There are so many different ways that the Classical World Championship could be run, and in this piece I plan to present a method that I think would be amazing.

The Candidates tournament is always one of the biggest tournaments in the chess world. This year it was not only watched by millions of chess fans, but it was also one of the most exciting tournaments I’ve ever seen. There were so many storylines and exciting moments, that it’s unlikely that any chess fan will ever forget what happened. From Gukesh’s incredible rise, to the nailbiting and heartbreaking final round draw between Caruana and Nepomniatchi to Hikaru’s late push to win the event, chess fans couldn’t ask for more.

What I think the Chess World should do, is to find ways to create more tournaments like this throughout the Championship Cycle. What makes a Classical Chess tournament great? Here are the things I’m looking for the most:

1. First place is critically important.
2. The stakes are high

These two qualifications fit the Candidates Tournament exactly. It was the highest stakes imaginable, and you had to win the tournament. That led to every player fighting their hearts out and knowing that nothing would suffice except for a first place finish.

The best way to make stakes extremely high, are to tie them to the World Championship. With that in mind, I propose the following cycle of 7 tournaments, that will determine who the future World Championship Candidates are.

Four six round, double Round Robin tournaments. The winner qualifies for the Candidiates

Two open swiss tournaments. The winner Qualifies for the Candidates

One FIDE World Cup KO. The winner qualifies for the Candidates

Lastly, the loser of the previous World Championship match will also qualify for the Candidates

I’ll lay out how each of these tournaments would work, and how to deal with certain oddities (players winning more than one event, or players winning events without intending to play in the World Championship).

• 4 Six Player, Double Round Robin Tournaments: The winner qualifies for the Candidates

These could be held every 4-5 months or so, in the 24 months in between each Candidates tournament. These tournaments would automatically include some high rated players, while also allowing other players to qualify in a democratic fashion. I am choosing a six player event instead eight to make sure that the length of the tournament is manageable from a calendar standpoint (10 rounds), and to help distinguish it from the 14 round Candidates tournament.

The first event would consist of the top 4 rated players in the world. 2 spots would also go to qualifiers from an open tournament to be held a month or two before the event. The winner of the tournament wins a cash prize and qualifies for the Candidates. The other players get some cash prizes, but receive nothing else of value.

The second event would consist of the top 3 rated players in the world who have not yet qualified for the Candidates. This time there would be an open tournament to qualify 3 more players from an open event.

The third event would consist of the top 2 rated players in the world who haven’t qualified to the Candidates and qualify 4 from an open event, and the fourth would include the top rated player in the world not yet in the Candidates, while qualifying 5 from an open event.

Some rules of these events:

• anyone who plays in these events, makes a tacit agreement that they intend to play in the Candidates Cycle if they should win. If they don’t plan to compete in the cycle, they would be asked not to play.
• Once someone has qualified for the Candidates, they would no longer be eligible for these specific events
• The qualification via rating would be made by some logical method that rewards activity, recent strong play, and is difficult to game. Even if it is gameable, it’s a lot better to game a system to make a qualifying event to the Candidates, than to be able to game your way into the actual Candidates, which was something that players attempted to do this year.

These tournaments would be exciting because everyone would know that they are one of a very few ways that it’s possible to compete in the Candidates cycle. They would include the top players in the world by rating, and allow exciting fresh faces to join from open qualification tournaments.

• Two Open Swiss Tournaments:

I think that holding two open tournaments also makes a lot of sense as a World Championship qualifier. The Isle of Man tournament has always been exciting, and giving a big prize for the winner of such an event feels very appropriate. Something like 11 rounds feels just right, and the winner of each event qualifies for the Candidates tournament. Some important caveats:

• It would be difficult to prevent people from playing an open tournament if they have already qualified or if they don’t plan to compete in the Candidates tournament. My suggestion on how to deal with this would be as follows:

— If the winner has already qualified for the Candidates, whoever is next in the standings directly takes their spot.

— If they have not qualified for the Candidates, they would be asked after the tournament if they intend to play in the Candidates Cycle. This would not be a firm commitment, however it would allow for quick movement if someone like Magnus won. Then we could just listen to him when he says he isn’t going to play, immediately give the spot to the next player in line, and make sure that player won’t be seeded in any of the other Round Robin qualification events.

• One World Cup Knockout

The World Cup is a great event, but giving away three or even two spots, to the Candidates, seems a little absurd to me. One major shame of the event is that by the time the final round has come along, most people have lost interest. The Championship match is probably the least interesting of them all, because the main prizes of value, spots in the Candidates, have already been snapped up. Any tournament in which the Quarterfinals and Semifinals are much more interesting than the Finals, is a flawed format.

There is just one spot up for grabs in this event. If someone who has already qualified wins it, then give it to the next player in line.

Because the Round Robin events generally allow you to include only players who are eligible to make it into the Candidates, I would aim to hold them later in the cycle. Preferably the final two candidates spots would be decided by those events.

We also want to avoid the scenario from this year, where the last Candidates spot was not decided in a clear way, but instead by a bunch of players playing in random events trying to gain rating as quickly as possible. That is not an interesting way to do things, and it’s a waste of an opportunity to hold a high stakes competition for that spot.

• The previous World Championship Loser

For logistical reasons I propose putting them directly into the Candidates tournament. First of all it is always interesting for the Candidates to include someone who so recently fought for the World Championship. But from a more practical standpoint, the guarantee that the loser of this match will get to automatically compete, means that in the six months between the Candidates and the World Championship match, you can already begin holding events for the next Candidates tournament. Otherwise, for fairness reasons, you might have to wait until the World Championship match had concluded, which hurts your flexibility with timing a little bit.

If it’s no problem to hold all of the events from December 2024, until the Candidates (presumably in March 2026), then I think you could eliminate this proviso. But I would like to make sure that the loser in the World Championship match will have just as many fair opportunities to qualify as anyone else, and if that becomes difficult, I’d suggest just slotting them right in.

We need more high stakes events that lead directly to the greatest prize of them all: The World Chess Championship. Candidates spots should not be given automatically to high rated players, or to players who finished highly in some complicated drawn out grand prix tournaments that no one fully understands or watches. None of these spots should be wasted. They are an opportunity to run a high stakes event, where there is only one winner. We should take advantage of every chance to do this, so that we don’t have to wait two years between high impact chess tournaments, and so there can be more heart stopping moments that the entire chess world enjoyed in the 2024 Candidates tournament.

