7 ms·

A 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 Championshi

• tudelo 8y ago
  > #27 in America for eight-year-olds The granularity of this ranking is interesting.
  • birken 8y ago
    Well 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 ago
    I 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.
      • benatkin 8y ago
        Yes, I'm disagreeing with the claim that it's interesting. Interestingness isn't entirely subjective. Mostly, though, I'm sticking up for the kid, whose sub-1500 rating shouldn't be scoffed at by any chess player who's more than, say, 10 years old.
        • deleted 8y ago
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        • mbrameld 8y ago
          Did you maybe misread the first comment you replied to? What exactly is it you're saying isn't interesting?
    • calvinmorrison 8y ago
      *sandbagging it's a term across all sports
      • kibwen 8y ago
        Including esports, where my experience with the term implies a meaning of "to intentionally disrespect your opponent by playing below your known skill level" https://www.ssbwiki.com/Sandbagging https://www.ssbwiki.com/Sandbagging
    • zem 8y ago
      minor correction: "sandbagging". the term is common in the scrabble tournament community too, and i'd always assumed it was metaphorically "ambush by hitting someone over the head with a sandbag", but apparently that's only the presumed etymology, and there is at least one other theory out there: https://ridemonkey.bikemag.com/threads/anybody-know-origins-of-sandbagging-phrase.74415/ https://ridemonkey.bikemag.com/threads/anybody-know-origins-...
  • notyourday 8y ago
    One thing to remember is that someone who has no official rating enters a tournament as unrated. The "does not suck in chess but isn't any good" rating is about 1500. Union Sq has a couple of Asian kids who play 1600-1700 hustlers ( with their parents watching ) and do about even with the which would make them about the same range. I'm sure they are unrated according to the US Chess Federation. Typically one would not want to enter an official tournament as unrated player while being a low rated player as that's the only time when one can compete in a low bracket and win a purse.
• Dylan16807 8y ago
  It's four-year-wide bracket, "for eight-year-olds" is going a bit too far in describing it.
• argd678 8y ago
  There’s efforts to correct the record on the Middle Ages too for this reason. The History Unplugged POD cast for example has a series on it. Intelligence is also a function of knowledge too however, it’s not purely a trait you’re born with. So the more correct knowledge you have on how to think and approach problems the smarter you are. You can easily see this today with the different decisions people make arround the world, where the base intelligence rates are the same but the decisions people make aren’t the same quality.
  • klenwell 8y ago
    I feel Jared Diamond illustrated this beautifully in his prologue to Guns, Germs, and Steel: From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. Of course, New Guineans tend to perform poorly at tasks that Westerners have been trained to perform since childhood and that New Guineans have not. Hence when unschooled New Guineans from remote villages visit towns, they look stupid to Westerners. Conversely, I am constantly aware of how stupid I look to New Guineans when I'm with them in the jungle, displaying my incompetence at simple tasks (such as following a jungle trail or erecting a shelter) at which New Guineans have been trained since childhood and I have not. The whole prologue is worth reading when contemplating the fraught question of nature and nurture and the importance of IQ. https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel/Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_Steel_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/fp_Jared_Diamond-Guns_Germs_and_S...
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• volkk 8y ago
  i'm highly paraphrasing (dont really know the source and maybe the its from SJG) but your quote really reminds me of -- "do you know the best painter that ever lived? a chinese potato farmer"
• sDlEzAtyoNAz 8y ago
  Presumably the message we should take from Dr. Gould is that the western world should shower more of its resources on the children of other peoples across the world and less on its own children, in the vague hope of finding that talent in a field or sweatshop. It makes you wonder whether any other civilization would even consider such a policy, and what the long term prospects are of any civilization that has so little regard for its own success in competition with other civilizations that it would even think about it. It also makes you wonder what could cause a civilization to adopt that kind of mindset. Surely such an idea would have been laughed at by the western world 300 years ago, or even 100 years ago. Now that kind of mentality seems totally within the normal range. What has changed?
  • packet_nerd 8y ago
    This makes me smile a little. My civilization includes all human kind; we're all stuck on this rock together, after all. Think about the vastness of the universe and the billions of civilizations that must be out there! It makes me think that our petty squabbles, divisions, and tribes are just so much of a tempest in a teapot.
    • sDlEzAtyoNAz 8y ago
      I wonder if people that belong to other civilizations see it the same way as you, and what the consequences would be for your civilization if people in yours did and people in other civilizations did not.
      • seppin 8y ago
        they most certainly do not, because they are more concerned with their own survival.
• billiam 8y ago
  "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses...." And they are sending us their best too.
  • devmunchies 8y ago
    yeah think of what he could have done for Nigeria. actually kind of sad. You need these sharp kids to grow up and help their own people so that there are less people wanting to escape.
    • Quarrelsome 8y ago
      why'd ya wanna shake it that way? There's nothing stopping him from giving back at a later stage. Refugees are refugees for a reason, people leave countries for a reason. When the conditions are right again I'm sure they'll visit or their children will, giving an opportunity to contribute. Sometimes you've gotta leave, would you be annoyed for a Russian leaving Putin's autocratic Russia? For some (depending on career and background) it becomes the only safe option. Whenever people express this principle you did in that fashion it can't help but sound like a dog whistle of rationalisation for isolationalist and nationalist principles. I'm sorry if it isn't.
      • cerealbad 8y ago
        isolationism and nationalism IS america.... selecting for highly intelligent immigrants is eugenicism, one step above racism - since racism at least allows for prejudicial morality, biological determinism doesn't have space for free will, let alone natural genetic variability or universal morality. rich european nations engage in various varian disasters in order to push through more regulations. america engages in predatory forced immigration by destabilizing ripe nations and then preying on their elites with faustian bargains. it's colonialism of the mind. if world power cared about the poor of africa they would stabilize it with a permanent global peace keeping force for one or two generations, and allow people the freedom and space to develop outside of the debt structure which has crippled them since independence. yes, they would do this by forced occupation, at the gasp cost of national sovereignty. china is engaged and accelerating in this process for the coming decades, and in return will secure resources for the next century of cold war. assad said something very telling when asked before the 2016 us presidential election who he preferred, it was something to the effect of "we don't listen to what the american politicians say, because they always do the opposite when they come to power. we will wait to see what they do." it's unfortunate that so many people just accept what america says, and avoid looking at what it does, has done, will do.
• KorematsuFred 8y ago
  "And somewhere there in China there is a bus driver equally as talented as Tiger Woods at golf and yet a virgin" - Scott Adams creator of Dilbert Comics.