GothamChess: Hans Niemann, Magnus Carlsen, Cheating Scandal & Chess Bots | Lex Fridman Podcast #327

I have anal beads that are communicating with Stockfish via Bluetooth. We'll get to that.

If you cheat, you play God. You decide when the game is over. You can fake bad moves, you can fake everything. You can. Even if you're cheating, quote unquote, the right way, you're going to lose plenty of games to avoid getting detected.

What's the probability that Hans cheated over the board against Magnus in St. Louis?

I think day by day, the evidence is slowly starting to show more and more that he's cheated. Like how Magnus said more than he said. And more recently.

The following is a conversation with Levy Rosman, also known as Gotham Chess. He's a professional chess player and educator. I highly recommend you check out his YouTube channel called Gotham Chess. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Levy Rosman. You're known for being able to guess people's ELO rating. So what do you think? Just by looking at my face, deep into my eyes, what's my Elo rating here? I'll help you. I'll do E4 for the listener. I actually read that Stockfish prefers E4.

Does it really?

I actually didn't know that because it maximizes the number of tactical options.

That makes sense.

The right answer is 3400, which is, I believe, stockfish. You guess people's Elo chess rating. What's that take? How hard is it to do that? And how would you actually do that? What are telltale signs of red flags about a person at different ratings? Is there something you look for?

Yeah, I think you can separate it. Something like the very first, the 0 to about 8, 900. For simplicity sake, I'm going to use the Chess.com rating system because Lichess is slightly different. It tends to go 2, 300 points higher than Chess.com, sometimes even 4, 500 points higher. But then it catches up. They catch up around 22, 20, 300, I would say.

What's Chess.com, what's Lichess? Can you like?

Yeah.

So explain what the difference is and what they are.

They're two chess websites.

Good starting point.

Yes. Chess.com is it has obviously the free option where you can play games. You get some sort of puzzles every single day, you get some sort of lessons every single day, but then they have tiered memberships where you can pay annually or per month that you can unlock all the other features. And like what?

Like, for training, for, like, puzzles and all that. Kind of stuff.

Yeah, they have unlimited puzzles. But they also have. Their biggest selling point for sure is like a dedicated game review that it's like very flashy and sophisticated and the coach will literally tell you what you did wrong at every single moment. The computer evaluated a mistake. But the most important thing that they have is they offer international masters grandmasters the opportunity to make video lesson libraries, which hundreds of hours of anything. I can even learn some stuff on there, probably.

I have anal beads that are communicating with stockfish via Bluetooth. Yeah, we'll get to that.

Yes, we will get to that. It's epic. It's actually scary how many people think that's a real thing, by the way, which is the danger of the Internet. But yeah, we will get into that.

But I tend to believe that people believing a thing that's hilarious at scale will make that thing a reality. I'm with Elon on this. I think people manifest the meme. The meme becomes real. So that. But that. That's in all walks of life. I think there is something about humor sort of being. Why does. Why did I. I was gonna. What was I was going to say is I feel like humor becomes a lubricant for the trajectory of human civilization. And I don't know why the word lubricant went into my head. Which beads I understand, but it's very Freudian anyway. So 0 to 900 if you're a 1300 player.

You were saying if you're not good at end games, you don't understand how to convert positions that have seven or eight pieces left on the board. You don't know when you're supposed to activate your king. You don't know how a bishop outplays a knight with just several pawns on the board. Those are all very important things. Because it's not just about knowing the theoretical endgame. Like some positions in chess are literally solved. If I showed you a position, I asked what's the evaluation and how do you win it? There's a technique. You're supposed to know that technique.

And the coaches on Chess.com can help or no. Yeah.

