8 year old homeless refugee wins his age group in NY State Champioship

@nikolajtesla

According to this his rating is 1473... this is a USCF rating not a FIDE rating. An equivalent FIDE rating would be about 1387. I would consider a player of his rating to be in the "Weak Intermediate" or "Class C" player.

What he could not do at his current strength:
He could not win a simul.
He could not play chess blindfolded.
He could not earn a Grandmaster Title, or any chess title for that matter, not even close.
He could not give handicaps and win.
He probably could not even play out the entire championship-winning game on the board without looking at the scorecard.
He could not have a winning record against thousands of players on this site.

These are not the ratings of a chess savant.

I don't know the future. I can not see how his rating will progress. I'm fairly certain he will never become a Grandmaster. I would say he has a less than 1% shot at that.

I'm not entirely sure just how strong this rating is for an "8-year-old". I do not feel he is any stronger than a 4-year-old Capablanca all the way back in 1893 way before the internet. http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1481959

The boy is definitely in for some hardships in climbing the rating ladder. Next year when a white or asian boy defeats him in the 9-year-old age bracket do you think that kid will get their name in the paper? What about the 10-year-old age bracket the following year... Ya, I don't think so either.

The boy is also not what I would call a "Natural Talent". That does not mean he does not get credit for his victory. Of course, he does. However, the article clearly states he spent much time in the homeless shelter on his dad's laptop playing online chess, and there is a coach that was giving him 3-hour long chess lessons for free. He worked hard for that rating he had to work on his training to build that skill significantly.

This fame and glory will be fading in time. I feel pity for the boy as this is likely to be the height of his glory in his life at the age of 8. Think of all the child actors that get that little taste of fame then how they almost always turn out.

He is just a puppet for the media to spread a pro-immigration narrative. He will be discarded in a week or 2 never to be heard from again. They will drop him like a hot potato so fast his head will be spinning. Who knows his 5 minutes of fame may last a month or 2, hell they may do a follow up interview or something in a year but that spotlight will be gone and soon.

Homeless shelter =/= Homeless

He has food every day, access to a bed to sleep on, a laptop to play his games on and so forth. Living in a homeless shelter is not the same as living on the streets. It's not like he has to eat out of garbage cans and use newspapers as blankets or sleep in the cold and has no access to hot water to baith. He is already in a taxpayer funded shelter.

Sadly as well that $200,000 or whatever that gofundme his parents are getting... Ya, they are gonna be homeless again eventually just watch. There have been experiments done when giving homeless people large sums of money they just end up homeless on the streets again. Often times it makes the situation WORSE for them, and a target as well. Some business owner offering his father some entry-level job would do far more for him and his family than some lump sum handout. How is a man gonna have any pride taking such handouts?

Yes, I may come off as a bit nihilistic, but what I say is true.

Again though, I can't see the future, and things may turn out alright for the lad, and his family but I can feel that there are some serious dark skies in his future that have only been exacerbated by this media circus. I wish him luck, he is going to need it.

@lurarose Imagine writing some long essay about how an 8 year old has no talent and is gonna fail in life smh

@lurarose Kudos.

Another example from the sexist POV. I believe it's from The Polgar Sisters by Cathy Forbes. Judith won a u12 tournament for the second time. This again made headlines, however the author noted that if Kamsky did the same accomplishment, it wouldn't be news. These "accomplishments" of the first woman..., first black..., or any first nonwhite, nonmale... isn't just sexist/racist but implies that a white man has to prove it is possible before others try. (I know that many women and minorities has made great, groundbreaking advances/accomplishments.)

Although I have deep respect for what each Polgar sister did, the experiment proved that people can become, as Kasparov stated, trained dogs.

@lurarose I think you are overly negative here. The kid won something and this is great. He tried hard, achieved something and this is not his fault that someone overhyped this achievement. I bet if you will win some low-level CM here and someone would write an article about you and offer you 20k for this you would not reject it.

Now back to the rating. 1400? I am not sure, but to me this looks like the bottom 20% of all chess players. When I read this I thought that the guy is close to 2300 or something like this. Looking at this page ratings.fide.com/top.phtml?list=juniors there is a 13 years old child who is 2500+. One might say that there is a big difference between 13 and 8, but there is also a very big difference between learning the rules and being able not to blunder a queen and grab a few pieces and being in top 0.1% of the players.

Also chess is not like boxing or powerlifting. Nothing prevents a 8 years old child (or a 65 years old grandfather) from winning a 23 year old.

