00:05 This is chess support.
00:06 [upbeat music]
00:09 @Mantosh12 asks, "Do chess players trash talk?
00:14 "That way this game would be more fun."
00:17 You can't talk to your opponent during a chess game, period.
00:20 So you definitely can't trash talk an opponent
00:22 during a chess game.
00:23 But outside of it, oh, it's some of the best
00:25 passive-aggressive soap opera drama
00:27 you can possibly imagine.
00:28 Now that we have a young grandmaster like Hans Nieman,
00:31 who, despite his checkered past, no pun intended,
00:34 will actually go out of his way to trash talk other people
00:37 and have more eyeballs on the game.
00:38 So yes, but also no.
00:41 @AnnaKramling, what, you got Anna for this video?
00:43 Says, "Is there any more satisfying checkmate
00:46 "than this one?"
00:47 First of all, hi, Anna.
00:48 Second of all, yes, obviously.
00:51 Probably the most satisfying checkmate in all of chess
00:54 is smothered mate.
00:55 When an opponent's king is stuck on the edge of the board,
00:58 boxed in by his own pieces, and you use this knight,
01:01 and you gallop into the position,
01:02 and the king is smothered in the corner by his own army
01:05 while this knight attacks,
01:07 and there's nothing that you can do.
01:09 @keenchess asks, "Was the Hans Nieman-Magnus Carlsen
01:12 "cheating controversy good publicity for chess?
01:14 "What would you make of the drama?"
01:16 Overall, it was a net positive for chess.
01:19 There was a massive controversy
01:22 between Magnus Carlsen and Hans Nieman,
01:24 where the young grandmaster from the United States
01:26 defeated the world champion,
01:27 and Magnus withdrew from the tournament,
01:29 basically doing everything
01:30 but directly accusing Hans of foul play.
01:32 Millions of people around the globe
01:34 started thinking of chess.
01:35 They were hearing all of these ridiculous headlines,
01:37 but at the end of the day,
01:38 it just sparked their interest in the game itself.
01:41 @neo_fight78 asks, "Okay, chess peeps,
01:44 "what's the opening or variation
01:46 "that's the most fun for you to play?"
01:48 One of my favorite variations to play
01:50 is when I'm playing with the white pieces,
01:51 and I open with the king's pawn, E4,
01:53 and black responds with C5, which is the Sicilian defense.
01:57 It's the most popular and combative opening for black,
02:00 fighting for the center with a flank pawn,
02:02 a pawn that's not one of the two center pawns.
02:04 And now, I will play what's called a delayed wing gambit.
02:08 I would go pawn to A3,
02:09 and the idea here is very, very sneaky.
02:12 You basically want to give up this pawn.
02:15 So black is going to take it,
02:16 and then you are going to take back,
02:18 and now black is gonna say, "Wow, what a dummy.
02:21 "I just won that pawn.
02:22 "Now I have an extra pawn."
02:23 And then you start kicking out the knight,
02:25 and you get this massive center.
02:27 You have a lot of pawns in the center.
02:29 You can even plug another one in,
02:31 and then you can use all of this open space for your pieces,
02:34 and a lot of players get overwhelmed in this position.
02:36 Find a chess opening or variation that you like,
02:40 that you understand, that gets you to a position
02:43 where you know the plans better than your opponent.
02:45 @ericfarley1 asks, "How does the ELO rating work?
02:49 "I'm intrigued."
02:50 And ELO is the number which quantifies your skill level.
02:53 It's not an acronym.
02:54 The first letter is a capital E, and then it goes L-O.
02:57 And the way ELO works is that it goes up and down,
03:00 or stays the same, depending on your results.
03:02 If you're rated 1,200 and you play a 1,100,
03:07 you will gain a certain amount of points if you win,
03:09 but your opponent will actually gain slightly more,
03:11 because they're beating somebody with a higher ELO.
03:13 The minimum ELO to qualify for Grandmaster is 2,500.
03:18 So an over-the-board live chess,
03:20 the highest ever ELO achieved is by Magnus Carlsen.
03:22 But online, Stockfish, which is the strongest chess AI
03:25 in the world, is estimated to be around 3,600.
03:28 At my peak, I was 2,430.
03:31 Then I lost to a bunch of nine-year-olds.
03:32 @johnnycpems asks, "How hard would Capablanca be to beat?
03:37 "With modern preparation tools at his disposal."
03:40 How good would Capablanca be with modern preparation?
03:44 Ridiculously good, probably the world chess champion.
03:47 José Raúl Capablanca was one of the best chess players
03:50 of his generation.