So these lesson libraries, it's not like a live lesson. It's pre recorded training position, walk you through it. And then there's a dynamic factor as well where you can practice. You can practice the theoretical and you can practice a practical game where there's no set format to do something. It's just based on your previous experience. Basically. Lichess is their entire thing is it's an open source Website that tries to be as free as possible and operates totally on donations. They don't have any advertisements. They don't have. Which is weird because normally in big competitive settings, it's all capitalistic. You have one big entity and another big entity and they're both for profit. But in this case, the big argument is, well, they offer a lot of things for free. You can analyze your games for free. You can go into Lichess lessons library and do things for free. The comparison that I always make is chess.com is basically like having a good personal trainer and having someone to help you at the gym. Lichess says you have to do all the stuff yourself. So you can combine YouTube with Lichess. No one's going to really point you in the right direction. You got to go fully explore on your own. If you want to do it, you can. I also like to say, can I make a controversial joke?

Yes.

Okay. Ardent Leasha supporters are like very angry, only vegetarian or vegan folks because they will tear you apart and try to convert you as much as possible.

Did you just point a large number of haters onto this very podcast? Is this what just happened?

No.

Is there several people that were very upset at you right now and throwing things? Okay.

No, no. That's always the joke that I've made. Because if people have Chess.com and I love all people, but I'm just saying Chess.com patrons do not try to actively convert folks on lichess. Folks on lichess are like, you know, there's a meme. Chess.comchaz.c it started at lichess, started somewhere in red. Unread, anarchy.

Chess kind of a. Oh, so Lichess is a little bit of an anarchist organization. Would you. Would you go as far as to say they're a terrorist, Terrorist, extremist organization.

Are we going there for legal reasons? That's.

I thought Lichess has like really good analysis. Somebody. Does it have an engine for analysis of like, games or is that. Is that an open source thing that like, they both do.

They both use stockfish 15.

Okay. And then the rest is the interface around stock Stockfish. That shows it's tough.

It's. It's the life. So Chess has a live server where you and I can play a game against each other. We just both seek and if we have the same rating, we have the same criteria, we'll play a game. But there's also reviewing your own games. There's an opening database so you can see what the most popular trends Are. So Lichess is great. I'm sponsored by Chess.com and I will openly say that. But you can't have.

So you're deeply biased.

Yes.

Okay.

But I'm also complimenting the competitor.

Can you play games on Lichess or is it just for analysis?

Yeah, yeah, you can. Yeah.

So it's the same exact thing. So they're like legitimately competitors. Not exactly the same thing, but they have the. They're trying to match for features. But you're saying Lichess is more chaotic and then Chess.com is more like professional.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if it's chaotic. I just know that it's. You have to. No one's going to hold your hand. If you, if you go to Lichess, you absolutely can. You can play games, you can analyze your games, but you have to discover yourself. The whole point of chess.com is to make the journey as simple as possible. But I also firmly believe you can't have any sort of growth in chess without a chess.com or a chess24.

What's chess24?

So chess24 was another live server with some lesson libraries and so on, but they were. I think the process was. They were bought by Play Magnus.

So what's Play Magnus?

Play Magnus.

That's Magnus Carlsen's thing.

He doesn't own it. He owns some stake in it, I think 9 or 10%. They owned a bunch of chess companies, including Chess24. But now it seems like they're either merging or basically getting acquired by Chess.com got it.

And then Play Magnus, it's an app also where you can Play Magnus. Different levels. But there's also the educational stuff.

Yes.

Okay.

The for profit chess companies make the option for grandmasters to make a living to make chess in esport. Lichess is great. It doesn't put on any events. There's no commentary. So you. You can have both in theory and probably some controversy is good.

Does Chess.com like sponsor you that help you out in some way? Like what's the connection between your videos and streams and so on and chess.com like are they supporting people in that way or.

No, my content, they don't necessarily. I just make whatever I want. Like I. I don't have not sense. Like if they do something stupid, I will call out their leadership. It's not like. But I. To have the logo up like in my YouTube videos or.

Yeah, it's just that kind of stuff.

Yeah.

So anyway, back to. I Mean, that was really helpful. I was confused about all that, the guessing, people's rating. So the thing you mentioned about the end game, if you don't know what the hell you're doing with the end game, what does that mean about you rating? If you don't know how to finish with just a few pieces on the.

Board, you could be my rating. Endgame is tough.