@david252525 The boy does have talent, but it's not "natural talent". He is a hard worker and worked to get his abilities to where they are. Which are again I must stress this not that impressive. Other lads his age have a rating 200+ higher than his, and he was the 8th seed. The thing about ratings at such low levels is they are rather volatile in comparison. A 1400 has a much better chance to win against a group of 1600s than a 2500 has a shot vs 2700s.

I'll further elaborate to explain what I mean by "natural talent". Imagine there are 2 little boys. We will call them Billie & David. Both Billie & David know how to play the Piano, and are good at it.

Billie is a hard worker. He will spend 3 hours a day after school practicing the piano, and trains hard and practices, and does a lot of memorization and puts that great effort in.

David, on the other hand, is different. He does not sit at the Piano hours on end. Although you can play him any song on the radio and he can instantly copy it note for note in perfect harmony! That is a natural talent.

If anything it's a compliment to the boy for putting that hard work in. However, this does not mean he is gifted at chess. He just tries really hard at it, and credit where credit is due he did win.

It's similar to say comparing some strong as an ox farmboy naturally strong with say a fitness instructor that spends most of his free time in the gym.

To be successful in the long run at chess you need a healthy combination of both natural talent and hard work. He definitely has that hard work down but is lacking in the natural talent department. It's the whole "Nature vs Nurture" argument. You need both to be a winner in the long run at chess.

Again, I got nothing bad to say about the boy. It's not his fault that he has become a puppet for the mainstream media. I would likely do the same or similar in his position, and once again I wish him luck because he will definitely need boat loads of it in the future.

@jonesmh The Polgar sisters are a very interesting example, and you are indeed correct in what you say. The Polgar sisters went through a more rigorous chess training growing up than almost any GrandMaster alive or dead. Back in the day when Bobby Fischer was on the run from the US government for playing Spassky against their approval he lived with the Polgar family. I think that Bobby was in love with Judit, but her father did not approve of him courting his teenage daughter. (Which I think led to further exacerbate his anti-semitism, for him the Jew took from him his one true love). Imagine though a world where the Polgar family accepted Bobby Fischer into the family without rejecting him. One where Bobby and Judit became lovers and had a son together who they both trained to be a chess champion. Such a lad today would probably be #1 in the world blowing Carlsen out of the water. Combine there great chess genetics and unparalleled training... unstoppable

I like chess

Google is also rather racist. Check this screenshot out. gyazo.com/ee2e825c08065db926ac8fb405e12b76

Top 2 rows of a google image search of "Chess Player".

Row 1:

Image 1: Tani
Image 2: Tani
Image 3: Magnus with his back to the camera more focus on Anand. Magnus face not seen.
Image 4: Tani
Image 5: Susan Polgar

Row 2:

Image 1: Carlsen
Image 2: Topalov
Image 3: Carlsen
Image 4: Anand
Image 5: Random group of diverse kids playing chess.

Garry Kasparov not seen until row 6.
Bobby Fischer not seen until after row 70.

So to break down the top 10 google image searches for "chess player" we got: 30% Black child 20% Indian male 10% woman 10% diverse group 30% white male. 0 east Asian representation.

Now lets take a look at the top 10 chess players in the world hmmm... wonder what those demographics look like.

1) Carlsen: White Male
2) Caruana: White Male
3) Ding Liren: East Asian Male
4) Anish Giri: White Male
5) Mamedyarov: White Male
6) Anand: Indian Male
7) MVL: White Male
8) Grischuk: White Male
9) Nepomniachtchi: White Male
10) So: East Asian Male

So that is 7 White Males, 2 East Asian Males, and 1 Indian Male. So 70% White Male, 20% East Asian, and 10% Indian. White Males are under represented as are East Asian Males by google.

Highly racist of google to misrepresent chess demographics like this. It would be as if googling "Basketball Player" did not yield results with many black males, but instead had little white kids playing baseketball & girls playing basketball & you had to go to page 70 to get a pic of Micheal Jordan. Imagine the outrage that would cause.

@lurarose #18
I think you should exclude Tani as he is a headliner right now. Just like a century ago the basketball scene was dominated by the Jewish. But still a great example.

As a biological need, racism does exist, but how bad does it have to be to be inserted into the Google code? (I also assume that the majority of Google coders are Indian which makes this even stranger.)

How did a thread like this turn into a shitshow?

Nobody is a god at 8 years old. MC hardly knew the chess rules. You gotto be a piece of work to critize a 8 year old for winning a tournament. We should all be better than that. You should be ashamed of yourself.