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World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen Is Now World Fantasy Premier League #1
- traderjane 7y agoPeople who are competitive at one game sometimes jump to another based on market trends, and although the transition can be rough, enough make it through that it becomes a visible thing. This is a mild argument for generality of competence.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- qzx_pierri 7y agoThis guy’s mind is amazing
- thom 7y agoInteresting that he mentions a stats-based approach, calling out provider Opta by name: https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen/status/1204105872668016642 https://twitter.com/MagnusCarlsen/status/1204105872668016642
- vages 7y agoSounds like a clever marketing scheme from Opta.
- scarejunba 7y agoSure, but you can't fake winning.
- actuator 7y agoI doubt it is. Opta is probably what most publications and broadcasters use as well. I don't think there is anyone else who collects stats that deep across so many leagues. Sometimes even I am surprised the details of those stats, like passes by an individual player, distance covered etc.
- thom 7y agoIt's actually a pretty crowded market at this point (I work at a competitor but have worked professionally with their data). The distance-covered sort of stats come from tracking data (usually derived optically from multiple cameras, giving locations of every player and the ball at 20hz or so), which Opta didn't offer directly until their merger with STATS.
- actuator 7y agoWow, I did not know this. They have special cameras in the grounds or this is just them having access to raw feed from all regular broadcasting cameras. I would love to read up on how this is recorded, processed and kept if you have any source.
- thom 7y agoMost of the big providers require special cameras in the stadium (some up to 16). Some can do this from video feeds (even broadcast quality, which obviously misses some info). You can read about one of the leading providers here: https://chyronhego.com/products/sports-tracking/tracab-optical-tracking/ https://chyronhego.com/products/sports-tracking/tracab-optic...
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y agoYou have fee access to it through numerous websites, not complete but very throughout numbers. He is calling out opta directly, not sure what kind of interface they offer unless he is reading their xml feeds directly.
- andrepd 7y agoOpta is the pioneer and the current standard of detailed football statistics.
- curiousgal 7y agoWorking with their xml data feeds still gives me PTSD.
- thom 7y agoAmen to that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bdz 7y agoThis is his account (not updated yet) https://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1908330/event/17 https://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1908330/event/17 He was climbing really well https://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1908330/history https://fantasy.premierleague.com/entry/1908330/history
- NilsIRL 7y agoI'm clueless as well but here is the best thing I could find: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_(gridiron) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_football_(gridiron) To me this sounds a lot like FIFA (the game by EA), which I'm clueless about as well.
- tapland 7y agoFIFA is you playing a virtual soccer team. Fantasy football is you managing a soccer team roster with points given to your chosen players based on real world performance the past week.
- petepete 7y agoSalah in midfield? Say what?
- actuator 7y agoAlthough he plays in a wide forward/winger like position for Liverpool they classify wingers generally as midfielders. Think of this in terms of the classic 4-2-3-1 position(not something LIV uses a lot). Firmino generally becomes the No 9 and he would be classified as forward. Even Son is classified as Mid. Though in the 4-2-3-1 Liverpool played today Salah was the most forward player.
- jaywalk 7y agoFantasy Soccer.
- na85 7y ago"Football" is the proper name for hundreds of millions of people, and literally anyone outside North America.
- evgen 7y agoAnd yet so many of them know so little about the history of the name and think that they are “correcting” Americans who call it soccer.
- umanwizard 7y agoThe second part is not quite true. It's called soccer in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa (and sometimes in Ireland), Calcio in Italy, Sakkā in Japan, Zu Qiu in China... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_for_association_football
- TrumpSucks 7y agopissed off euro trash spotted!
- hhmc 7y agoIt’s known as fantasy football to anyone outside of North America.
- drekembe 7y agoI'd love to see him take on Magic: the Gathering, especially formats like vintage or legacy.
- brianwawok 7y agoThe top MTG players have mostly gone on to poker, where the prizes are much more lucrative.
- thom 7y agoOf course a lot of those players have in turn gone on to gambling and hedge funds.
- ZhuanXia 7y agoI often wonder about this in the context of musicians and actors. You would have to be a fool to pick such careers, as the prospects are so dim. Yet because of this dimness the selection pressure is very high on the pool of contenders. So our best actors and musicians are fool/geniuses. Which implies the most innately talented potential musicians and actors are working at a hedge fund or Google DeepMind. And perhaps the odd personalities of musicians and actors is more to do with the bottlenecked selection than some relationship between talent and impulsivity: Only the egotistical and impulsive would step into such fray. And so we are left not with the best but with the best of a bad lot!
- ZeroFries 7y agoOr, you know, they enjoy the craft/art-form, and want to do it professionally. There's definitely some weird selection pressure in show-biz, and impulsiveness/ego may play a small role, but there's a million ego-maniacs for every Tom Cruise.
- j88439h84 7y agoPeople wanting a more reliable job can work in any field with reliable jobs. I dont understand why you picked the most prestigious ones. Aren't they more likely to be farmers or nurses or teachers?
