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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
3:18 - Trip to Italy
10:20 - Chess tournaments
15:07 - Streaming
27:11 - Chess strategies
47:37 - King's Indian Defense
1:05:37 - Chess training
1:10:03 - Losing
1:13:22 - Street chess and trash talk
1:18:11 - Passion and study
1:36:03 - Loneliness and depression
2:00:52 - Andrew Tate
2:09:35 - Greatest chess player of all time
2:12:10 - Magnus Carlsen
2:21:20 - Advice for young people
2:23:14 - Chess boxing
2:32:08 - Meaning of life
2:33:13 - Love

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I mean, I've definitely experienced moments where I didn't want to do anything but chess.

I think if you want to be the best at anything you do or any sport, you have to be that level of obsessed.

The following is a conversation with Alexandra and Andrea Botez.

They're sisters, professional chess players, commentators, educators, entertainers, and streamers.

Their channel is called Botez Live on Twitch and YouTube.

A small side note about the currently ongoing controversy in the chess world, where the 19 year old Grandmaster Hans Niemann beat Magnus Carlsen at the Sinkfield Cup.

After this, Magnus, for the first time ever, withdrew from the tournament, implying with a tweet that there may have been cheating or at least something shady going on.

Folks like the Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura fanned the flames of cheating accusations and the internet made a bunch of proposals on how the cheating could have been done, and it ranged from the ridiculous to the hilarious, often both.

Hans himself came out and said that he has cheated before when he was 12 and 16 on random online games to jack up his rating, but he said that he has never cheated in person over the board.

Danny Wrench from Chess.com, who I've spoken with, may make a statement in response to Hans's claims soon.

Folks like Grandmaster Jakob Luge spoke to his experience training Hans Niemann and has said that his memory and intuition were quite brilliant.

So as you see there's a lot of perspectives on this.

Chess Base has a good summary of this saga that I'll link in the description.

Also note that this is so quickly moving that new stuff might come out between me recording this and publishing the episode, but I thought I'd mention this anyway since the episode with the Botas sisters is a conversation about chess and was recorded shortly before the controversy, so we didn't talk about it.

I'm considering having Hans on this podcast and also Magnus back on the podcast and maybe others like Hikaru or folks from chess.com's anti-cheat staff to discuss their really interesting cheating detection algorithms, but I may also just stay out of it.

I find chess to be a beautiful game, and the chess community full of fascinating, brilliant people, and so I'll keep having conversations like these about chess.

My goal with this podcast and in general as a human being is to increase the amount of love in the world.

Sometimes that involves celebrating brilliance and beauty in science, in art, in chess.

Sometimes it involves empathetic conversations with controversial figures that seek to understand, not deride.

Sometimes it involves standing against the internet lynch mob, as the chess based article calls it, to hear the story of a human being who is under attack, even if it means I get attacked in the process as well.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, Here's Alexandra and Andrea Botez.

It was very chaotic because we went out on a whim and we only had our first hotel book.

And then we rented a car and drove around all of the cities and went to like 5 different cities in about a week and a bit.

So I think it was just the variety of seeing so many different places when we're used to being at home all the time.

Yeah, I would say it was the most stressful vacation we've been in in our life And it was a valuable learning lesson because now I know how to be prepared for trips But we lost our bags and I never got him back and like Alex said we didn't know where we'd be sleeping every night and we're just driving through a new city with a giant van in the most narrow streets with and getting in many, many fights with Italian men.

Wasn't it liberating to lose your baggage?

My entire life, I've always had the issue of overpacking.

And I told her before the trip, Andrea, you're gonna pack light, right?

And then I see her stuffing her overweight suitcase.

We both had giant, big extra baggage that we didn't need and I'm actually very glad we lost it because for Venice hauling that around on all the boats and through the tiny streets and there's no Ubers and now it's the first time where I can travel without checking in a bag which I've never done before So now I've learned what it means to pack light because I saw that I could survive off of just my, this sounds very dramatic, but it was really a big learning lesson for me.

The driving must've been crazy because driving in Italy is rough.

I did most of it and it would be really interesting driving through places like Florence or even through the beach areas that were super windy because they're two-way streets that should really only be 1 way.

So you'd be driving this huge van and then another car comes on a cliff and you're just waiting for it to slowly pass.

So it took all of my focus and concentration to drive well in Italy, but it was actually really relaxing because the hardest thing about making a lot of videos online is you're always thinking about it, what's coming next.

And when we were in Italy, it was so chaotic that I did not think about work for a good week and a bit.

I wouldn't recommend it or ever do that again, but.

And we even randomly ran into 2 friends of ours who were in the same city and we just traveled with them for about half of the trip.

Okay, and I see like, cause you were using your hands a lot, you got in, you picked up some of the Italian hand gestures.

I did, we did get yelled at by a lot of Italians.

The old Italian grandmas would come to us after breakfast because we'd leave something on the plate and she'd be like, you could feed an entire village with that.

Tell your friends and we'd be, we'd feel so ashamed.

Yeah, we got cursed out a lot, but it really reminded me of where we grew up and helped bring back those memorabilia.

We're Romanian, but it was like an immigrant neighborhood.

So, you know, same, if you don't finish your plate, that's disrespectful to the people who made the food.

I feel like the carbs thing is too intense.

Yeah, I think very overrated in my opinion.