03:51 He was a fantastic positional player.
03:54 He was an expert endgame player as well.
03:56 The only thing that he didn't do was live
03:58 in the modern century in the age of computers.
04:00 He managed to do all of that with chess being on paperback.
04:02 Modern preparation tools are just a complete game changer.
04:06 They allow you to analyze positions
04:08 for 15, 20 moves in advance.
04:10 The information gap from 1920, 1930 to nowadays
04:13 is just absolutely absurd.
04:15 An 11-year-old now with modern preparation tools
04:19 could probably beat Capablanca in a match
04:21 just on the information that is available
04:24 to the 11-year-old that Capablanca
04:26 in the 1920s and '30s would not know.
04:28 @anuragsingh asks, "What is going on in your mind
04:31 "when you have to play your next move?
04:33 "Like what is your mind processing?
04:34 "Combinations, simulations?"
04:36 It's a great question.
04:37 José Raúl Capablanca said,
04:39 "I only think of one move at a time,
04:41 "and it's the best move."
04:42 Chess is all pattern recognition.
04:44 Most experienced chess players have studied a lot.
04:47 They have done thousands of chess puzzles.
04:50 So I might be remembering something in my memory palace.
04:54 I might be remembering there was this game played in 2012
04:58 between Grandmaster A, Grandmaster B in this city.
05:01 He was wearing a blue shirt,
05:03 and in that game he played this.
05:04 The more you play chess and the more you study,
05:06 that is how you are going to figure out
05:09 some of these good moves or an evaluation of a position.
05:12 @yourbudjosh asks, "Do old people
05:15 "still play chess in parks?
05:16 "What parks do you have to be old to play?"
05:19 I wanna play chess in the park.
05:21 There is no minimum age requirement
05:24 to play chess at your local public park.
05:27 But historically, chess has been associated
05:29 with old guys at the park.
05:32 When I was five or six years old,
05:33 my grandparents in Brooklyn would walk me to the park
05:36 where local 70-year-old men would sit there squabbling.
05:40 A lot of park chess players are actually really good.
05:43 The average park chess player in Union Square Park
05:46 or Washington Square Park is better than you
05:48 watching this right now.
05:49 So go play against them.
05:51 Many of them are very, very friendly.
05:53 They will give you some pointers,
05:54 and at least here in New York City,
05:55 it's customary to throw them like $3 or $5 for a game.
05:58 @sebilozano asks, "Hey Siri, how much do chess players make?"
06:03 Chess players make exactly what they win in tournaments.
06:07 Nowadays in 2023,
06:08 there's also things like endorsement deals.
06:10 Magnus Carlsen is famously sponsored by Puma, MasterCard.
06:14 You can also get invited to paid corporate
06:17 or speaking engagements, which a lot of them do
06:19 because a lot of people respect chess players now.
06:21 So it used to be that if you were outside
06:23 of the top 20 grandmasters in the world,
06:26 I'm not even sure you would break six figures
06:28 on a good year.
06:29 If you're also traveling the world constantly
06:31 playing tournaments and you're just not succeeding,
06:33 there is so much more pressure.
06:34 You're probably losing money in a calendar year.
06:37 @mckenzieweber3 says, "Learning how to program
06:40 "has changed my perspective on a lot of things.
06:42 "How does a chess bot able to analyze
06:44 "an entire game and point out which moves are the best?
06:47 "That's so wild."
06:48 Chess bots have been better than human beings
06:50 for something like 30 years.
06:51 Chess bots like Stockfish, Leela, AlphaZero
06:55 use really, really ridiculously powerful servers
07:00 and they can analyze tens of millions of positions
07:04 every single second.
07:05 What they do is then they go out into the future,
07:08 40, 50 moves in many, many different branches
07:11 and they come right back and they evaluate
07:13 what a move would do depending on
07:15 what's out there in the future.
07:16 @_namori_fan_, that's a lot of underscores,
07:21 says, "Does Stockfish blunder?"
07:25 No, a blunder in a traditional sense
07:28 is a monumental mistake.
07:30 Stockfish doesn't blunder anywhere near
07:32 the traditional sense, but at times,
07:35 it will place a piece on a certain square
07:38 and then not realize that actually 20 moves down the line,
07:41 that piece is not supposed to be positioned there
07:44 and all of a sudden it's too late to defend itself.
07:46 Stockfish has laws, not to humans,
07:49 it's laws to other bots like Leela, Komodo, or Torch,
07:53 but it definitely doesn't blunder like we do.
07:56 @erosendomita asks, "How does chess notation work?