That's the self deprecating humor we tuned in for.

End games are hard, man. They're very deprecating. You can't have. There's a reason Magnus is the best, because seven hours into a game, when everybody's given up, he's still squeezing juice out of the fruit. So that's the way I would describe it.

So that's not a good source of information. If you few.

No, within the first 15 moves, generally you can tell because you can tell how well they played the opening, so how well they knew what they were supposed to memorize, what they were supposed to play, and then how they react to piece interactions. So if they are faced with a move that a more advanced player would deal with very swiftly because there's kind of a natural response that gives you information. If they move their king when they're in check, when they didn't have to, that's a massive giveaway. Some people just think, oh, I'm in check, so I have to move my king.

Okay, so it's like how direct the response of your play is to the danger. So like if you're more moving like multiple pieces at a time, meaning like you're moving like the pieces are like tied together in interesting ways and then. Okay, okay, like what about, like what about the opening? Can you tell Also because a lot of people can memorize openings, right?

Yeah, but takes two to tango, so you could memorize a bunch of stuff. But if you're 900 and I'm 900, your rating is fluctuating all over the place in the. In this podcast, I feel 12, 13, 900, you can memorize things. I'm gonna play some crap. And you can't play the way you memorized because I have to respond to you in certain ways. So you will either respond the way you think you're supposed to respond and that will probably be incorrect, or now you have to figure out how to deal with the fresh position.

Also, the 900 will reflect itself in both cases.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wonder if actually. So do you know your current rating or no or your top rating? What was your top?

I know Both my current Elo like, over the board now is 23, 20. My peak was 2430.

Oh, cool. So can you play, like a 900 player? Like, can you force yourself?

Yeah.

So you can, like, given that you've guessed a lot of ELO ratings, can you kind of emulate that? It's kind of an interesting question.

Yeah. Yeah, of course. Before I was doing YouTube and Twitch, I was teaching kids, so I had to. Not only did I have to play at their rating, I also had to play and sometimes even behave and explain things in a way that a kid could understand. So. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's what contributed to the growth of the channel, frankly. I kind of understood how beginners thought about the game. So.

Yeah, you taught people chess. You coached people for many years, I guess in New York.

Yeah, New York.

What did you learn about the way people learn from that? So, like, how. How did people that were successful at getting good at chess quickly, what were the. Some of the commonalities, some of the patterns that you saw?

Obsession. Yeah.

What does obsession look like?

I would say it's obsession and also. And also love of the game. So if you're bored, you don't want to watch a show, you want to boot up chess.com or lichess just for. Just so I don't get flamed by any. Anyone in the audience. And you just play.

So you're saying lichess people are the ones that would attack aggressively. They're the kind of people.

Probably the chess 24 people.

Oh, that's another. So there's not. I didn't know. I thought chess24 was part of the chess.com.

Well, now, yes.

Cult or tribe or whatever terms we want to use.

No, no, I'm sure there's even more places to play live. There always have been more place to play live. But chess, like, I'm. Leeches dominate. And. Well, chess 24 is rough for live interface. Of course, they have good courses and everything, but.

Yeah, I got it. I got it. And some are even good people or whatever that quote goes. Okay. Like obsession. That means the way they look at the board, when the board. How quickly do they return to the chessboard, that kind of stuff. Just like how many hours a day they want to spend. They spend and want to spend.

Some kids definitely have a talent. Of course, there's this eternal debate, talent versus hard work. I don't necessarily know if it's a talent for chess specifically, but it's a talent for. I'm sure there's some sort of spatial visualization in Your mind, your. You start picking up what squares are controlled by your pieces and opponents pieces faster. Your memory is much stronger. So you don't just learn openings like we discussed. You learn literal patterns such as, oh, I remember this from two tournaments ago. I remember this from a game I played just yesterday. And you just keep playing and playing and playing. But I think the one commonality I think I've seen in all kids, it's obsession. You have to play a lot. And I've seen kids who are brilliant kids, if you give them a page of tactics, puzzles, they solve faster than anybody. They can pick things up here super fast. They're a pleasure to teach. They go to a tournament disaster, they can't handle the anxiousness. They can't handle that silent face to face war with another six year old, they can't even handle. There's also trash talk. One sentence by a kid can throw off your prized student. And I've seen kids just totally disintegrate. I've seen also my students bully other kids who aren't my student wasn't that strong. But their verbal warfare, which is not allowed but goes unnoticed.

