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Executives who are exceptional at chess
- hassy 14y agochess is old school. i want to see a list of founders who are exceptional at starcraft. (only half-joking)
- gte910h 14y agoI much prefer seeing champion poker and starcraft players rather than champion chess players when looking for real world skill capable people.
- chollida1 14y agoCan you elaborate on this? I'm not sure why it would make much of a difference whether someone excels at chess or poker.
- SatvikBeri 14y agoThis is an excellent argument for why Poker is more correlated to business skills than Chess or Go: http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-think-like-a-Go-player-a-Chess-player-or-a-Poker-player http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-think-like-a-Go-player-...
- bgutierrez 14y agoI don't know gte910h's reasons, but I'm also curious to know how many executives are excellent poker players. Poker has elements of chance, betting, and partial-information that make it a great environment for exploring game theory and information theory. Optimal strategies have to have a solid mathematical foundation, but must still be flexible depending on opponent's experience and demeanor. Good players know when to fold and when to bet, even if it hurts to think about the risk. They have to become comfortable losing money occasionally, knowing that if they continue to make good decisions, they'll come out ahead in the long run. Chess is perfect for a world where we make our decisions with full information in a deterministic environment. For the partially informative, stochastic world that we live in, I'll choose poker.
- mmcnickle 14y agoBackgammon sits nicely in-between chess and poker; Players have perfect information, but there is well-defined element of chance in it. Dan Harrington (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Harrington http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Harrington) famously excels in all three games (chess master, champion backgammon player, world champion poker player) suggesting a link in proficiency.
- gte910h 14y agoHowever, Backgammon is really only useful for figuring things out about people who were alive in the 70s, as no one else plays it. It's a VERY boring game without gambling, which is illegal many places (the doubling die doesn't matter really without money).
- btilly 14y agoMy brother-in-sin was a professional backgammon player at one point. What he said killed it was the development of a computer program that played perfectly. Prior to that someone would learn to play, and you had a long time to keep profitably exploiting their small flaws as they improved. After the computer program came out they would start to play, learn about the computer program, then fairly shortly after would play as well as you did. A classic example of efficiency (in this case of learning) can result in decreasing profit opportunities.
- rubashov 14y agoYou don't play a match in one game. You play five or seven. The doubling cube speeds up play and has a critical impact on the whole game. There's plenty of online backgammon gambling.
- gte910h 14y agoYou have most of it. More importantly: You always do X Y and Z in poker (many times), even if you will probably lose the current hand, because X Y and Z are all positive expectation, even if the current result of that particular instance turns out bad. This skill cannot be undersold in real life. It's the key to sales pitches, job interviews, getting raises, running departments, etc. It's the key to fairness to people who did something that got a poor result (but was a good way to do something), etc.
- gte910h 14y agoPoker is far more about making risk reward calculations. Chess is far more about pattern matching. Starcraft is about planning a strategy then executing it on many many fronts at once.
- xal 14y agoMore importantly, both Poker and Starcraft have you make decisions when your information is incomplete which is crucial in startups.
- vijayr 14y agowhat about go?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- ricefield 14y agoExactly what I wanted to ask, but you'd probably find that list on a Chinese/Korean/Japanese website...
- ohashi 14y agoI guess it probably depends on what you mean by exceptional. The real top players seem to be entrepreneurial within the e-sports space but I don't know of much branching beyond that. If you look at simply high ranked players (masters or grandmaster) it might be more interesting. My anecdotal experience, I only competed locally in Washington DC, was there were a lot of developers or technical people (~75%). It was also disproportionately asian (~50%). And Male (~90%). Pretty much every stereotype about who was playing was my actual experience. The better players (masters or higher+) were all technical people of some sort that I can recall. 4 were developers. 1 in grad school for machine learning. 1 biochem engineering. It wouldn't shock me to see some talented starcraft players who also are founders. I just am not convinced that being a good starcraft player has any/much effect on being a successful company. Correlation != Causation and all that. It may just be a common hobby among the demographic we're interested in.
- xal 14y agoI think this is insightful. Starcraft is a game of making split second decisions based on extremely limited information. In fact, getting information is often expensive, so what you have to do is try different attacks (experiments) to penetrate the defences (market). I played Starcraft 1 more then I'd care to admit and even won some minor tournaments. Starcraft 2 I played at masters level which is roughly equivalent to 2000 elo in chess (Read: huge difference to the pros). The skills learned from Starcraft and Poker are definitely highly applicable to building Shopify.