It’s been six months since my first blog, detailing my journey from a total beginner at Trivia (44/150 correct answers in LearnedLeague), to making it to Group B. Apologies for the spoiler in the title, but I made it to Group A!!!

When I first started doing Trivia my gut feeling was that it would take many years to get to Group A level. Like how could I ever make up the knowledge gap that I had. And how can I just learn everything about everything? But it turns out if you study nonstop every day like a psychopath, it’s not as hard as it looks.

My Progress

I am super happy to have completed the direct path from E to A. My first season of being in the E group I wasn’t yet good enough to make it out of E, but after that I advanced to the next group with each successive season. I wonder if anyone has ever done that before, at least anyone who legitimately belonged in the bottom group when they started.

However, despite my upward rise in the rankings, the fast progress that I was seeing throughout my first year seemed to have slowed down quite a bit, as my Total Correct Answers in Learned League tapered off a bit. For example, my last three seasons have been 103, 100 and this season I hit my all time high with 107. Whereas before this I was going up much faster (44-60-82-93-103 correct was my progression)

However despite this, I am still making some serious progress. The most aggressive progress I’m making has been in Jeopardy. When I last updated you in May, my CORYAT score was hovering around 28,000. It’s now at 31,500 for my last 50 games. (For those who don’t already know, here is more information on what CORYAT score is.) It seems that every single month there is a significant uptick in my Jeopardy score, which is probably because I spend so much time studying old games, questions and making flash cards and reviewing them. The longer term goal for my Coryat is $35,000, and then once I hit that I can figure out what my next goal is. Although I’m guessing this goal will take a while to achieve.

My Daily Double get rate is now slightly above 80%, whereas it was closer to 75% the last time I updated you. For reference, the average Jeopardy player seems to hit Daily Doubles at about a 63% rate over the last year. The medium-long term goal here for me is 85%+, although I suspect that this will be very difficult to reach. To put it in simple terms, I just don’t know the answer too often, and 85%+ is knowing a lot of answers!

I’ve also had the great fortune to play some online trivia/Jeopardy training games against some established strong players and have held my own on occasion. There are plenty of players that I’ve played who are without question better than me at the moment, but the fact that I can win every now and then is encouraging. And with every week it feels like I’m getting just a little bit sharper.

My Big Takeaway: Trust Your Gut

Lets swing back to Learned League though and focus on what were some of my biggest issues in this past season, aside from the basic one of not knowing things:

My Biggest Learned League weakness: I managed to get 4 questions wrong this season in the exact same way: Not listening to my intuition. I have built up a large intuition due to tens of thousands of handmade flashcards (about 60,000 of them now). It is impossible for me to have an exact and thorough knowledge and recall of these flashcards, but sometimes my brain knows something that my rational mind doesn’t know and can’t even explain. There were a few specific instances of this happening in this season’s Learned League and I’ll give an example of what happens to my brain when I mess up in this way. Not only did I screw these questions up, but in most cases my unconscious brain knew I was going to be wrong, and I knew that I should follow whatever vague spidey sense I had, but because I couldn’t logically explain it, I decided to put a different answer down that was something that I could at least explain. For example, this is how I mentally contorted myself out of the correct instinctual answer to this question:

At first, I instantly wrote down MOUNTAINS. I felt like it may have been asked in the top row of a jeopardy game at some point. But this was an extremely vague memory and I convinced myself I was making it up. But one thing I did know for sure was that oro meant gold in Spanish. And while I knew that Latin and Greek roots almost never have much to do with each other, at least it was something I could explain to someone instead of “Ummm I dunno I kind of remember some thing on a flash card, but not really”. So I put gold, and of course it was mountains. This wrong answer also cost me the match.

Alas, I did not learn enough from this fiasco and made the same mistake of talking myself out of the correct knee-jerk answer in three other questions. But over the course of those mistakes, the lesson sunk in and my methodology for how to rely on my intuition solidified. Now, I believe that when my brain quickly thinks it knows something, it’s almost always right and I should never under any circumstance use some twisted logic to put something else down, just so that I can justify my thought process. To reinforce this conviction, I’ve written a rule on the top of the place where I put drafts for my answers:

“If you have a first instinct about something and you can’t quite understand why, you have to be nearly positive that any new answer is correct in order to change your answer”

I used to say I had to be 70% correct, but I somehow convinced myself that some of my other guesses that went against my intuition could be 70%. So now I have to be like 95+% sure in order to against an unexplainable intuitive feeling.

The good news is that after the Learned League season ended I had two specific opportunities to test this in the other leagues I compete in.

REDEMPTION QUESTION: EXAMPLE #1 –In geometry, a regular dodecahedron has twelve flat faces. Each face of the regular dodecahedron has what shape?

This question is from the league I play on BPTrivia. The moment I saw this question my brain immediately said “pentagon”. I had no idea why it was saying Pentagon, but it was the first thing I wrote down and it just felt right for no logical reason. Then I decided to envision the shape and I ran into problems. I just had a lot of trouble envisioning pentagon’s on a die, but somehow it was much easier to envision hexagons and it felt a lot more natural to me. There was a giant hexagon in my mind’s eye, staring at me in the face. But I told myself this was a perfect time to test my intuition. My unconscious brain wanted pentagon for some reason, and so I decided to put Pentagon. Of course it was pentagon! It turned out that I had some flash card about this but I hadn’t seen it in months, so the memory was kind of pushed into my subconscious.

REDEMPTION QUESTION: EXAMPLE #2 –CURRENT EVENTS – On December 5, 2022, a national laboratory conducted an experiment that resulted in a breakthrough in modern science – the first ignition in a controlled fusion experiment, which indicates that the reaction produced more energy as output than it required as input (although only if you measure the energy input in a specific context). This breakthrough took place at a national laboratory named for WHAT CITY which also serves as the namesake for a super-heavy element associated with the laboratory?