Well it's not even verbal warfare. Like just going like, like, like facial expressions you make at the board. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. There's pretty creepy, the intensity. Not creepy, that's not the right word. But there's an intensity in that silence over the board. Like you can probably hear stuff like just like it's super quiet. It's like a library.

Yep.

And then there's just a tension that builds. You can hear the breathing.

Yeah. And at the highest level, both sides are involved in a battle that they Both, both foresee 99% of the time. That's the scary part, is that you both see the exact same thing. It's very rare you play a move and I didn't see it. It's that I mis evaluated it. I saw the move could be played, but I missed something. Three or four moves deeper. You play that move and suddenly you're excited and I'm nervous. But all of a sudden you make an inaccuracy and now the tide shifts. Right. We could be on totally different planes throughout the game or we could be on the same plane throughout the game. So it's really fascinating and it.

Yeah. So your thought is when you see a move that to you seems suboptimal, you start to think what was that? You start to try and make sense of that. Did you miscalculate or did they miscalculate What? Isn't that what Magnus is really good at is taking people away from like making suboptimal moves to take them away from the known openings? Or is that unfair to say?

Yeah, he gets part of his really dominant reputation, I think, from not letting people get into ultra theoretical positions. He just won this tournament, this online tournament, and he said he had a young player strategy. He had an anti. Sorry, a anti. Young player strategy.

What's that mean?

It means that by move seven or eight, you go to the database. No games. Kid is on their own, they have to swim on their own. And they have to deal with the strategic complexities of the position, which he just. He gets and he might get from just an enormous database within his brain of historical games that have similar structures or just sheer genius. We won't know it's a mix of the two for sure. The younger you are, you can't remember a game played in 1951 and some bar in the Soviet Union. But he does because he read a book once or a magazine once.

He just remembers.

He remembers the structure, which. It's just. It's not fair. It's crazy, right?

What do you think makes him. If we consider Lingard, what do you think makes him so good?

I think it's the memory and I think it's. He just seems to get the game better than anybody else. That's the best way I can describe it in sports. You have reaction time, you have strength, you have. But also as he's now evolving its stamina. So there have been games that if you put two other 2750 rated players or world top 10 players, they would have drawn the game. The game would have ended the game. Nobody would have won it. You put Magnus as one of the aggressors in that game. Suddenly the chance of victory doubles from 5% to 10%.

What's that about? Because was a Game 6 against Nepo, right? Uh, isn't Stockfish say that it's supposed to be a draw?

So 0.00 does mean a draw sometimes, but other times it means. And it's the joke I always make. It means that Stockfish is out for a smoke break. It just. It can't.

Can you explain the joke? And can you explain 0.00?

Yes. So when. So Stockfish will show an evaluation which determines whether the position is equal. Slightly better for one side, slightly better for the other side, or completely winning. You can. 0.0, 0.2 minus 0.2. That's all within a balance. You can say, okay, Black has a little sprinkle of activity. Something white has that. But if it's 000, it could be literally a dead draw. Meaning theoretically just impossible to win. But oftentimes what that means is the smoke break joke is Cypher doesn't know. There is so much complexity within the position. The combinations of different moves that are acceptable and okay. And it cannot evaluate correctly. Wow.

So even the end games are tough for Stockfish.

Which is why Magnus won that game. Because there was practical value remaining. It wasn't a dead draw. He continued to ask questions over the course of six or seven hours. He would sacrifice a pawn. He would sacrifice another pawn to damage the structure. Valuation stayed the same because a machine could stop him. But not Yun. And that was one of my favorite. That game ruined my whole day by the way. It destroyed because. Yeah, I made so many plans that day. It completely ruined my day. But it was a very worthy recap.