- room271 7y agoPeople may not understand how big an achievement this is. Yes you need a lot of good fortune, but there are 7m players of FPL. For most, getting into the top 100k is seen as a good result for the end of the season. Magus is clearly a massive football fan though - he talks about it a lot on his livestreams etc.
- rhnmhdv 7y agoIt's mind-boggling to me. I've been a huge/obsessed fan all my life and never got in the top 200k
- abcdef123xyz2 7y agoSomeone has always been number 1 though :-). This is only news because he is also world class at another game.
- headmelted 7y agoWouldn’t this also infer that Magnus has understood the mechanics of the game more than almost anyone else? By which I mean to say couldn’t this translate indirectly to an edge (I realize FPL and predicting individual match outcomes are very different) in sports betting? I’m ordinarily utterly skeptical of any such suggestion, but Magnus thinks at a level beyond my understanding so what do I know?
- lonelappde 7y agoImply, not infer. But yes, the people who know a knowledge-based game better are better at playing it.
- rsync 7y agoJust to clarify, as I myself was confused, this Fantasy Football is not American Football, but ... actual football which Americans refer to as soccer.
- mc32 7y agoAnd Australians... and Canadians say soccer.
- billfruit 7y agoAustralia and New Zealand are officially now using 'football' rather than soccer for association football.
- ganeshkrishnan 7y agoThe Australian football or footy is something else, a bit like rugby.
- billfruit 7y agoYes but their National 'soccer' association now calls themselves Football Federation Australia, in line with international usage.
- mc32 7y agoAnd the national team[1] is “the Socceroos” [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_national_soccer_team https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_national_soccer_te...
- cookie_monsta 7y agoIf you're talking about the shape of the ball, yes. Otherwise, no.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- thom 7y agoUpdated the title from 'Fantasy Football' to 'Fantasy Premier League' to stave off continued tedious arguments about international sporting nomenclature.
- mellosouls 7y agoThis is unfortunate, most of the world immediately knows what is meant by "football". Probably only mainly American readers might assume American Football. Can we change the website title to "US Hacker News" for clarity to avoid this sort of misunderstanding in the future? (Edit: but apologies to OP thom, I've since read the other comments moaning about it)
- jmartrican 7y agoDumb question here, does he get paid for this or earn prize money?
- bdz 7y agoThere are some prizes https://fantasy.premierleague.com/prizes https://fantasy.premierleague.com/prizes But it's a long season, there are 38 rounds and today was the 17th
- k2xl 7y agoIs there some skill that links chess to this? Seems to improbable for a coincidence
- wayoutthere 7y agoI would imagine it's that both are game theory on Markov Chains.
- umanwizard 7y agoGeneral intelligence?
- cambalache 7y agoYes General IQ, concentration, analysis and synthesis of information, a prediction-oriented mind, and plain capacity to do the work.
- mellosouls 7y agoWhatever the skill, I'd say it's clear its no coincidence and is down to Magnus' incredible mind and brilliance in whatever skills are needed. Having said that, you might expect to see good showings in the league by other top-level grandmasters with a similar passion for football. Perhaps his interest in it is unusually keen within the chess world though, I've no idea.
- kick 7y agoMemory and intuitive reasoning definitely helps in both, though another part is luck: Carlsen's skilled, but he also has made some incredibly lucky guesses.
- jon-v 7y agoWhat do you think luck is?
- kick 7y agoDendoncker scoring his only goal of the season so far right as that became beneficial for Carlsen was something no one could have predicted, for example, but it benefit Carlsen marvelously. Unlike chess, games with humans aren't fixed: there's luck inherent to them.
- exogeny 7y agoFantasy sports for money is a huge business here in the states - FanDuel and DraftKings probably do north of $200 million of revenue each in the vertical alone - and almost all of the top players have some kind of data science or math background. It’s not a coincidence.
- pmoriarty 7y agoCan someone explain what this is and the significance of Carlsen's achievement to someone completely and utterly clueless about football?
- defen 7y agoFantasy sports is when you pick a fake roster of players, subject to certain rules. You get points based on how well your chosen players do. Carlsen is the best in the world at this. And at chess.
- Scarblac 7y agoIt's a very luck based game, or so it seems. With 7 million players. But last year the world chess champion was top-100 and now he's (at this particular moment) first.
- tryptophan 7y agoBeing good at managing uncertain outcomes is not luck though, although the difference between that and luck is nuanced and this often gets lost in discussion.
- Gene_Parmesan 7y agoThis is very true, which is (for example) where the skill in high level poker comes from.
- littlestymaar 7y agoThere is indeed skill in managing uncertain outcomes and being rank 100k or rank 100 is a clear indicator of a skill difference. But there is indeed luck also, and you can't really tell the skill difference between the world first player and probably the first hundred, because the luck factor weight more than the skill difference at this point.
- daxfohl 7y agoI wonder how Messi would do on Fantasy Chess League.