This question comes from a new cool Trivia League called LiquidKourage. It’s super fun, but it’s currently pretty small, and I highly recommend joining it if you’re into Trivia. This one was really spooky for me because I still don’t know what happened. I knew exactly one city that is associated with an element and that also has an element named after it, and that’s Berkeley (for Berkelium). So it would be really easy to just write Berkeley and feel good about that answer because I can explain it away pretty easily. But for some reason that I still don’t understand, my brain kept whispering at me “Livermorium”. This was a problem because I didn’t even know if Livermore was a city. I had some vague feeling it might be, but I definitely wasn’t sure. This seemed like the perfect time to test my intuition because it’s a really weird case where I had almost no logical reason to put Livermore down. The only reason for writing it is because in the back of my head there’s some information that I can’t quite process. And maybe I didn’t think that Berkelium was a super-heavy element, although honestly I don’t know what a super heavy element is. I decided to yolo it, and lo and behold, it was Livermore. It’s named after a guy named Robert Livermore, whereas the Laboratory in Livermore is named after another guy with the last name Livermore. I’m still very confused and have no idea what’s going on, but apparently it was the answer, and my brain is smarter than I can explain sometimes.

So where do I go from here?

I just keep doing what I’m doing for as long as I find it interesting. I assume that I’ll just keep getting better as long as I do that.

The next goal in Learned League is to become a player who gets 110/150 correct on average, although that’s not a very aggressive goal given that I just got 107 and missed some super easy things. So the real goal is to be someone who’s getting at least 120+ on average. Hopefully I’ll get there someday, but it could take some time to fill blind spots in some areas that are difficult to study for.

One amazing thing that just happened is I qualified for the top Group of BPTrivia. I’m completely outclassed in the top group there as it’s filled with some of the absolute best trivia people in the world. I will almost certainly get demoted back to the second group next season, but I’m pretty pumped to have made it at all and have my name next to all the legends.

The honest truth is that there are so many people out there who are just so much better than me, and have many years, if not decades, of more experience than me. The best trivia players in Learned League are just outrageously good. Although one really cool thing about trivia is how many different formats there are, and how being good at one doesn’t always translate into being good in another. Even a small shift like a league that has more math questions than normal, can change the skill level of a player. In games like Jeopardy, it’s really common for some of the best trivia players in the world, to not always be as dominant.

And sometimes it feels like people are really talented with things like wordplay, or parsing answers quickly. Or maybe they don’t make as many boneheaded mistakes as I do (I make a lot of them!). Like we had a question where all I had to know was basically what an acorn is, and I managed to get that wrong. Like it’s a freaking acorn, it comes from an tree, I’ve seen thousands of them in my life, and I was still very confused and managed to get the question wrong.

How exactly am I training now? I do a few specific things:

1. Study Jeopardy games, the current games and old games
2. Study old LearnedLeague questions
3. Study current and old Masterminds questions. It’s a daily TV quiz show and they have a lot of bite size simple questions.
4. I play some online trivia games, and anytime I get something wrong or take too long to get something, that someone else gets correct quickly, I know I need to study that
5. I do Crosswords regularly to help with wordplay stuff and general connections. They’re super fun and I’ve gotten a lot better at them.
6. Practice play playing Jeopardy or other trivia games online
7. Play in every decent trivia contest that doesn’t require me to be in a specific place at a specific time (LearnedLeague, BPTrivia, Alex Jacob’s School of Trivia, LiquidKourage). I even joined Apocalypse Sports Trivia, which I am pretty terrible at, but I’m doing it anyway. I generally try to avoid any league that’s too focused on one subject, because I find that in these cases the questions are extremely hard and usually not as applicable to general trivia.
8. I started studying some OQL trivia questions. I think this is some smart person’s team trivia league thing? I’m not exactly sure what it is, but the questions seem good (Although some of them seem like they might be pretty obscure.)
9. I generally avoid any Learned League mini leagues or dailies. First off I don’t trust random unvetted people to make good questions, and secondly, as mentioned in #7, I find that they can often be a little bit too focused on one subject, and then the things I learn aren’t as applicable as things I could learn from other methods.
10. Do tons of review on my flash cards every day with an aggressive spaced repetition plan. Honestly this takes up a huge amount of time, but otherwise I’ll just forget everything. So much of it has just been shoved into my brain in the last year, and I haven’t had a whole lifetime to absorb it and make it automatic knowledge.

Thanks for reading all of this! I’ll try to do updates every now and then for those who are curious about my progress.

I knew it was one of those Ninja Turtles, but how was I to know if it was Leonardo, Michelangelo or Raphael?

I have always hated trivia. I don’t know things. Unlike chess, no amount of talent or creative brain power is going to help me figure out who was the king of England in 1200. So when friends of mine tried to convince me to join an elite trivia league called “LearnedLeague”, I was skeptical.

“It’s fun” they said. “There are levels for all different types of players, and even if you’re a total Trivia beginner, you’ll get matched with people your own level.”

The way that LearnedLeague works is that you are asked six trivia questions every day for five weeks. You are matched up against one opponent from your group. You both answer the questions, and also try to predict which questions will be most difficult for your opponent. 

Fun fact: In my second season, I infamously answered tyrannosaurus Rex to Question 5 at the last second, after having the correct answer down the entire day. 

There are 5 levels, ranging from groups A-E. The top 10% or so of players are in Group A. The next 10% are in Group B, and 20% each are at levels C-E. I figured – it’s just six questions for five weeks; I enjoy competition even if it’s something I’m not great at, so it would be a fun little thing to do to pass the time.

My first season began in May 2021… and as I expected, I got my butt whooped. I got 44/150 answers correct in my rookie league, playing with all the other rookies, and got placed in the E group. Not only was I in the bottom group, but from looking around at other players, it was clear that I was one of the weaker ones, and approximately in the bottom 10% of all players leaguewide.

Where does one even begin if they want to succeed at something in which the entire breadth of human knowledge is the subject of study?

Because the league had such a cool competitive setup, it was kind of annoying to me that I’d never have any chance to promote to Group D. I just didn’t know enough things. Where is the Caspian Sea? What is the Caspian Sea? What’s an Opera? I think I’ve heard of Nutcracker! Like man, I just didn’t know a lot of things, and looking back, I feel like even 44/150 was a bit of an overperformance. But fortunately, they ask some pop culture stuff that if you just watch movies sometimes then maybe you can get them right. I was also lucky to get a question about a book they forced me to read in high school (Age of Innocence).

Aside from knowing some things about sports & games, I was pretty bad in all categories. Where does one even begin if they want to succeed at something in which the entire breadth of human knowledge is the subject of study?