So I'm actually not supposed to eat gluten because I have an allergy, but I was in Italy and it's gluten galore.

So I was actually eating a lot of it and it was very interesting because I didn't get sick while I was in Italy, but I do while I'm in the US.

So somehow the food was actually maybe more okay for me to digest, which I appreciated, but I didn't like it as much as I thought.

I love cars, but it feels like Vegas when I go there for the food, it's like, if I stay here too long, I'm gonna do things I regret.

And everybody is pushing very large portions and while kind of eating things on you, pasta, pizza, and bread, so delicious.

So yeah, I love it, but I regret everything.

So it's like, I don't wanna go to a place where I'm going to regret everything I do for too long of a time.

Yeah, surprisingly, the people there though are still very fit and everyone stays in good shape, but that's probably because you're walking around all day and you're much more active than in the US.

And they also just know how to moderate food.

I think I've gotten used to the US way of eating.

And I feel in the US, food advertisements are also much more in your face and you're more often reminded of junk food than we were in Italy.

So even though we were eating less healthy things, I think we were getting cravings and being pushed towards junk food less often.

All right, I gotta ask you a hard question.

So the romance languages, so I think French is up there as like number 1.

Not Italian, but we studied French and Spanish in school.

I think Romanian, which is- And Romanian.

I feel like every country calls their language a romance language.

No, but it's Romanian, French, Spanish, Portuguese.

And I think there was 1 more that was like this dialect, but those are considered the romance languages.

I think we got yelled at so much in Italian that it's not gonna be a love affair.

It's on the bottom of the list because people did not use it nicely to us.

But I always really liked how French sounds.

I think something about it where maybe Spanish actually sounds nicer to the ears, but French has more character and it feels more sultry.

I feel like French, in France, I feel like I'm always being judged.

Which is why, you know, yeah, I long to belong to that.

Actually, 1 thing we did on our Italian trip is we just picked up British accents for the entire trip for fun.

And we forgot we were doing them to the point where we talked to British people and they'd ask us, why are you talking like that?

People, like, you know, I don't know if they felt the same way about us, but it was more of, you know, the confidence.

When did you first, let's say when did you first fall in love with chess?

So we both started playing when we were pretty young, around 6 years old, that's when our dad taught us.

And I enjoyed playing chess because I had good results early on, but a lot of it was being pushed from my dad to play chess.

And I only really started loving it when we moved from Canada and we started moving a lot and chess was the 1 stable thing that I had.

And it was also where all my friends were.

So it was kind of that foundational thing for me.

And that's when I started studying chess very intensely.

And when I started putting in the hours out of my own will and not because I was being pushed by my dad.

And I even wanted to take time off college to just focus on chess.

It was when I was doing it for myself that I started getting my best results.

I would spend summer vacation studying for tournaments and my mom would come and say, you need to make friends, go leave the house.

And I'd be like, no, I need to play chess.

Yeah, my experience with loving in high school is very opposite from Alex's, but right, my sister was playing and my dad taught me when I was

Andrea was cool in high school, unlike me.

I'd say more balanced and I was interested in other hobbies.

In my childhood, if I ever really did love chess, there's certainly moments about like traveling and being together with my family and spending those moments together, but those are more the social and the experiences.

But funny enough, I think my happiest moment where I really played the game for my own enjoyment was probably my most recent tournament, because this was after, obviously, we've been streaming and I'm no longer in high school, but when I was in school, I was always playing for college and for the results, trying to build a resume.

So I was too stressed out about the pressure to really enjoy the game.

Whereas when I just played my first tournament, so it was like after like a 2 year break because of the pandemic, And it was also all live on Twitch, so there was some pressure, but it was the first time that like, I was really eager to study for the game, sitting and focusing since we've been streaming and not getting distracted by something else in years, like I said.

And the tournament experience, I hit my highest rating and it was my best tournament ever.

And I think most of that is cause it came from my own enjoyment.

Cause I think you like did really well, right?

The tournament, Well, of course, I think the results came from enjoying the tournament.

Because I would be in high school, like studying double, triple the amount of time, like 6 hours every day compared to this tournament.

And for 3 years, I wouldn't be able to pass 1 rating.

Whereas in this 1 tournament, I passed it by like 70 points without even any preparation.

So it was, I think, as soon as you stop worrying about the competitions, when the games get much better.

Usually when you reach 2000 you're considered an expert which is the rating Andrea was going for.

Okay, expert is a technical term or that's like

It's more of a colloquial term where if somebody's around a 2000 and you're playing them in a tournament they won't have the actual title next to their name, but you say, I'm playing an expert.

What about like the more official things like master?

Does that have to do with rating or something else?

Yeah, so national master in the US is when you're 2200.

International master is based off of a different system, the FIDE system, which is international.

To be an international master, it's 2,400 and you have to have 3 international master norms.

Yeah, I think Magnus said he's a 28, 6 something.

But see, the thing is, I think what he meant is that's a decent rating because it accurately captures his actual level.

So it's not overinflated or underinflated and so on.

And so the discussion there was how do you get to, can a human being get to

And then he says, because my current rating is pretty decent, and representing my skill level, it's gonna be a long road to actually get there.

Because it's like, so you have to beat people your same level, that's how the number increases.

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Botez Sisters: Chess, Streaming, and Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #319