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8-Year-Old Refugee Wins New York State Championship
- MKais 8y agoNYT Article https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opinion/sunday/chess-champion-8-year-old-homeless-refugee-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opinion/sunday/chess-cham...
- vr46 8y agoAs they say, talent is evenly distributed and opportunity is not. Good on the little fella.
- golemiprague 8y agoTalent is not evenly distributed, for example some groups of population has much lower average IQ than others.
- jonahx 8y agoTalent is nowhere near evenly distributed. As this boy shows.
- yathern 8y agoEvenly distributed not in the sense that everyone has an equal amount, but that every way you can cut up demographics (age, race, sex, nationality) will have the same bell curve of talent. But that is not necessarily so with opportunity.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoNo offense, but it seems preposterous to suggest the talent distribution within any demographic category is uneven, but if you compare two demographic categories, they are the same. Take a look at the top marathon runners, and tell me that the long distance running talent is distributed equally in Bolivia and Kenya.
- yathern 8y agoWell that's more of a question on what defines "talent" - and if such a thing exists. Genetic predisposition certainly is a thing in sports, and genetics and ethnicity are obviously closely related. The context we we're talking about was specifically taken in terms of intelligence. Or "potential". If you want to make the argument that intelligence potential is affected by your ethnicity, you are free to do so, though I doubt such ideas will be well received :) This idea of talent being equally distributed may not be factually accurate. But it's something I'd prefer to believe regardless and be wrong about.
- iguy 8y ago> But it's something I'd prefer to believe regardless and be wrong about. This is fine so long as you are judicious about what actions follow from such beliefs. If it motivates you to seek opportunity and encouragement for all, that is wonderful. If it motivates others to run witch-hunts in against fairly meritocratic organisations whose makeup stubbornly refuses to conform to their beliefs, that is less than wonderful.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yathern 8y ago> it motivates others to run witch-hunts in against fairly meritocratic organisations whose makeup stubbornly refuses to conform to their beliefs I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about. Can you give a specific example of a witch-hunt like this? I imagine you're talking about something where (for low-stakes example) a video game competition is typically dominated by 20 year old white males. Someone stirs the boat and tries to make changes so that 50 year old hispanic women place better, despite worse objective performance. Obviously that would not be a great thing to do! However, let's not assume the makeup of meritocratic organisations is always as fair as we think. In the video game example, the inconsistency with the makeup is not necessarily because 20 year old males are, by nature since birth, better at video games. But for mostly social reasons, having had more exposure.
- bluthru 8y ago>but that every way you can cut up demographics (age, race, sex, nationality) will have the same bell curve of talent. No. There is not data to support this belief, and the problem becomes when people expect this result and make rules to create this outcome.
- danans 8y ago> No. There is not data to support this belief, At least with things like chess playing and related abilities, there is no data to suggest the opposite belief either. Any observations that we could use at sufficient scale are massively confounded by other huge environmental variables.
- bluthru 8y agoLet's take an easy one: basketball. There are more white high school basketball players but more black college basketball players. Are you claiming that's 100% environmental?
- danans 8y agoI never said it was 100% environmental (those are your words). I said determining the cause of high ability in things like chess is not straightforward because of the confounding environmental factors. Just because your cherry picked example of basketball has an obvious first order physical correlation to performance (height) doesn't mean it's comparable to chess. And your example also ignores the fact that white students tend to have more avenues to access college than black students, so don't need basketball programs nearly as much.
- akhilcacharya 8y ago“Not everyone can be a chess champion but a chess champion can come from anywhere”.
- yathern 8y agoIs that a modified ratatouille quote? That's been my philosophy for a while :)
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIt's a good quote!
- sDlEzAtyoNAz 8y agoWhat reason do you have to believe that?
- broodonix 8y agoI think he means geographically
- KorematsuFred 8y agoTalent is highly distributed, Opportunity is not. Fixed it for you.
- intuitionist 8y agoTalent is higher-entropy than opportunity.
- frutiger 8y agoPithy, but that’s not really what entropy is about (logarithm of microstates corresponding to a macrostate).
- Chris_Chambers 8y agoWho are “they”? I’ve never heard this and it seems incorrect.
- sDlEzAtyoNAz 8y agoAs who says? And what reason do they have to believe it?
- diego_moita 8y agoNYT's Nicholas Kristof (the first to tell the story) announced a GoFundMe campaign to help Tani's family: https://www.gofundme.com/just-tani https://www.gofundme.com/just-tani
- fernandopj 8y agoA very successful one: currently at $193,339 of $50,000 goal, in 4 days.
- Dangeranger 8y agoA year after learning to play chess he has a USCF rating of 1473 and is #27 in America for eight-year-olds. Tani participated in the New York State Championship. He won the category for children of his age, kindergarten to third grade, with five wins and one draw[0]. "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opinion/sunday/chess-champion-8-year-old-homeless-refugee-.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/opinion/sunday/chess-cham...
- tudelo 8y ago> #27 in America for eight-year-olds The granularity of this ranking is interesting.
- birken 8y agoWell the USCF knows your exact USCF rating and your birth date, so it is very easy for them to make these lists. Though they should be taken with a grain of salt because, especially for young players who are improving quickly, their rating is very likely a lagging indicator of their current skill.
- benatkin 8y agoI disagree. This isn't a contrived category, which is common in tournaments, to make them interesting. On chess.com and Lichess there are chess tournaments that are restricted to people with lower than, say, a 1500 rating. If a 1700 chess player plays worse on purpose to get the score down, that's called sandbagging. There is little room for sandbagging here. People can't just change their ages, or up and move to the US. There are age ratings and regional divisions in different sports, and it both makes things more fair and opens up more opportunity to compete. This is a significant achievement and the boy is undeniably an elite chess player. Edit: s/soundbagging/sandbagging/g
- tbrake 8y ago> I disagree. Was there an edit to the OP I missed? What are you disagreeing with exactly? It was clearly a statement of opinion about how they found it interesting. You couldn't just elucidate more on the reasoning for the classifications, you had to first tell them they were wrong and then pedantically explain it. Peak fucking HN commenting.
- Cyph0n 8y agoImagine the potential this kid has if he was able to achieve this while his family was homeless... I am both impressed and jealous!
- koolba 8y agoFlipping it around, imagine he grew up in a stereotypical middle class suburb and, instead of pursuing chess, he spent his idle time watching YouTube videos of influencers unboxing toys on his iPhone.
- sshagent 8y agoNicely put.
- PhilWright 8y agoAh, apparently you have met my son and all his friends. Getting any of them to be passionate about anything but YouTube and PlayStations seems all but impossible.
- caprese 8y agoalongside the potential distractions when different preoccupations are available
- bufferoverflow 8y agoIn his age category.
- noir_lord 8y agoHe's 27th in the country out of his age range and he's up against a lot of kids with every advantage in life. That's damn impressive any way you cut it, just under 1587USCF meaning he's playing at about the grade of an average active adult chess player (and far beyond an average player)...at 8 after a year living in pretty grim life circumstances. Little dude is inspiring.
- bluGill 8y agoAt 9 years old most kids have not been playing long. It wouldn't surprise me if he studied more hours than everyone else in his class (homeless implies no other toys to play with) which begs the question why are the other 26 better than him with less study. Note that wouldn't surprise me doesn't mean much - I have no clue how much study he does.
- emiliobumachar 8y agoStudying more then the other competitors is definitely to one's credit, arguably more so then any innate talent.
- vorotato 8y agoClearly you're not familiar with competitions.
- ivanhoe 8y agowell, if his rating is 1473, then he plays chess after just one year of learning better than I can after 30+ years...
- wwweston 8y agoAt a state level or above, distinction in any age category is a distinction. I think I was about 11 when I learned the game, and before long with no particular study I could beat most of my neighborhood peer group and some adults. Then I actually went to my local middle school competition, was handed a series of decisive defeats, and learned there's a world of people who begin to make a serious study of it in childhood, same as there are serious students and even prodigies when it comes to musical instruments, and in that arena, I was nowhere near the top of the local pool. Let alone a New York pool, where I suspect there are 8 year olds that could give many HN participants a run for their money.
- narrator 8y agoEdit: Yay for the kid. He's awesome. I was trying to be clever about demonstrating how the journalist's selection among alternatives narratives influence our perception of reality, but it was too much wrongthink.
- BoorishBears 8y agoWhat the hell is this supposed to be?
- JJMcJ 8y agoStrongly suspect a cut/paste catastrophe.
- rosser 8y agoIt's supposed to be clever, I imagine. It just comes across as churlish, though. EDIT: Even the fact that the comment was edited from some stupid pseudocode, into something that cries "wrongthink" plays thusly...
- Dylan16807 8y agoI'm not sure how 'pseudocode' justifies "what the hell is this"..?
- BoorishBears 8y agoIt wasn’t psuedocode as much as oddly racially charged drivel.
- narrator 8y agoMy definition of "wrongthink" is suggesting that facts support confirmation of a narrative, regardless of what the facts are, when that narrative has become socially unacceptable. For example, in Chinese society, to suggest that religious minorities are being mistreated by the government is "wrongthink" regardless of what the facts are. If this kid had been from a Uyghur family in China and his father had been killed in a Chinese internment camp it would not be "wrongthink" for a western newspaper to say "8-year old fleeing from religious oppression in China wins New York State Championship", though it would be "wrongthink" to print this in a Chinese newspaper or even an Indonesian newspaper. A presidential candidate in Indonesia recently declined to comment on China's mistreatment of muslims for example.
- joe_the_user 8y agoHe won the State Championship for children in his age category. If he had won New York State Championship for all ages, he would have been indescribably far advanced. I think Bobby Fisher won the NY State Championship at age 19 - New York holds many of the strongest US players, naturally.
- simen 8y agoFischer won the US championship for adults at the age of 14. He then went on to become the youngest candidate for the world championship in history at the age of 15 - a distinction he still holds.
- internet_user 8y agoWe are post peak-chess. The interest fell sharply after Kasparov's loss to DeepBlue. I was a member of a chess club, that went from 30 tables to 5 in a span of couple of years.
- narrator 8y agoI heard that even grand masters get beaten by cell phone chess games these days.
- internet_user 8y agoProbably not that far from truth. Yet I don't see cellphone chess programs make first page, for some reason. Why is that?
- Bootvis 8y agoExactly the truth, actually.
- mmmrtl 8y agoMaybe the same reason you don't see news stories about chess grandmasters beating 8 year olds? They're out of their class and dramatically outmatched - the cellphone chess programs can't really compete with better resourced chess computers
- cjbprime 8y agoI heard that cars are pretty good at distance athletics too, but no-one gives them any credit.
- internet_user 8y agoUntil they reduce employment.
- systemspeed 8y agoSpeaks to the fragility of the human mind. The human collective organism, as it were, instead of rising against the challenge from the machines, decides to shift focus elsewhere. Chess is nowhere close to being a solved game, yet we're already treating it as such.
- SolaceQuantum 8y agoHow can we, as a society, support our future during its most vulnerable time (childhood)? How is it possible that we still have homeless children in a country with so much wealth? (I'm seriously asking. I want to know how many other similarly bright minds aren't being supported to their full potential due to circumstances not their fault, and what public administrative techniques have been proven to work or not work and why.)
- johnchristopher 8y ago> How can we, as a society, support our future during its most vulnerable time (childhood)? How is it possible that we still have homeless children in a country with so much wealth? The argument goes like this: > Because why should I care for someone else's child and why should I shell out money because someone decided to have children even though they shouldn't have ?
- edmundsauto 8y agoTaking it further, it's because when we offer goodwill, we want it to have strings attached. When you support someone else through charitable donations, you want certain restrictions on it. For example, I don't want to support some kids' religious education, because I think religion is a form of handcuffs. When we give to a homeless person, we don't want it used for drugs. In general, we want our giving to support our values. With other people's children, especially children in a different socioeconomic group, that's unlikely.
- MRD85 8y agoI don't see anything wrong with wanting conditions attached to handouts, everyone has their own moral system. I see nothing wrong with helping support two children whose parents have been unable to earn due to injury / illness. If a single mum with 9 kids has a history of having more children while demanding hand outs then I'm not do keen.
- Jill_the_Pill 8y ago
- python_gt_r 8y agoThis story radically changes my world views. Eye opener.
- 40acres 8y agoI read this kid's story in the times and as a native of NYC it just helped to strengthen my conviction that NYC, despite all of its problems, is truly a microcosm of what makes America great. I was a latch-key kid growing up and can clearly remember hopping on the train after class (with my free student pass) to Manhattan and killing some time at some of the best museums in the world (also free for students) and being exposed to so much. We must continue to invest in our kids and in social infrastructure like transportation and libraries to spark the next generation. Kudos to this kid, I just really hope he can make it through. There is unfortunately a huge disparity in what we can expect him to achieve because of his circumstances.
- mav3rick 8y agoThe best part is that is they uplifting one youth is exponential they help their family and they in turn help their children / siblings. This is how class mobility happens. Thanks for such a positive comment.
- _bxg1 8y agoBut no, let's keep making it harder to get a Visa.
- devmunchies 8y agothis is news because of how rare it is. its a classic underdog story.
- atomi 8y agoYeah. It's rare in every category you put people in whether it's nationality, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or whatever.
- abetterday 8y agoYou can find Top 100 lists at http://www.uschess.org/component/option,com_top_players/Itemid,371/ http://www.uschess.org/component/option,com_top_players/Item... and his play history at http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?16649696 http://www.uschess.org/msa/MbrDtlMain.php?16649696 . It is almost precisely a year since his first tournament game so there is no exaggeration. Going to 1473 in one year is extremely impressive especially since early tournaments show loses so it isn't like he excelled but simply wasn't rated. For reference, Magnus Carlson played since 5 (though not too enthusiastically) and was ~900 at age 9. But he was a 1900 a year later.
- cjbprime 8y agoI remember reading that Carlsen memorized all of the world capitals aged 2, so it's not the case that there was no warning he might be exceptional player :)
- radiator 8y agoWho is Magnus Carlson?
- frutiger 8y agoTypos or not, in a Chess thread, there should be enough context to recognize who is widely regarded as the greatest chess player to have ever lived.
- abetterday 8y agoI am curious how they funded the tournament play. It tends to cost about $10/rated game.
- bluGill 8y agoMost tournament directors are nice people and will find an exception or sponsor for someone who is really poor to afford the fees. Anyone who is good gets noticed quickly in the chess world. There are rich people in chess who will sponsor kids. All great kids in the US will get a free chess coach to get them better (I'm not sure how great you need to be to get this). Many other countries have similar chess sponsors. If you read the article you will see that his school chess club waived their normal fees and even found him a coach (before he would qualify on the national level)
- hirundo 8y agoI got whooped by a 10 year old girl in a local tournament. And I didn't make any gruesome mistakes, she just out thunk me. Of course it was one of the last games of the day, so there was a big crowd around the board. Kids like these should be kept to their own age class ... to protect the fragile egos of patzers like me.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoTitle should say "New York State Chess Championship".
- stronglikedan 8y agoUsually followed by teabagging.
- mooseburger 8y agoStephen Jay Gould was an ideologically driven liar (https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/the-mismeasurements-of-stephen-jay-gould/ https://quillette.com/2019/03/19/the-mismeasurements-of-step...). He should not be regarded as someone worth quoting.
- earenndil 8y agoDoesn't make his points (at least that point) any less valid.
- spenczar5 8y agoThere is some beautiful irony in citing Quillette to say that Gould should never even be quoted, given Quillette's stated mission of protecting free expression and ideas, "even dangerous ones:" > Quillette is a platform for free thought. We respect ideas, even dangerous ones. We also believe that free expression and the free exchange of ideas help human societies flourish and progress.
- MiddleEndian 8y agoA lot of groups claiming to be for free speech just want to promote their own ideologies. At least YouTube is obvious about the content they take down.
- deogeo 8y ago'Not worth quoting' is obviously a judgement of quality, and no more opposed to freedom of expression than claiming a movie isn't worth seeing.