My System

I decided I was not going to try to be competitive about it, but just for fun, I’d learn a few things. Because trivia is so varied, and there are so many things to learn about, I didn’t want to pick and choose what to learn at first, as I feared that would lead to me becoming too focused on just one specific area, and leave the rest lacking. So my strategy was:

• Go to JeopardyArchive, a cool site which has the questions and answers of every Jeopardy game ever played
• Look at some of the recent Final Jeopardy questions
• If I didn’t know the answer, study whatever the answer is

This way, I would get a pretty varied mix of topics, and keep learning something that was deemed important by the most famous quiz show in the world.

I amazingly got the first 15 Final Jeopardy questions wrong (I was really not good!), but it was fun learning about Leonardo da Vinci, Aaron Copland and whatever other random subjects came up at first.

I would make flashcards out of everything and store them in my Flashcards Deluxe app on my phone. At that stage, my philosophy was: it can’t hurt to learn a few things. Why not be a bit more cultured and worldly?

Then, I began to Google and make flashcards out of things like “ten most famous artists ever”, and “ten most famous paintings ever.”

Every time you learn a new fact, you are better at this game!

Sometimes, a famous book would be one of the answers, like Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. I would do a deep dive into the book, starting at Wikipedia, then going to the book’s CourseHero page. I would watch videos about the book, find major quotes from the book, and get detailed summaries of all the key characters. By the time I finished these processes, I usually felt like I had a pretty good feel for everything that happened in the story. I’m sure that actually reading it could be an option, but I feel like I pick up most of the culture, messages, and vibe of the books by doing it this way. While I do enjoy reading for pleasure, I enjoy maybe dozens of other things more, so I don’t really want to spend my time focusing on one book for hours.

At that point, it started to become obvious to me that I wanted to spend more time on this. It felt like a great hobby for the following reasons:

1. It’s a fun competitive environment that has been created by someone who has been very diligent in making the competition as engaging as possible.
2. It is extremely rewarding to actually know things. After knowing very little for 43 years (aside from a few areas I specialized in such as chess, poker, CrossFit, etc), it’s cool to suddenly be able to have conversations about history, art, literature and opera.
3. It is very clear when you are improving. Every time you learn a new fact, you are better at this game. If you do the hard work, your performance in competitions goes up very clearly.
4. The accomplishment of learning new things, and having the knowledge pay off, provided a huge dopamine hit.

My Stats

Let’s take a look at how my performance changed season by season. Keep in mind that each season you have to answer 150 total questions:

Season 1: (May 2021 – Rookie Group) 44/150 29%. In your first season they put you in a “Rookie Rundle”, which places you with other players who are competing for the first time. After that you get moved to a group between B-E, depending on your placing. My rookie performance of 44 correct answers put me in the bottom 5-10% of all players in Learned League, and off to Group E I went.

Season 2: (August 2021 – Group E) 60/150 40%: This was my first season in Group E. I finished somewhere in the middle of the pack, but my 40% performance was a major increase on my rookie season. On the plus side, 40% in Group E is typically well above average, so it was a good omen of things to come. While the improvement was great, I was still in the bottom 25% of players in the league.

Season 3: (November 2021- Group E) 82/150: 55%: This was my breakout season. Getting over 50% correct answers in Group E is a massive score, and I easily qualified for Group D the next season. My score would have even put me in the upper echelon of players in Group D, so with two months to prepare, I expected to be pretty competitive there too. Also this result put me in approximately the top 35% of all players in the league, which is a huge turnaround from bottom 25%.

Season 4: (February 2022 – Group D) 93/150: 62%: My percentage here was enough to handily win my Group D. I clinched first place with 1-2 matches left in the season. My performance also would have been one of the top performances in Group C. My performance this season put me in the top 20% in the league.

Season 5: (May 2022 – Group C) 103/150: 69%: I had by far the most correct answers in my Group C, and clinched first place with one match to go. This was my most recent season, and like the past seasons, my performance would also have been strong one level up (My total correct answers would have tied for second place in the Group B division). Another cool thing is that the 6 day Jeopardy champion at the time of this writing, is in the same Group B that I’m moving into (she has since lost). With this result, my performance was just about top 10% in the league.

Since there are over 30,000 players playing in the league, I figured that people would be interested in a step by step guide to how to get a lot better in just one year. I have yet to find any other player on Learned League with such a stark progression as mine (basically going from one of the worst players in the league to top 10% in a year), and the very large majority seem to stay at the same level throughout time. Here is my stat page: https://learnedleague.com/profiles.php?56100

How did I improve so fast? Slowly but surely I turned into a trivia machine. I started out being very bad at Jeopardy. I would try and solve an entire board, untimed, and get about 25-28 questions correct out of 60. After a few months I got that number up to 40+. Then in February 2022 I started watching the games live and tracking something called the CORYAT score. That number started around 23,000, but it’s now June 2022 and it’s around 27,000, but it’s slowly creeping more and more towards 30,000+ (I got 30k+ in 4 of the last 5 games since writing this). It’s not a mind blowing number, I believe that lots of players with Jeopardy aspirations get 30,000+, but it’s high enough that if I was on the show, I could easily win a few games. It also helps that my Final Jeopardy and Double Jeopardy correct rates are well above the show averages.

I have studied every question on every Jeopardy board since the beginning of 2020, and every Final Jeopardy answer since 2012. I literally mean that I know the answer to every single question in the last 3 years, not that I have just casually glanced at them.

Some people have a strategy to focus only on the most commonly asked topics on Jeopardy. I feel like that’s a good idea if you are rushed for time and cramming for something, but I have all the time in the world, and because my Flashcard system makes it possible to retain information easily, I want to know everything. If its on any kind of quiz competition and I get it wrong, into the Flashcards it goes. This also prevents there from being too much of a ceiling in my potential. At some point, you’re going to be facing people who also know all of the basic and most common topics on Jeopardy, so to only focus on that stuff is a good short term solution, but long term it’s less ideal.

I have also memorized every single LearnedLeague question since Season 50 (that’s about 10 years of seasons, and about 6000+ total questions). The league tends to repeat questions every now and then, so it is really helpful and I include every question, correct or wrong, in my flashcards. Although I have to shamefully admit that I got a question wrong about “Ontology” in this most reason season, despite having already made a flash card about what Ontology from a previous Learned League season. To be honest I still don’t really know what it is. It’s something about the philosophy of the nature of being, whatever that means. But it’s okay, I have come to grips with the idea that occasionally I’m just going to forget things, however I try to put myself in the best position not to…..