You were just all in. You watched that whole game.

I watched the whole game and the World championship was a crazy time because I wanted to be first with the recap video but I also wanted to be best with the recap video. So I spent all the hours of the games watching all the. All the live broadcasts and getting all the information, all the variations and trying to put that into the recap. It was. It was a lot of fun. It was a huge adrenaline done when it was all over.

So just for people who don't know, that's the most recent world championship. So you had a. I mean that. That was a draw after draw after draw after draw.

Yeah.

And it was. It was kind of boring in that way. Or maybe are draws. Is there like non boring parts within the draw to you when you were like just studying it carefully?

For me, yes. For the average viewer. No. That's the truth. Especially when the game itself is not that exciting. When Magnus plays a strange move on move 9 or 10 that hasn't ever been played and then Jan has to try to exploit it and he fails and no attack builds up and they shuffle their pieces for three hours.

My favorite thing is when the commentator is like. I don't know why he did that. I wonder why he did that.

Yeah. Why.

When the commentators are confused. That's my. As a. As a person who's just a spectator. Just like. That's. That's interesting because then you. The most interesting part is about listening to the commentators who I guess themselves might be grandmasters all.

Yeah.

They are trying to. I guess, just like Nepo. Just like Magnus Tried to figure out what's the idea here? What are you thinking? That's cool. That's, that's, that's an interesting part of the game. But other than that, it, it seemed, yeah, I was sure this is just gonna keep being a draw, especially in that situation. So almost, it seems almost remarkable that Magnus was able to put pull out a win in Game 6. And after that, at least Magnus said that that that ends it because now that was gonna have to take more risks. And that opens it up to pure chess. And then who was it? Steve Prefontaine said, like when. Whenever it's, whenever there's a race is down to like pure guts, then that's when I win it.

There was also a conversation about Jan's first half, second half in any tournament. In the first half, he's just brilliant, on fire. You could even say he was out playing Magnus. But the entire conversation before the match was, Jan slows down and at the first sign of a loss or a setback, the match might fall apart. And that was the worst way to lose. There was literally no worse way. And it just got worse from there and there. I mean, it was one move mistakes and. But he's back. Jan has won the candidates again. He's going to play for the world Championship.

So who you got? Who you got? What is this slang terminology? Can we like somehow edit that into a more sophisticated, with the British accent type of phraseology? Okay, who do you think will win that match?

I think it's 55, 45, but I don't know who. I don't know.

So it's close.

It's very close. Okay, you can make both cases. You could say Ding. You could say, Jan has been here before. You can say to the World Championship stage. He knows what it's like to have a training camp and so on and so forth. His playing style is very. But you can also say Ding Liren is one of the most stable, unemotional chess players. And Ding oftentimes goes from down to up. So in the candidates, he lost to Jan in the very first game. 14 round tournament. He got demolished in the first game. I'm sure he was suffering from jet lag. The flight. He came to Spain like two days before the games began, which was crazy to me. And he got second place by the end. His chances of finishing in the top two were like 2%. After that first round game, people wrote him off completely. So he doesn't go from top down, he goes the opposite way. And if he loses, he might come back. But the truth is. I don't know. The truth is it's going to be an interesting match and it's also disappointing. We're not going to get Magnus in it.

Yeah. What do you think about him stepping away from the World Championship? Are you a romantic about the World Championships?

No, I'm not a romantic about anything. I don't think. I can't imagine that went dark quickly. I don't think I'm sophisticated enough to be a romantic. I think I, you know, I taught chess and Now I make YouTube videos. I'm not qualified on the subject of romanticism, but I.

You don't think it's a beautiful game, chess?

Yeah, no, I think. I think it is a beautiful.

There you go. I got you.

Yeah. Is that considered being a romantic?

Yeah, I was seeing the beauty in the. You can be like Bach and seeing the math in the music or you can see the beauty, the magic.

I think I see beauty in certain types of chess, for sure. Not in all chess.

So I'll.

