Great story about Bills receiver Amari Cooper convincing a 14 year old to teach him to play chess

An article from August headlined, "Why did NFL stars gather in June to play chess? It all began with Amari Cooper’s vision":

When Cooper first drove his Lamborghini into a suburban townhouse complex in 2020, a 14-year-old’s parents were wary.

Was a Cowboys player 12 years their son’s senior really just driving him to … the neighborhood Barnes & Noble for chess lessons?

Deviprasath, then a ninth grader on the verge of attaining chess’s expert “national master” rating, told his mother he was going to coach Cooper.

“So first she Googles him and tries to understand,” Deviprasath said. “She honestly wasn’t believing him. Like — how does this happen?”

...

They met each Monday night for two to three hours at the Barnes & Noble near Deviprasath’s townhouse.

Four years later, lessons continue.

They’ve outlasted the Barnes & Noble, which closed in May 2023, and Cooper’s Cowboys tenure, which wrapped March 2022 when Dallas traded him to the Browns for a fifth-round draft pick as his salary outgrew their interest. Deviprasath worried then that the lessons and friendship had run their course.

Instead, he and Cooper began FaceTiming each Monday night as Deviprasath shared his screen.

“Then he came back to Dallas [each offseason] and it was almost like no difference,” Deviprasath said. “Our chess lessons have grown over the years.”

"Centaur chess" and the "Wicked Problem"

From a long interview about the state of cheating in high level chess:

Machines alone can beat the world’s best chess master easily, but human-machine teams can beat that machine.

That was a very counter-intuitive result. [Former U.S. Defense Deputy Secretary] Robert Work famously used “centaur” chess to promote the Third Offset Strategy, where humans and computers work together, combining human strategy and computer speed. This fed a big argument at Defense about whether tactical battlefields should be just AIs acting alone and coordinating things, or a human-computer team. I actually was consulted on this.

...

In the current controversy, I’ve read some pretty crazy commentary, like, “Oh, maybe one of the players was using a sex toy as a remote communication device” to send vibrations to signal what an off-site machine thinks he should do, which I assume is not substantiated.

Yeah, but there’s one case in 2013 that I was involved in, where a player getting buzzes on his thighs was substantiated. It’s believed to have been a cellphone in a pocket. It was Morse code.

Scandal in the chess world after legend loses to 19-year-old grandmaster

Guardian:

Magnus Carlsen’s shock withdrawal from the $350,000 Sinquefield Cup in St Louis following his third-round defeat to the newcomer ... has triggered a variety of “cheating” claims.

...

it was the first withdrawal of the Norwegian’s entire career. His only explanation was a cryptic video clip of the football manager José Morinho saying “If I speak I am in big trouble,” during a press conference about referees.

This was widely interpreted as raising suspicions of cheating.

...

[The 19-year-old] has been banned from the largest chess site and uninvited from the Chess.com Global Championship, a $1m event with online qualifiers and an eight-player final in Toronto.

magnus carlsen: loses literally a single match

chess fans: pic.twitter.com/SDfPbfBX1n

— Flerbergerber 🧄 (@Flerbergerber) September 6, 2022

"No one has won a regulation game in a [chess] world championship since the Obama administration"

Oliver Roeder with several, aggressive suggestions for change:

Format inversion

Keep it simple! Instead of 14 games in which the players start with 120 minutes, play 120 games where the players start with 14 minutes. Do it over a long weekend.

Gray scale

Paint all pieces the same color — not black or white, but gray. Otherwise, play proceeds as normal. If at any point a player touches a piece that isn’t actually theirs, they lose.

...

‘Squid Game’ furniture

Both players’ chairs are made of glass; only one is tempered.

America's newest chess master is a 10-year-old who started playing while living in a homeless shelter in New York after fleeing Boko Haram

NPR:

[He] practices chess "every day" after school for "10, 11 hours" 

...

 "I say to myself that I never lose, that I only learn"

"In 2004, winner Rustam Kasimdzhanov walked away from the six-game world [chess] championship having lost 17 pounds"

ESPN looks at the physical demands of high level chess:

In October 2018, Polar, a U.S.-based company that tracks heart rates, monitored chess players during a tournament and found that 21-year-old Russian grandmaster Mikhail Antipov had burned 560 calories in two hours of sitting and playing chess -- or roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

Robert Sapolsky, who studies stress in primates at Stanford University, says a chess player can burn up to 6,000 calories a day while playing in a tournament, three times what an average person consumes in a day. Based on breathing rates (which triple during competition), blood pressure (which elevates) and muscle contractions before, during and after major tournaments, Sapolsky suggests that grandmasters' stress responses to chess are on par with what elite athletes experience.

"Grandmasters sustain elevated blood pressure for hours in the range found in competitive marathon runners," Sapolsky says.

It all combines to produce an average weight loss of 2 pounds a day, or about 10-12 pounds over the course of a 10-day tournament in which each grandmaster might play five or six times. The effect can be off-putting to the players themselves, even if it's expected.

...

Stress and anxiety, in fact, are the greatest drivers of the phenomenon.

...

not one of these grandmasters has perfected his fitness routine like the current world champion, Magnus Carlsen

*Previously: "Chess Coach to Leave Texas Tech With Her Team’s Best in Tow"

"A third-place finish at a tournament last month by a formerly obscure player was so startling that organizers searched his clothing and took apart his pen looking for evidence that he had outside help"

NYT:

They found nothing.

But the episode has again raised the question of how officials can monitor games in an era when technology is so advanced, and it set off concerns about how such suspicions will affect the game.

Chess set, where pieces become opaque when removed from the board

Designed by Yasmine Sethi, who says she was inspired by Through the Looking Glass. Via.

*Previously: Alice In Wonderland-themed fashion shoot by Annie Leibovitz.