back to indexAll-In Summit: Alexandra Botez takes on the Besties in a 1v4 simultaneous chess match
Chapters
0:0 Besties welcome Alexandra Botez to All-In Summit ‘23!
1:35 Rules and ratings
5:46 Chess match
17:55 Results
21:0 Q&A with Alexandra
22:34 Conversations with fans and the creator economy
27:30 Expanding distribution
30:11 Live events
31:4 Poker
32:15 Growing up with chess
36:10 Chess scandals
00:00:16.000 |
Don't worry, you won't need to use it for very long. 00:00:40.000 |
one of the most followed chess commentators online, 00:00:49.000 |
She was a five-time Canadian National Girls Champion. 00:00:54.000 |
She achieved her highest FIDE Elo rating of 2092 00:01:00.000 |
She began streaming online chess content in 2016 00:01:19.000 |
Anyway, they manage the popular Botez Live Twitch and YouTube 00:01:27.000 |
She'll take a selfie with you later, after she beats you. 00:01:30.000 |
And so we're about to do a four-game simultaneous here. 00:01:34.000 |
Do you want to just explain the rules to the audience? 00:01:37.000 |
And maybe before we get started, thank you guys 00:01:53.000 |
going to be playing all four of them at the same time. 00:02:00.000 |
If you guys saw the betting line at the betting 00:02:02.000 |
lobby in the front, it's 50 to 1 for any of us 00:02:10.000 |
Before I explain the rules, maybe you tell them 00:02:13.000 |
And we can all talk about the chess experience of it. 00:02:27.000 |
So he's kind of like club player type rating. 00:02:56.000 |
You won a Prius, and I won a first class ticket 00:03:02.000 |
And David, you also are pretty decent at chess. 00:03:31.000 |
I don't want to talk about anything right now. 00:03:36.000 |
OK, well, I love that you guys are already trash talking. 00:03:47.000 |
Just sitting here and getting embarrassed in front of everyone 00:04:06.000 |
OK, so let me explain the rules really quickly. 00:04:10.000 |
but it's actually good if you're going to work together here 00:04:19.000 |
These two idiots are the two that cannot work together. 00:04:25.000 |
I feel like this is a group therapy session instead of chess. 00:04:33.000 |
I mean, you know what podcasting means to men, right? 00:04:46.000 |
If anybody runs out of time, the game is over. 00:04:49.000 |
So if they manage to stall me enough and they're just running my clock on one board, 00:04:54.000 |
Every time they make a move, they get an extra two seconds increment. 00:04:58.000 |
This is just so that if I only have 10 seconds on one clock, 00:05:03.000 |
And the way it works is they can make moves at any point. 00:05:07.000 |
I think we're going to have a little eval bar on the screen behind. 00:05:11.000 |
So if you don't play chess, you can kind of look at that. 00:05:20.000 |
If the eval bar, you could see more of white than black. 00:05:24.000 |
That means I'm -- it's because that's an illegal move. 00:05:37.000 |
If you don't know chess, I will let you know if they make a good move 00:05:41.000 |
I will call it out just so that everybody can follow. 00:05:58.000 |
I think I'm just going to do the same first move. 00:06:00.000 |
Actually, no, I'm trying to checkmate you in four. 00:06:12.000 |
I'm not going to try to checkmate you in four. 00:06:33.000 |
I didn't know you were going to help everyone. 00:06:39.000 |
Also, the clock near the board is their time. 00:06:58.000 |
For fun, I guess let's just do three minutes on this clock. 00:07:22.000 |
I've got to concentrate on the game here for a second. 00:07:38.000 |
I can tell you didn't get assistance on that one. 00:07:44.000 |
I didn't know that David Sax would be doing a simul of his own here, but I guess it works. 00:08:04.000 |
I'm starting to only get three minutes on each board, and nobody has been checkmated yet. 00:08:43.000 |
Why did I not be speaking a different language? 00:08:55.000 |
David, look, I'm doing this little tip-sitting over here. 00:08:58.000 |
I can tell he's not paying attention to you anymore. 00:09:02.000 |
Okay, I think I need to bully the weakest link, 00:09:07.000 |
He's lost, but now he can try to stall me on the clock. 00:09:14.000 |
Okay, I'm starting to get two minutes on the clock 00:10:09.000 |
So far, they're actually-- he just put a queen on the board. 00:10:29.360 |
The other two have been able to get a little bit of a break. 00:10:33.360 |
The other two have been able to get a little bit of a break. 00:10:44.080 |
And this position is actually pretty even also. 00:10:47.200 |
So I'm going to just have to do more cardio at some point 00:10:49.240 |
and take out Jkal very soon, because he's managed to lose 00:11:04.720 |
I think what I need to do is I need to take them out 00:11:06.960 |
and then focus on you individually, because you're 00:11:37.720 |
I only have a minute on that board, because I accidentally put 00:11:39.720 |
I give you an extra minute if that's what you want. 00:11:53.720 |
Every time I come here, I feel like I'm doing something 00:12:00.720 |
Every time I come here, I feel like I'm doing something 00:12:02.720 |
Every time I come here, I can't tell if you've made a move, 00:12:08.720 |
This is getting really dangerous, so I need to focus on Friedberg. 00:12:11.720 |
So we're just going to have to make fast moves. 00:12:30.720 |