Partially romantic.

Part time romantic.

Yeah.

Yeah. So what? I mean, what do you feel about Magnus stepping away from the World Championships?

Disappointing, but understandable.

Can you steal Magnus Case? What's understandable about it to you?

I don't think it's as prestigious as it could be. I don't think the World Championship. Yeah, yeah.

Why does Magnus still sign everything as world champion, then?

That's a good point that he did just put out a statement and he.

Did, but he does it everywhere else too.

Does he really?

Yeah. Like world champion. Right? World champion.

I don't know.

World champion, world chess champion.

Maybe it's just because he won it, but he thinks that the journey to the top, once again to maintain the status quo has lost its appeal. You know what, the example that I like to make, I'm a big fan of ufc, so we've never really seen, with the exception of Georges St. Pierre walking and Khabib. But Khabib was kind of a different story. Walking away from a belt at the absolute zenith of their career, but also in the ufc, champions are extremely well taken care of. Champions have some of the best, some of the best lives. Of course, you can argue, not all champions, you can say some of the lower weight divisions. Yes. But what I'm saying is a lot of them get all the sponsors, they get massive, massive paydays. They're international celebrities. I don't think chess has that. In fact, the World Championship of Chess prize fund has not changed much in like 40 years.

So you could probably make more money on YouTube.

Yes.

Playing randos. Not randos, but other. Having fun and playing challenging, really challenging games. Playing other super grandmasters, like an ad hoc events or maybe a little bit organized events, but not the world championship and still have a lot of fun. Make a lot of money, get everybody excited, all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. So for Magnus specifically, and we're using him because he's the world champion, if you tally. If he wins every tournament that he plays in over the course of a year, which is really not even that crazy of an estimate because that's really how it seems sometimes. I don't know how much money that is. I haven't tallied. But if he dedicated an entire year to being managed on social media and doing various things and growing all his brands and getting sponsor deals, I think he would make five times more than being the world champion, which is crazy.

Yeah. But money isn't everything.

I know. That's. That's totally.

People dedicate their whole life to winning the Olympics. The Olympics is a. Funny. Is an interesting one too because like, I didn't even watch the. The Olympics as carefully as I usually do this year.

Yeah, me neither. It's.

It's really strange. I'm not sure why that is. And during COVID I'm not sure that's. That was weird. I don't know if it's losing its magic. Part of it is also the people that own the Olympics and the way they distribute it, they make it a little bit more difficult to watch. Like it's. It should. In my opinion, it should all be just available on YouTube and easily accessible. It's like the difference between like SpaceX and. And some other organ, like even NASA just SpaceX is better at streaming their launches and. And commentating them. And it. They've made NASA better as well, but just like the ability. It sounds ridiculous, but making it more frictionless for people to watch get excited to share all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Like, I'm not exactly sure where the magic, like, balances between the. The classy traditional world championships and the kind of dramatic, exciting streamer world. And it feels like for. For the world championships to be relevant, they have to find that balance.

Yeah. Well, this recent one had. I was.

It's pretty good commentating. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I. I'm not. I'm not even necessarily talking about myself. There was a lot of.

That was the worst.

No, there was.

Well, every. You did amazing.

Yeah, I appreciate that. It was a lot of. It was a big arms race. So every major Chess platform, tried to get one super Grandmaster, Vishwanathan Anand, Fabiano Caruana, you name it, they were basically involved. And to go back to that point, yeah, the big question is money, and if Magnus is not motivated by money, if the prize fund for the next World Championship was $10 million, would he play it? If he says no, then it must be something else. It must just be a matter of something's not worth it. It's not worth.

You got to take him in his word. And his word is like, there's too much stress to the low sample play.

Yeah.

Like I want to play many more times.

Yeah, he wants to play more. He wants to. He wants to be more interesting. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. More shorter games, like, where you can increase the possibility of pure chess, whatever the heck that means.

But we can't go back to the first Karpov Kasparov match, which they had to stop due to health concerns. I mean, the guy went down five nil, and it was first to six. Wins and draws didn't count, so draws didn't amass to the total score. There was no best of system.