My FlashCard Factory

How does my flashcard system work? I have manually created about 38,000 flashcards in the last year. I use spaced repetition, which basically means that when I get a flashcard correct, I will see it less frequently, and when I get one wrong, or if it’s a newer card, I will see it more frequently.

I use a very aggressive formula for the spaced repetition. I think that it’s very important not to be a perfectionist and to accept that I am going to forget lots of things. Perfectionism will kill you when you need to gain such a wide breadth of knowledge. The main thing is to keep adding new information and remembering as much of it as possible. It’s much better to know 85% of 38,000 flashcards than to know 100% of 2000 flash cards. Some things I get wrong over and over and I’m fine with it, it’s just one thing. Instead of spending too much time trying to fix that one issue, I’d rather be absorbing lots of new information.

If it takes me two years to learn a fact, that’s totally fine, as in the meantime I’m filling my brain with lots of other facts as well.

When I add a card for the first time, and I am first tested on it and I get it correct, I either mark it as correct (in which case the next time I see it will be in 8 days), or I mark it as super correct (in which the next time I see it will be 20 days).

Perfectionism will kill you when you need to gain such a wide breadth of knowledge. It’s much better to know 85% of 38,000 flashcards than to know 100% of 2000 flash cards.

I start each day by reviewing all the cards that are “due”, which means that the countdown to when they are supposed to be studied has been completed. I then count them as either “wrong”, “correct” or “super correct”. Correct means the multiplier of its current interval will triple. So if I haven’t seen it in 10 days, and I mark it as correct, I’ll see it again in 30 days. If I mark it as Super Correct, it will increase the interval by 6.7 times. I have a 5 second timer on each card, and if I easily get the card before the timer goes up, I mark it as super correct. The maximum interval is set to 730 days, and anytime I get an answer wrong, it cuts the interval in half, and it quizzes me on the question again immediately the very next day, forcing me to repair the connection in my brain.

Since I began this process about one year ago, I have been making just over 100 flash cards per day. I also strongly prefer entering cards myself, because I want to check for quality control, and because I find that you learn a lot through the flash card creation process.

When I add a card, if I don’t understand the reason for why something is correct, I do my own research and write all the reasoning down on the answer side. I’ll never just write an answer with no explanation, unless no explanation is required for full understanding.

I Never Play Anything “Just for Fun”

I tend not to watch or do any trivia related activity for fun. What I mean by that is whenever I get something wrong, I will make a flashcard out of it. Playing and studying without working to correct my mistakes would help me about 20% as much as focusing on what I got wrong.

For me, this is an important part of studying for any endeavor, whether it’s chess, poker, trivia or even something physical like CrossFit. In chess it can be tempting to play blitz game after blitz game without learning from your mistakes. It’s okay to have fun sometimes, but I know that I have massive amounts to improve, and if I don’t do this process, I won’t get there.

For instance, when I watch the Chase each week, I make flashcards out of every single question I don’t know. It’s a bit more time consuming because there is no website where I can just copy and paste the questions, but the idea of getting something wrong and not putting myself in the best position to get it right next time is too painful for me. It feels like nearly a waste of time to watch the show without going through this process.

Beyond LearnedLeague

I have recently joined two other trivia leagues:

BPTrivia and SchoolofTrivia

What I like about playing in all 3 of these leagues is that they all have different scoring systems and styles. Also you will learn things that will help you in all of the other leagues, and in Jeopardy. So you are not only competing but also training!

SchoolofTrivia is particularly fun because I am constantly going head to head against well known Jeopardy contestants (and sometimes holding my own!). I was just in a group with 4-5 tournament of champions qualifiers for the current 2021-2022 Jeopardy season. This league has four divisions from Senior to Freshman, along with an elite division of the top 10 players. I was shocked at how competitive I was here, as I made it past the Freshman and Sophomore divisions in my first two seasons. I was particularly proud to win clear first place in the Freshman in my first season, going head to head with a 7 day Jeopardy winner and only passing her on the final few days. (Although she kicked my butt this last season!). This league is run by a former Jeopardy Tournament of Champions winner (and a poker player!) Alex Jacob.

BPTrivia has the hardest questions of the three, and has the strongest opposition. They also have a lot of other mini quizzes throughout the week. For the first 6-8 months of my Trivia life I sort of shied away from taking it seriously, but I’m finally at the point where I feel I can compete reasonably here too, and most importantly, I can learn more things.

I have also started getting into CrossWord puzzles. I noticed that a lot of top trivia players are good at them, and I felt it might help all to make sure everything is connected and improve my ability at wordplay related clues (didn’t pay off in yesterday’s Jeopardy game in which I went 0/5 in a wordplay category). I started doing them back in January 2022 and have gotten a ton better and have started to become slightly addicted to them. Have only recently gotten to the point where I can complete the Thursday, Friday and Sunday puzzles without any help.

I am also on a 128 day streak on DuoLingo. At the moment, I’m studying Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Italian all at once. I don’t expect to get fluent, but it’s a fun little game to play, and I feel like it’s also good for the brain. Also knowing that “Inu” means “Dog” in Japanese got me an $800 question in a recent Jeopardy game.

One major takeaway from this, and anything you may want to put your mind to, is the extreme benefit you get when you really enjoy the process. Right now I enjoy almost nothing as much as cramming new information into my head and testing myself on it. Whenever I have down time, it’s a chance for me to learn one more thing, to look at one more jeopardy board, and to make Flashcards for every answer I don’t get right.

The next level up is always daunting. However at every step of the way, the next level up has seemed so far away, and then I’d reach it in a few months.

I’m curious to see where I will plateau, and whether it will come due to lack of the sustained effort that I’ve been putting in, or because my method is no longer sufficient to substantially improve. The fewer questions that I get wrong each season, the less likely it is that any studying will target those few topics.

The next level up is always daunting. I can barely imagine getting to 110 correct questions in the 150 question LearnedLeague season, yet alone 120, which is what I’d probably need to be a serious competitor in Group A. However at every step of the way, the next level up has seemed so far away, and then I’d reach it in a few months. 

To conclude, I’m pretty proud of what I’ve accomplished in a year. I know I’m competing against people who may have over a decade of trivia experience. Many of them have done Quiz Bowl, many have been on and studied for Jeopardy. It’s nice to start a new thing, decide to take it really seriously and then see proof that the work you do, and the methods you use are good ones. I honestly didn’t expect in my wildest dreams that I would improve this much in just a year.