Actually, I have a better chance to flag JCal than they do to flag me, so I'm looking forward 00:35:39.720 |
>> And that's in memory chunking, and that's where people confuse maybe intuition with 00:35:46.440 |
actually pattern recognition or chunks of moves. 00:35:49.840 |
And that is the best way, from what I understand, to get really good at chess is to understand 00:35:53.360 |
those sort of situational chunks of moves like when you hit me with a knife fork and 00:36:00.280 |
And Magnus, the best player in the world, he's extremely good at end games because, 00:36:03.920 |
again, he knows the foundation of end games really well. 00:36:07.560 |
And he also just has crazy natural talent at figuring them up. 00:36:10.880 |
>> So speaking of Magnus, there was a chess scandal that we talked about on the pod some 00:36:15.360 |
ways back involving Hans Niemann, a player who has kind of kicked off chess.com and maybe 00:36:20.960 |
some other places, too, for alleged cheating. 00:36:25.520 |
Now I guess there was a statement that chess.com is allowing him back. 00:36:30.760 |
Can you give us an update on what the chess world thinks happened there? 00:36:35.720 |
So I'll give some general background a little bit more so the audience has it, too. 00:36:40.120 |
Basically the best chess -- and I know they talked about it on the pod, but just in case. 00:36:44.040 |
So the best chess player in the world was playing against a talented junior. 00:36:47.520 |
He was in the top 50 of all players in the world, top 10 for all juniors. 00:36:52.840 |
And he was this chess player who had risen really quickly, like 100 to 200 points, which 00:37:01.960 |
And Magnus the next day withdrew from the tournament, which is the first time Magnus 00:37:07.040 |
And it basically led to Magnus accusing him of cheating. 00:37:10.680 |
And Hans coming out with a public interview saying he's never cheated on the board, but 00:37:14.400 |
he has cheated online when he was, you know, 16 or very young. 00:37:18.440 |
Chess.com saw this, and because he said that information about cheating on their site, 00:37:24.400 |
So they came out and they said, actually, he's cheated online in hundreds of games, 00:37:31.200 |
And then he got uninvited from some larger tournament. 00:37:34.800 |
And basically what ended up happening is it blew up into this giant controversy where 00:37:40.080 |
people on Hans' side were saying they haven't been able to prove the cheating over the board. 00:37:44.600 |
He admitted to online, that's very different. 00:37:47.080 |
And then people on Magnus' side were just saying, you know, if the best person in the 00:37:51.280 |
world thinks he cheated, he has really good intuition. 00:37:54.220 |
This was recently resolved, where Hans has been able to get back onto chess.com. 00:37:58.800 |
I spoke to them the day he got back on the website. 00:38:02.040 |
The way they saw it is, we just want the world to move forward. 00:38:05.480 |
We don't want there to be drama in any sport. 00:38:07.640 |
Somebody can get a penalty, but they should be allowed to come back in. 00:38:10.840 |
And Magnus agreed to play him back over the board. 00:38:13.800 |
And then just a day ago, another world chess champion accused him of cheating and made 00:38:20.080 |
For what it's worth, he accused him of cheating because his timing was really weird in an 00:38:24.980 |
But this 19-year-old was like changing music, talking to his chat, so that's probably why. 00:38:29.880 |
But because of computers, it's just really easy to be suspicious now. 00:38:33.600 |
But didn't some of the cheating occur in person and they were thinking he might have had some 00:38:36.920 |
sort of signal and somebody was, you know, maybe an issuer or something like that. 00:38:40.280 |
Maybe he could talk to that because that seems, yeah. 00:38:45.960 |
Even when the chess.com report came out, chess.com said they found no evidence of cheating over 00:38:50.360 |
the board and there still has been no cheating, no evidence of cheating over the board. 00:38:57.160 |
That being said, it's extremely difficult to catch people who cheat because it could 00:39:01.360 |
be as simple as an arbiter you're working with scratching their head when you have a 00:39:09.040 |
Not saying that he did cheat, but that's the difficulty of catching cheating at a league 00:39:13.680 |
At tournaments, are they now going to do them like in a sealed room so that nobody can be 00:39:16.740 |
watching and present in order to keep the integrity of the game? 00:39:19.840 |
I mean, they do metal detectors and all of the arbiters now, you know, they check them 00:39:26.880 |
They look over their game and things like that. 00:39:28.480 |
So they're doing all of the tools that they can. 00:39:31.480 |
Alexandra, thank you for bringing chess to the world. 00:39:39.760 |
And it's said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. 00:39:43.760 |
And it's said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. 00:39:47.760 |
And it's said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. 00:39:51.760 |
And it's said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. 00:39:55.760 |
And it's said we open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it.