So what happened there?

The match went something like seven, eight months. Kasparov started making a comeback after being down 5, 0. He was 5, 3. And they called it off. They called it off. They said both players are in poor health conditions. Kasparov stormed down, yelled that this is a farce, and. But the match was 50 games long. Even more, maybe. I made a video and I don't even remember how many games it was. It was so long. Can you imagine? Bobby Fischer wanted something almost as extreme. Draws don't count his first one to 10 wins. And if it's nine, nine, the world champion retains his title. So you have to beat the world champion. 10, 8. That's the only way.

You don't like that. Well, it's just grueling.

I don't know, maybe I like it for the YouTube recaps, but do I like it for the players? Do I like it for general public?

No torture.

It's three, four hours, right? Imagine your favorite tennis match was six months long. What are we doing?

Yeah, yeah, there's still magic to the World Championship. I wish they could make it some interesting. They make it work somehow. But I think Magnus is really challenging Fide and everybody else to step up and try to figure that out, which is great. Ultimately, who would you say is the greatest of all time? Can you make the case? You mentioned Kasparov. Can you make the case for Kasparov? Can you make the case for Magnus Carlsen, Bobby Fischer, Tal.

In my opinion, you can make a case for Magnus, Gary and Bobby Fischer. I'm not one of the folks that's like. I mean, Capablanca was brilliant. You can argue Steinitz was brilliant, but as I think, I think it was, it's probably Kasparov and Magnus has a chance to overtake it.

So the longevity is really important to you when you were thinking about this.

Yes, I think so. I think Magnus is very, very close. It's extremely close.

What would be the magic?

You got to get that sixth one also. Just kidding.

So the world championships matter.

It's kind of like basketball, right. Rings. It all comes down to how many rings did this person weigh?

What about. Well, basketball doesn't have this. The number of years at number one. Right. Like rating. Sorry. Yeah, like there's a. There is a. Which is what Magnus really likes is like there is a nice system of rating of who is ranked number one. And it has to do not with some championships or low sampled tournaments. Has to do with general game after game after game helps estimate more accurately the Elo rating.

So, yeah, he's been world number one for I think 11 years. Right.

Which is still less than Gary was.

World number one for 20 years. Yeah. Which is.

Which is quite wild, but still lower rating, I think than Magnus now.

Right. Yeah, I think rating in general has sort of.

Allegedly it got inflated.

Yeah.

Is that true? Is there true to that?

I think so. I don't. I can't speak to how exactly it happened, but it also happens online if you go back just three or four years. I think some of the best blitz players on let's say Chess.com were 27, 2800 and now they're 3200. I think it's just sort of what happens. But I. I don't exactly know. I will mention that there was a very strange change, not exactly sure when the year was in fide. So over the board chess, where if you were under the age of 16 or 18 years old, one of those two and you were below 2300. Okay. Your rating change factor was three to four times higher. So just imagine what that means. Magnus has a rating change factor of, let's say one. I have a rating change factor also of one. Anybody over the rating 2400 has the same rating change factor.

What is the rating change factor? So if you win.

Yeah. There's a formula. And basically, let's say at the very base level, five point change. If your rating change factor is one, you beat somebody, you gain five points. Those kids who were under 18 and under 2300, their rating change factor was four. So their ratings were going up four times higher and four times like up and down compared to normal folks. And there was a. There was one teenager in the US in particular who in one month played a bunch of tournaments with his rating change factor and became nearly rated 2,640, which is top 50 in the world. He was just a random teenager from the United States. He became a grandmaster ultimately. But he bled like 90 points down because his rating was so inflated. And the K40 exists now. I mean you have many kids who out of nowhere, 2100, 20, 100, 2400 after one good month. Like what? So that's interesting.

That's like similar to like how TikTok inflates your virality early on. Does it? Yeah, like I don't know. Well, at least the rumor is like they want you to get engaged and I thought there was even artificial likes and so on that they want you to get that dopamine addiction and.