Oh, and not to leave you hanging – it was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci in the early 1500s, and has been on display in Louvre since 1767, save for four years in Napoleon’s bedroom, a couple brief exhibitions in NYC, Tokyo and Moscow, and a scandalous theft in 1911.

Everyone close to me has known that I’m polyamorous for at least a few years, and plenty of people who aren’t close to me know as well. But I’ve been increasingly feeling that it’s important to make this clear to the entire world and to explain more about what polyamory means.

Polyamory can mean lots of different things to different people. But the main idea is that you aren’t restricted to one romantic relationship at one time. That idea never seemed groundbreaking to me. Like many social norms, monogamy is simply self-reinforcing: it’s common and normalized, so often people do it without deliberately choosing it.

The main reason I feel it’s important to be public about polyamory is that there are an enormous number of polyamorous people who keep their identity secret, to avoid the judgement of conservative and closed minded friends and family. While it’s normal for monogamous heterosexual couples to post their couple photos on social media, it’s a lot more fraught with danger for polyamorous people to do the same thing. I have met many other poly people over the last few years, and a common theme is that they are rejected by people close to them after coming out as poly. Seeing so many people close to me faced with this type of judgement made me feel it is my moral obligation to be publicly poly and to do my part to normalize it.

I knew that I was poly for nearly fifteen years, yet I never had the courage to live a polyamorous lifestyle or even really tell many people about it. Part of this lack of courage was because of how controversial it is and how I thought it’d be harder to date or meet people who were on a similar wavelength. Part of it was that without being very deliberate and mindful, it is scarily easy to find yourself in implicit monogamous commitments because everyone assumes you are monogamous unless you explicitly specify otherwise.

Five years ago I was terrified to tell even my closest friends. I was absolutely certain I was poly but felt like I couldn’t tell anyone, and I am sure there are countless other people reading this blog who are in a similar boat. Eventually the fear of looking back at my life with regret, knowing that I didn’t live according to my true identity, was enough to make me finally be who I’m supposed to be.

Today I proudly tell anyone who asks about my love life what I’m all about.

I recognize that I’m lucky because I’m not going to get fired from my job for this, or discriminated against, or lose all my friends or family. But the fear of things like that can be a real obstacle to many people. It’s extremely common for people to be polyamorous and feel like they need to keep it a secret from at least one person in their life, if not from nearly everyone.

The type of poly that I identify with the most is frequently referred to as relationship anarchy. To me it means that there is no predefined structure to what my relationships should look like, and it also means that romantic relationships are not automatically the pinnacle of human connection. I don’t want to control anyone, I don’t want anyone to control me. I want everyone close to me to be free to love and connect with anyone they want in any way they want and to spend their time in any way they want, and I require the same freedom.

It’s a fantastic liberating feeling to know that at any moment I can meet any person I’d like, and my connection with that person can follow any path that naturally develops. There are no rules, there are no people I have to check with. Everyone important to me will support any relationship I foster with anyone else. Not only will they support it, but they’ll be glad to hear about it, just as I’m glad to hear about the people who are important to them.

I currently have a life filled with love and amazing romantic partners, platonic friends, and others who fall somewhere in between. It feels really good to be who I’m supposed to be. I hope that everyone else who knows that their identity is not what they currently put forth to the world has the opportunity to be who they truly are.

Chess is broken. A game can be broken and still be popular, entertaining and beautiful. Chess is still a beautiful game, and is even growing in popularity. But that doesn’t mean that it’s perfect or that it doesn’t need fixing. What we are doing to this game by refusing to make any changes is terrible.

Every major video game in the world does regular “balance changes”. These are just standard changes that are made to the game to make it more interesting or fix it because something about it is broken. There are so many things that are not ideal about chess, that the chess community refuses to address due to adherence for tradition, lineage and an obsession with sitting in the same spot for 6 hours.

Magnus Carlsen himself, the World Champion of Chess and number 1 player in the world, even admits it in his latest interview. He says “In general it’s good to incorporate more rapid and blitz in the world championship because to some extent it is a purer form of chess because preparation plays less of a role”.

I have lost all patience with the diehard “never change anything about chess” crowd. They are dinosaurs and are making a mockery of what a game should be

What are the main problems with chess:

1. The draw rate is absurdly high at the top level. Do I have to see another article at some major super tournament where the author writes a glee filled headline because a few games actually ended in wins? A perfectly designed game should not be a tie as frequently as chess is and this is super obvious. The drawing margin is too high, and you can get away with too many mistakes and still draw, especially with the White pieces. Yes some of the draws were interesting, but how about create a format where it’s not a draw every single time? Maybe that would be even more interesting!
2. Computers have taken a lot of the life out of the game. Chess players are no longer willing to play any risky looking moves in the opening, because they fear their opponent’s computer preparation. They know that it will be absolutely perfect and that they will stand no chance if they walk into home prep in a complicated position. This could be seen in Game 2 of the most recent World Championship match, in which Magnus intentionally avoided what looked to be the critical line. He knew it was the critical line, but he also knew that Fabiano would know everything about it. Magnus didn’t want to play against a computer, so he played a tamer line and was satisfied to just play for equality.
3. The games are too long. The top players play exceptionally well in faster time control games. Give them a time control of 90+30 and they will still play near 2800 level. But for some reason we have to add an extra two hours so that maybe they will play at 2820-2830. It’s so ridiculous and a complete misuse of time and resources. You have to be so stuck in the past to think that a three or four hour chess game just isn’t enough, and that it simply must be six hours. The extra benefit is that when the time controls are faster, even just slightly faster than they are now, people win more frequently.
4. There are almost no more memorable games in World Championship Matches. We have grown up studying the great games in the matches with Capablanca vs Alekhine, Botvinink vs Tal or Kasparov vs Karpov. Tell me one memorable game from the last 6 World Championship Matches? They will basically all be forgotten. You can pretend that Carlsen’s fortress defense from Game 6 will be remembered, but it won’t. Actually I take it back…..there was one extremely iconic moment from a recent World Championship Match that I don’t think will be forgotten easily. It’s when Carlsen played the beautiful 50. Qh6!! to win the title against Karjakin. It just so happens that came from a rapid game! Once rapid chess starts getting taken more seriously, we will see that the games and ideas are so much more beautiful and much more digestible to 99%+ of the chess audience. Players will once again be able to go for speculative sacrifices against the best opponents in the world.
5. The current format is not likely to determine who the best chessplayer is! Because classical games end in draws so frequently, even if you increase the match length to 24 games, you are often going to see someone win the match with 2 wins to 1 and 21 draws. This does very little to differentiate who is actually the better player. Sticking to the low number of games, slow time control format, increases the chance that the weaker chess player will win.