- ByThyGrace 7y agoIs there even such a thing as a Fantasy Chess league?
- boomboomsubban 7y agoYes, basically every sport now has someone running a fantasy version.
- ofcourseianal 7y agowhoosh
- aklemm 7y agoWould his skill translate to discovering player talent or negotiating player contracts?
- symplee 7y agoImagine if he starts picking stocks? Checkmate.
- drcode 7y agoWow, that really obliterates two major assumptions I had about chess (1) that you can't win without 100% dedication to chess (2) that the skills are highly domain specific and not transferable.
- karussell 7y agoI still think that chess skills are highly domain specific, but it clearly shows he has more than one skill that he dominates.
- dr_kiszonka 7y agoHe might have mastered one skill (or has a trait) that allows him to dominate both chess and FPL.
- milchek 7y agoIt's impressive. I suppose you could say there are some skills from chess that are very transferable to something like managing a fantasy sports team; the ability to predict or prepare for certain outcomes and the ability to manage and minimize risk being two that come to mind. It also helps that Carlsen is a football fan and has domain knowledge there that assist him in employing these skills.
- abcdef123xyz2 7y agoA previous article on this mentioned his superb memory, which is probably also an asset to both games.
- crashbunny 7y agoDepends on what you consider chess-related work. I would put sleep, exercise, diet, meditation and other interests as chess-related work for a full-time chess player. Even if you didn't, studying chess for more than 8 hours a day has diminishing returns, especially for older players like Carlsen. One of the reasons older players don't continue to get better and start to get worse as they pass 40 is they find it hard to maintain high levels of concentration over a 4 hour game.
- lonelappde 7y agoI'm a bit confused. Either chess is harder than fantasy and the top 100K players should all be bots, or fantasy is harder than chess and so why is Carlsen and others wasting time on professional chess?
- ur-whale 7y agoIs this american football or regular football?
- larnmar 7y agoI’m confused about what sort of person (a) refers to soccer as “real football” but (b) doesn’t know what Premier League means.
- trynewideas 7y agoHah... just noticed he's in a "Grandmaster League": https://fantasy.premierleague.com/leagues/35182/standings/c https://fantasy.premierleague.com/leagues/35182/standings/c Sergej Movsesian (FIDE world #136) Yúlia Movsesjan (Slovakian female #1) Radosław Wojtaszek (World #27) Jon Ludvig Hammer (second to Carlsen in WCC 2013) etc.
- symplee 7y agoFor comparison, these are the ranks of the other grandmasters in the group: rank rank / 7,182,778 players: ____________________________________ 1 -------- 0.0000139% 23,365 --- 0.3252920% 238,352 -- 3.3183818% 391,870 -- 5.4556886% 448,139 -- 6.2390763% 510,354 -- 7.1052454% 602,723 -- 8.3912241% 726,511 -- 10.1146242% 728,141 -- 10.1373173% 2,011,481 28.0042207% 2,258,848 31.4481110% 3,993,041 55.5918755% 5,015,777 69.8306004%
- thom 7y agoTowering football geniuses, the lot of them: https://en.chessbase.com/post/three-million-view-chess-players-playing-soccer https://en.chessbase.com/post/three-million-view-chess-playe...
- yters 7y agoSo does this mean Deep Blue can beat Magnus Carlsen in fantasy football?
- foobaw 7y agoHe must watch a lot of games to really know who to pick. As someone that dabbled in DFS for the NFL, the #1 team each week always seem like either pure luck or just someone that submits tons of optimal entries. Now, EPL is definitely different than the NFL but still amazing regardless.
- nbabitskiy 7y agoHe's not #1 this week (not even close), he's currently #1 over a 16+ weeks period[0]. Each week's #1 is usually one of many random teams, picked for that purpose. I have no idea how many games he watches, but watching the games isn't correlated to fantasy football success. Looking at his team, all the players are in a very hot run of form, or likely to be picked just by studying e.g. Understat.com, or both.[1] Most of them are also likeable, and could be suggested by a football fan unaware of fantasy football specifics. [0] 17th "gameweek" isn't over yet. [1] Except for goalkeepers. His goalkeeping choices have been awful.
- abcdef123xyz2 7y agoA previous article on this said he watches a huge amount of football.
- sofista 7y agoIn Argentina, where I come from, a couple of GMs, unable to make ends meet with their chess earnings, switched to poker, backgammon and/or bridge, games in which there is a lot of gambling going on, and they made quite a lot of money. I understand that these games are much more similar to chess than a fantasy football game, but it seems that some chess calculation skills are indeed transferable.
- Scarblac 7y agoI think that the chess skills themselves are not, but the training skills probably are. Like identifying various aspects of the game, figuring out how they can be trained, and then spending 10+ hours a day on them for months. Or getting a database of games played by opponents and analyzing them for weaknesses in their play, and knowing how to exploit such weaknesses, that can probably also be done with poker.
- dikaio 7y agoUmm.... can we get back to the football/soccer article?