- ekianjo 14y agoBeing excellent at a single thing rarely correlates to anything meaningful in life. In real working conditions you need negociation skills, relationship skills, team-working skills and a well rounded knowledge about a number of things. I don't see why someone would be looking at a single factor to judge someone else's abilities.
- lpolovets 14y agoThe lower rated players on this list tend to be cofounders and CEOs while the higher rated players tend to work in finance. I wonder if that's a coincidence.
- jlarocco 14y agoI don't think it's a coincidence. The blurb for Norman Weinstein says that after he was hired by Banker's Trust, "He was so successful that they kicked off a recruitment program for other strong chess players..." and then it lists a few people they recruited afterwards, with even higher scores. The connection between chess and finance/trading seems strange to me.
- 3JPLW 14y agoI think there's a selection effect at play. There are many more lower rated players, but fewer CEOs and cofounders. Remember that this list is about executives. As they go up the list, the pool of players narrows. And thus, they have to dig a bit farther down into corporate ranks to find their execs. However, the finance correlation would be unaffected by this effect.
- mvkel 14y agoPost hoc ergo propter hoc. What do all these execs have in common? An obsession with chess as a youth. I bet 90% of successful execs had a sweet baseball card collection when they were 10 years old, too.
- horatiohnelson 14y agoreally cool
- jpwagner 14y agoRealize that the difference between 2500 and 2200 is truly remarkable. Those under 2000 should probably be considered enthusiasts rather than exceptional.
- super_mario 14y agoYes, indeed. Breaking the 2000 barrier is really hard. But becoming a grandmaster is unimaginably hard. There are only a thousand living grandmasters on the planet today (the highest there has ever been in the history of humanity) out of 7 billion people. In 1972 there were only 88.
- petegrif 14y agoAgreed. <2000 is pretty common.
- spot 14y agoheh that's interesting i went to high school with vivek rao, he was a couple years behind me iirc. he said once (i think he was quoting someone else): a good chess player is the sign of a good mind. a great chess player is the sign of a wasted mind.
- spot 14y agoa little research turns up: "The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life." -- Paul Morphy
- coldarchon 14y agoFunny, whenever someone asks here how to improve his skills in programming I told them to learn chess but my comments were always ignored ..
- ternaryoperator 14y agoIf he chose bridge rather than chess, there'd be some really high-recognition names on the list: Bill Gates (a good enthusiast), Warren Buffet (an excellent player), Jimmy Cayne (former CEO of Bear Stearns, a national champion), and many others.
- pinchyfingers 14y agoIf anything, it seems like an enthusiasm for chess may be a good way to get introductions or jobs. That's good news if you're not into golf.
- llasram 14y agoI wonder what the Go list would look like. US-only, probably somewhat random and maybe even obfuscating, but world-wide is a far more popular game.
- snth 14y ago"Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be." - Garry Kasparov http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che...
- losethos 14y agoGod's not very good. He gets too creative. He can always Jedi mind trick you into mistakes, though. God says... soap_opera do_it ehh_a_wise_guy humility you_should_be_so_lucky God_smack bad_ol_puddytat repent humility little_buddy the Bam well_I_never nope bye what_would_Jesus_do my_bad God says... chill come_and_get_me bassackward absolutely spending far_out_man Isn't_that_special you're_wonderful ---- was in Samaria, and was sick: and he sent messengers, and said unto them, Go, enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron whether I shall recover of this disease. 1:3 But the angel of the LORD said to Elijah the Tishbite, Arise, go up to meet the messengers of the king of Samaria, and say unto them, Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that ye go to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron? 1:4 Now therefore thus saith the LORD, Thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die. And Elijah departed. 1:5 And when the messengers turned back unto him, he said unto them, Why are ye now turned back? 1:6 And they said unto him, There came a man up to meet us, and said unto us, Go, turn again unto the king that sent you, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Is it not because there is not a God in Israel, that thou sendest to enquire of Baalzebub the god of Ekron? therefore thou shalt not come down from that bed on which thou art gone up, but shalt surely die.