I have already written my solution in a previous blog but I’ll reiterate it one more time, with a small change, because I do think it’s the perfect balance of retaining that classical chess tradition, while not allowing all of the life to get sucked out of the game:

This is how a chess game would work:

You play one game at 90 minutes plus a 20 second increment. The winner gets 10 points the loser gets 0

If that game is drawn you reverse colors and play one game at 20 minutes plus a 10 second increment. The winner gets 7 points and the loser gets 3

If that game is drawn you keep the same colors as the rapid game and play one game at 5 minutes plus a 3 second increment. The winner gets 6 points and the loser gets 4. If this game is drawn, both players get 5 points.

A perfect mix of Classical, Rapid and Blitz.  The Classical game is still worth 5 times as much as the blitz game. The Classical game is worth 2.5 times as much as the rapid game. The rapid game is worth 2 times as much as the blitz game. But all the games count, and all forms of chess count. Every single player will need to be equally versed at Classical, Rapid and Blitz chess to consider themselves the best in the world.

The best overall chess player will almost always win handily with such a format. If it’s truly very close, then we will see some really tight and exciting matches. Right now everyone is so good at the top and the draw rate is so high, that most matches with absurdly long time controls are going to end with the majority draws and maybe one or two wins sprinkled in.

I think that Fischer Random is also a great idea, but there is something beautiful about the starting position in chess, so I decided to retain that chess tradition in favor of simply speeding up the time controls. But Fischer Random has the added benefit that Computer Preparation is rendered almost meaningless.

The chess community needs to wake up. The World Championship was just all draws. The one before it was 10 out of 12 draws.  The idea of making the match even longer so that eventually someone wins is ridiculous. Where exactly were players avoiding risks? You could say it was Carlsen in Game 12, but I believe he only got that position because Caruana was so hell bent on trying to win and avoid the rapid tiebreak. This is all so stupid and it’s so frustrating to be part of a community who can’t see it.

Everyone loves to resist change, and they eventually get left in the dust because of it.

 

 

 

 

Good news everyone! I’ve finally figured out the ultimate solution to fix chess.

A lot of people are complaining about the World Championship Match right now, mainly due to the number of draws and the feeling that sometimes the players are avoiding risk. I honestly don’t completely agree that it’s so bad, and I think that:

• There have been some really exciting moments both on the board (Game 1), and off the board (Magnus’s funny comments in press conferences, the whole video controversy and etc)
• I think also that in a match this long someone will eventually win, and the mounting tension of draw after draw will make it that much more dramatic when it does happen.

But despite my feelings that things are okay, I also believe they could be much better. And it’s also clear that as time goes on these problems are only going to get worse and worse. Change is inevitable, it’s just a matter of time until we all realize it.

Another thing that fixed this idea in my mind was something that Hikaru Nakamura said. He said he’s rooting for Magnus because “It doesn’t feel right to him that the world champion shouldn’t be someone who’s not also one of the best at rapid and blitz chess”

What is my solution that will fix EVERYTHING? Simple:

You play a classical chess game. It should be sped up SLIGHTLY compared to the normal time control, probably by removing a half hour from each clock, and slightly speeding up the following time controls.

If you win this game, you get 5 points. If you lose you get 0

If the game is drawn, you reverse colors and play a rapid game. If you win the rapid game you get 4 points. If you lose the rapid game you get 1 point.

If the rapid game is drawn you keep the same colors you had in the rapid game and play a blitz game. If you win the blitz game you get 3 points, if you lose you get 2 points and if you draw you both get 2.5 points. 

Why do I love this solution?

1. Someone will win most of the time, which is MUCH more exciting and interesting for fans of chess
2. It requires players to be skilled at all types of chess in order to be considered the best in the world
3. It helps negate white’s advantage a bit because in the rapid and blitz game, the player with black in the classical game will have the white pieces.
4. It still puts a high emphasis on classical chess. If you win the blitz portion the first four games you’d have a lead of 12-8. That would be erased in one game if your opponent won the next classical game.

This works in head to head matches and also in round robin tournaments. Literally everything will be immediately more exciting, without massively downgrading the quality of the classical game.

What are the downsides?

• In order to make sure there is time for the rapid and blitz portions of play, we will have to speed up the time control a little bit. I’m not sure the best way to do it. One idea could be to lower the increment from 30 seconds to 15 seconds, while also removing a little bit of time from the clock (for example 90 minutes to start with a 15 second increment).
• You may think that blitz and rapid chess is an abomination and should have no business being involved in any serious chess tournament. I happen to strongly disagree.

I honestly can’t think of any other downsides but I’m sure the lovely people of the Internet will point them out for me in the most polite way possible!

 

 

The number one thing that gets my bullshit alarm to go off is when someone gives unsolicited advice, as though they are some kind of spiritual or intellectual life guru.

There are a lot of things I have opinions on, but once I start taking these opinions and voicing them in “advice” form, I become totally full of shit. Here are a few examples:

• Before a chess game you should clear your mind and go for a walk instead of playing a video game or preparing for your opponent up to five minutes before the round.
• If you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, don’t go to the gym.
• When you travel, XYZ is a must see, you can’t miss it!!!
• Put down your cell phone and enjoy the moment.

Do I agree with the above? Mostly no. I think that before a chess game everyone is completely different, and totally different routines will work depending on who you are.  But there are tons of people telling you exactly what you should and shouldn’t do right before a game.

I do think that you should generally skip working out if you didn’t sleep well, but often a 20 minute nap will rejuvenate you enough to make exercise worthwhile again. And for some people who have kids and a busy schedule and can literally never get enough sleep, I sure don’t suggest that they never work out.

I also want to strangle anyone who tells me I “have to see” anything in another country. Unless you know me unbelievably well, you have no idea what I have to see.

Also I can’t stand the anti technology commentary. I think it’s so overblown to the point of absurdity. When I’m alone I’m on my phone constantly, and I think it greatly improves my quality of life. I get to listen to music and dance down the street, and it makes me feel more connected no matter where I am.