08:00 "I'm going to bite someone."
08:01 No need for physical assault, it is quite simple.
08:04 If I was gonna play a chess game right now,
08:06 I would play pawn to d4 and the way you write that down
08:09 is just the square that the pawn moved to.
08:12 You don't have to write p, so it's kind of shorthand.
08:14 So you would write d4 and that is what that would look like.
08:19 And then your opponent would, let's say, play e6,
08:23 pawn to e6, you would write e6 and it would be d4, e6.
08:28 White made their first move and black made their first move.
08:31 c4, so you would write c4.
08:34 Now let's say your opponent developed a knight.
08:37 They played knight to f6, k is king, so knight is n.
08:41 Knight f6, so it would be nf6.
08:45 There's some moments where two pieces
08:47 can actually move to the same square.
08:48 For example, in this position,
08:50 both of black's knights can go to d7.
08:53 So if this knight went to d7, it started on b.
08:58 So knight b, d7.
09:00 And if this knight went to d7, it would be knight f to d7.
09:05 Bonus, what if both knights were on the exact same file?
09:10 Now knight b, d7 is the same exact thing,
09:13 so their only differentiator is what rank they're on.
09:16 So knight eight, d7, knight six, d7.
09:20 You only ever really need to do this with knights and rooks
09:24 because the bishops can never go to the same square
09:27 'cause they go on opposite colors.
09:28 @AidanB_ says, "Chess prodigies are so crazy to me.
09:33 "How are you seven years old and beating people
09:36 "who spent 60 years of their lives learning chess?"
09:39 That's actually the beautiful thing about chess.
09:41 It's a timeless game, and incredibly,
09:44 children and adults learn chess in vastly different ways.
09:48 People who start chess at a very young age
09:50 have a chance of getting to a much higher ceiling overall
09:54 in their chess careers.
09:55 That's why you'll see at a local chess tournament,
09:57 seven-year-old playing a 60-year-old.
09:58 I played a chess tournament in St. Louis
10:01 a couple of years ago,
10:01 and I played the number four, number two,
10:03 and number one-ranked 11-year-olds in America,
10:06 and I only scored 50%.
10:08 @adv_universe asks, "What is the single piece
10:11 "of chess advice that helped you improve the most?"
10:14 The biggest piece of advice that I give to kids or adults
10:17 trying to learn this game is to completely disconnect
10:21 your ego from this learning experience.
10:23 Be prepared to lose a lot.
10:26 There is no other way to get better at chess.
10:28 You will probably lose three out of every four games
10:31 that you play, but there are four to five things
10:34 that you can learn in each of those games.
10:36 If you are unable to do that
10:37 because it makes you angry or upset or frustrated,
10:40 then you are never going to get better at chess.
10:42 @iamalisa_deke says, "Hey, what is the price stake
10:46 "for this Chess World Cup?"
10:48 So the price take for this year's World Cup in 2023
10:51 was won by Magnus Carlsen,
10:53 and it was estimated to be something like $110,000.
10:56 The Chess World Cup is actually different
10:58 than the World Chess Championship.
11:00 The World Cup is a knockout tournament
11:02 that happens every two years in chess.
11:04 It starts with 128 players and ends with two.
11:06 @roamwithjohn asks, "How is chess boxing a thing?"
11:10 Chess boxing is a sport that combines
11:13 chess and boxing, shockingly.
11:16 And essentially all it is is a game of chess with a person,
11:19 and then you pause the game and you box for a round.
11:22 And then you finish the chess game
11:24 from the point it was started.
11:24 And then you keep going until one person
11:26 either wins in the chess or knocks the other out.
11:29 It's a fascinating sport, and it wasn't too popular
11:33 until 2022 when Ludwig, massive YouTuber,
11:36 actually put on the chess boxing event.
11:39 I was a part of it, I was a commentator.
11:40 I thought I was gonna fight,
11:42 but I am a little bit too scared
11:43 of getting punched in the face.
11:44 @roudsink asks, "I still can't wrap around
11:47 "the concept of speed chess.
11:48 "How can you decide a move under a second?
11:50 "Form a strat, and it usually lasts under a minute.
11:53 "The amount of brain cells you use in this."
11:55 There's no brain cells at all.
11:56 The average really good chess player
11:58 probably doesn't know how to make toast.
12:00 There is no correlation between chess and intelligence,
12:03 except in my case.
12:04 Listen, speed chess is all pattern recognition.
12:06 If you've seen it before,
12:08 it's not always going to be a one-to-one,
12:10 but you're gonna have enough experience
12:11 that you know what parts go where.