- dang 8y ago"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446089 and marked it off-topic.
- mindgam3 8y agoAs someone who had the unfortunate label of “prodigy” applied to me in my youth (chess master at age 10), I’d like to offer a perspective. It almost goes without saying, but huge respect to the kid for being able to persevere through massive adversity and achieve such a result. What I want to suggest without hopefully ruining the “feel good” party is that the adversity and the success here aren’t just a striking coincidence but are in fact two sides of the same coin. This kid is winning not (just) due to his natural talents, but because he is more motivated than the other kids. His opponents are playing to win a cool trophy and impress their parents. He is playing for a chance to have a future. I say this because I had the same drive to win in the early days, although not for the exact same reasons. I wasn’t homeless, but my success at chess competitions was directly linked to the emotional stability of my home environment, which cycled between dysfunctional and abusive. When I won tournaments, my mother showed me love and affection for a period of time afterwards. When I lost, it was bad. As a kid, you learn pretty quickly to dig deep and do what it takes. I know a fair amount of chess prodigies from back in the day, including some who are still active and top players on the professional circuit. To this day I have not met a single one who didn’t have to deal with major adversity during childhood - broken home, missing or abusive/alcoholic parent, etc. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t bring kids into competitive chess, or celebrate their accomplishments. I have always loved the game, and still do, despite its relationship to my massively dysfunctional childhood. But I think we need to look deeper into the dark side of competitive scholastic chess culture, most of which comes from misguided parents who view their kids’ success as an extension of their own. We should reward things like integrity and sportsmanship in addition to raw intellectual performance. For this refugee kid, I hope his gift brings him joy and success, even if he doesn’t go all the way to become the youngest grandmaster. And I hope his story will inspire a conversation about values in the larger competitive chess community.
- keldaris 8y agoI'm someone who didn't have a traditionally dysfunctional home life and wasn't driven enough to be labelled a "prodigy", but I was good enough at chess, piano and math as a child to meet plenty of prodigies at those subjects in various settings. What you've said rings true across all of those fields, and I've always suspected it generalizes much further. I've sat across children at chess tournaments and piano competitions that seemed driven to a pathological degree without having all that much interest in the subject itself. At the time I found it disconcerting without having any idea as to the causes, so I just assumed I wasn't good enough at the subject. In retrospect, and with the benefit of hindsight (knowing I don't care to pursue a career in any of those subjects), I'm glad I didn't take it as seriously as others did.
- collyw 8y agoAre girls chess tournaments generally of a lower standard that mens? For physical sports it's clear that men have an advantage in most sports. Chess is all mental ability. Can a guy decide to be transgender and compete in women's chess? (expecting down votes for questioning this).
- jackpirate 8y agoDownvoted because no one except you is talking about girls tournaments.
- dang 8y agoCould you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? Downvote baiting is also against the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow them in the future, we'd be grateful. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19446534 and marked it off-topic.
- freyr 8y agoWouldn't hurt to put chess in the title.
- lrdd 8y ago(www.chess.com)
- Causality1 8y agoTitle is very misleading as it implies he was competing against adults. "8 year old refugee better than any other 8 year old" is a far less interesting story than the implied chess prodigy.
- hazz99 8y agoI don't think so - if I read about an 8 year old winning a tennis championship, I'd assume they're playing with other kids. The interesting and impressive part comes not only from the achievement itself (winning the championship) but doing it despite their situation and past (refugee, homelessness, etc)
- Causality1 8y agoTennis is a physical sport where it would be virtually impossible for a preteen to beat an adult. Chess is an intellectual exercise.
- hazz99 8y agoStill, I don't think the title is misleading. If he was playing against adults, I'd explicitly include that in the title because it's majorly impressive.
- rurban 8y agoHe only won his age group (K-3), for kids at his age. And there were kids with a rating of 1400-1700 already. Everybody knows that young immigrants play much stronger chess than US kids. So not really newsworthy at all. It would have been if he would have won the real New York State Championship, such as the young Japanese boy Harimoto who beat all the world champions right and left aged when he was still 15. (table tennis). Also an immigrant (from China). In a much harsher and openly racist society.