What am I trying to say exactly? When you give advice, most of the time, there should be some level of uncertainty.

I am a very strong chess player compared to the general population of chess players, however except for the most basic information there is, I don’t know if there is any advice I can give and be certain that what I’m saying is true.

It makes me sound really wishy washy sometimes, but I believe it’s more intellectually honest than stating something as a fact, when I don’t believe it is one.

I mean I can look at a chess position, and know that I believe white is slightly better, but I don’t believe it enough to say “White is slightly better”. I can say “I believe White is slightly better because of X, Y and Z”, but often I’m not certain in my belief. However players about the same level as me, or weaker, will confidently state things in public that I’m totally unsure about. How can this be? I know that they basically don’t understand anything, so why do they behave like they do?

Do I know the best way to study chess? Nope, I have no clue! I believe it’s different for everyone. The only thing I know is that studying one hour a day probably isn’t enough if you want to be World Champion. But for most people, I couldn’t even tell you if studying 2 hours a day is better than studying 6 hours a day. One is more sustainable, and one might lead to burnout. Probably the six hours is better, but it’s not an automatic answer.

Do I know what chess books you should read? I have some opinions, but when people speak like “You MUST read this book”…..well I literally believe that about no books. There are books I like and you can read them if you want, but it won’t kill you if you never look at it.

In CrossFit you see a lot of people online just throw out random advice as though it’s gospel. Many of them are just randos who have no idea what they are talking about. Sometimes they are coaches and have some knowledge, although even then I don’t think they do a great job of realizing that everyone is wildly different.

I think I’m pretty decent at CrossFit, but I basically don’t know anything. I know maybe a few strategy ideas in WODs, but in almost all cases they are athlete dependent. I do know that you probably shouldn’t row too hard in most WODs, but there are definitely lots of exceptions to that!

One thing that a lot of CrossFit affiliates like to preach is this militant anti-sugar mindset. I have sugar sometimes, and I think it’s TOTALLY fine to have sugar in moderation.I will throw up the next time someone acts like I’m going to die because I drink one coke. But who knows, maybe I’ll die of some donut related disease sometime soon and the psycho anti-sugar people will be proven right?

If you are going to travel, do I know exactly what you should do? Not unless you tell me “hey this is a problem can you help me with it?”. Then I can give some advice that might be smart. But if you are just some random traveler and I don’t know much about you, I have no idea what to tell you. I can tell you what was interesting to me, but I’d never presume that my opinion on something was absolutely correct.

Every travel article makes me want to smash my computer. I mean I literally don’t give a crap about almost every major tourist attraction, and that includes the Sagrada Familia, which everyone tells you that you’ll probably die if you don’t go to see it. I’ve been there and I really just don’t care about it at all. It made no impact on me whatsoever, except for “why am I waiting in a line to see a church?”.

Do I know what you should do with your money, or your time, or your love life? I maybe have some opinions, but that’s all they are.

The Internet seems full of “gurus”, who want to give you spiritual, intellectual, or financial advice on anything. Anyone who tweets advice for no reason I figure is either pompous, a charlatan or an idiot.

Now I’m aware I probably do this from time to time, especially in an offhand way with friends. But I will never make a tweet saying “Do this, spend more energy on this, focus more on that, blah blah blah”.

So what am I saying? Just phrase things with more uncertainty. If you want to post some quote for how someone should live their life…be like “hey I read this and it resonated with me”, instead of “You should meditate for 30 minutes every day in order to achieve the maximum inner harmony” or whatever bullshit everyone is peddling.

 

The tiebreaks at the Candidates Tournament are ludicrous, although I’m surprised to admit that it’s not as ludicrous at it seems at first glance.

It’s absurd to determine who will challenge for the World Championship due to Most Wins, or any other tiebreak system in a Round Robin.

The only reasonable way to break a tie in an event of this magnitude is to play a tiebreak match for it.

I could easily end the blog here, and the majority of the chess playing community would agree with me. However it’s not quite as simple as it seems.

What does it mean that there is no tiebreak after tomorrow’s games? It means that these are going to be the most intense classical chess games that you’ve ever seen

Karjakin, Mamedyarov and Caruana are going to be fighting like wild animals in a classical game, because there is no chance for any of them to coast to a tie and aim to win a tiebreak match. This means that the audience is going to be treated to the most dramatic day of chess that we’ve seen since at least 2016. If a tie resulted in a tiebreaker match, you would be likely to see more conservative play among the leaders at almost every point throughout the tournament.

The key point is: By removing any tiebreak match, and instead using a tiebreaker, even if it is a flawed tiebreaker, the classical chess play becomes much more exciting. 

This is a win for fans, but at the same time we are talking about a very serious topic. We are talking about who will go on to challenge Magnus Carlsen for the World Chess Championship. It’s not enough that it’s exciting, but it also has to be both fair and logical. It is fair as all players play by the same rules, but it is not logical. There is no real reason why someone with more wins should qualify over someone who has the same score. There is certainly no logical reason why a Sonnenborn-Berger score should have any effect at all.

Fortunately I have the perfect solution, and one that I believe has been proposed before, but absolutely should be a staple for all future Candidates Tournaments.

The tiebreak should take place before the first round!

The above system is used in some tournaments to determine the draw, such as who gets the extra white and which pairing numbers and etc. But in this case it should be used as the tiebreak.

For example, you could have a one day round robin tournament with a time control of 15+2, or you could even make it a double round robin that takes place over two days. The winner of this event wins on all ties, the second place finisher wins on all ties against lower placed players and etc. In fact with this format, the entire field would effectively start the Candidates a half point behind the winner of the rapid tiebreak tournament.

This means that everyone will be playing catch up from the very start, resulting in a clear cut standing in every round. Whenever there is a tie at the top of the crosstable, you will always know who is ahead based on their performance in the rapid tournament. It’s simple for fans and adds another day or two of exciting chess for everyone to enjoy.

This is a much better system than the current one because:

1. It ensures the classical chess that takes place is maximally exciting, because seven of the eight players will always be clearly behind the leader.
2. It’s fair to all players
3. It’s logical, unlike our current system. The players who win on tiebreaks will have clearly earned the right to their victory.

This is the second most important event in chess and the idea of what to do on a tie needs to be taken more seriously, instead of the lazy solution that is currently being used.