12:13 These people can do it in two, three seconds.
12:14 Speed chess is my favorite type of chess.
12:16 If I have to get slowed down,
12:18 then that's where I really struggle.
12:19 @sabaosmankazi asks, "Where did chess come from?"
12:23 Allegedly, around 600 AD in India.
12:27 It was called Chaturanga,
12:29 and back then the rules were slightly different,
12:31 but that apparently is the first,
12:33 earliest recorded instance of chess,
12:35 and I would know I was there.
12:37 @bisonboos asks, "Did chess ever change its rules?
12:41 "I mean, for a game that old,
12:42 "they must have made a few balanced patches."
12:45 Over the years, there have been very, very few changes
12:47 to the game of chess.
12:49 There are things called variants,
12:50 where they, let's say, shuffle the back row of pieces,
12:53 and now that's called chess 960,
12:55 or giveaway, where you try to lose all of your pieces,
12:58 and so on and so forth.
13:00 And the last time there was really any major update
13:02 is when they instituted en passant.
13:04 @rinequan asks, "Bro, what is en passant?
13:07 "What the hell I just found out about this rule?"
13:10 En passant in chess is a rule that came out,
13:13 I don't know, something like 200 years ago,
13:15 and essentially all it is,
13:17 your pawn has crossed the center line,
13:20 and your opponent makes a pawn move,
13:22 and stands side by side with your pawn.
13:24 They have to move two squares.
13:25 For this move, and this move only,
13:27 you can take that pawn diagonally behind it.
13:29 The only way you can en passant
13:31 is if a pawn moves two squares for this turn.
13:33 You cannot do that if it was another piece.
13:36 If your opponent just moved their knight to that square,
13:38 you cannot en passant a knight.
13:41 You would get punched in the face.
13:42 @mzslayer1 asks, "Chess lovers, what do you consider
13:46 "to be the most famous move in chess history?"
13:49 1972, Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky,
13:52 World Chess Championship.
13:54 United States versus Soviet Union, Cold War era.
13:57 They begin the match, and toward the endgame,
13:59 Fischer captured a pawn,
14:01 and got his bishop trapped in one move.
14:03 It was an oversight that, let's say,
14:05 an amateur player wouldn't even make.
14:06 It was just a complete, just mental slip for a move.
14:10 Fischer captured a pawn in the corner of the board,
14:14 essentially, and all Spassky had to do
14:17 was move his pawn one square.
14:18 And his bishop had no way out.
14:20 It was a completely inexplicable mistake.
14:22 Fischer had not made a mistake like that
14:24 in his entire career,
14:25 and he never made a mistake like that ever again.
14:27 Bobby Fischer went on to lose that game,
14:29 but a World Championship match is played over many games.
14:33 And even though he lost that first one
14:34 in this completely ridiculous fashion,
14:36 he actually went on to dominate and win the match.
14:39 @cozykayon asks, "Why do chess players resign
14:42 "instead of taking the loss?"
14:44 People at the highest level resign
14:45 when they know they're going to lose,
14:47 and they know that their opponent knows how to beat them.
14:51 Most of you watching this should not resign
14:53 because you never know.
14:54 Stalemate is possible at the end of a game,
14:56 running out of time by accident,
14:58 Wi-Fi disconnecting.
14:59 To resign, you would either tip over your king,
15:02 which is the dramatic way to do it,
15:03 you would click a button on chess.com if you were playing,
15:06 or you'll see grandmasters oftentimes just pause the clock.
15:09 And I would extend my hand to my opponent to shake it,
15:11 which is just a silent way of saying, "I surrender."
15:14 @quoraquestions4 says,
15:16 "What is the greatest chess match ever?"
15:18 The best chess match which took a long period of time,
15:20 you probably have to look at 1984,
15:22 Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov.
15:24 And back then it was decided by the first person
15:26 to win six games.
15:27 Karpov got out to a five-nothing lead,
15:30 and then Kasparov did not lose.
15:32 And he defended, defended, defended.
15:34 He fought to make it five-three
15:36 with like 30 draws in the middle.
15:38 And the match basically had to be called off
15:39 due to health concerns.
15:41 It was like two months of playing chess against each other.
15:43 I would never survive.
15:45 So that's all the questions we have for you today.
15:46 I just wanna say a big thank you to all of you
15:48 for watching chess, playing chess,
15:50 supporting chess in any way, shape, or form.
15:52 Until next time, thank you for watching Chess Support.
15:55 (upbeat music)
15:58 [BLANK_AUDIO]