EP 502: GM Mauricio Flores Rios on Finding Lessons in Olympiad Games 

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Ben Johnson (1:19)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Perpetual Chess. We have a return guest joining the show in one minute. Grandmaster Mauricio Flores Rios.

We talk about the Chess Olympiad. He played many times representing his native Chile, and he's been covering it on his fantastic YouTube channel. But we also talk about his website, ChessMind AI, and about how AI is impacting chess and the world. Speaking of which, I wanted to thank our sponsors for this show, Claude AI. So you actually hear Mauricio and I complain later in the interview about all the people vibe coding their own websites and then sending auto-generated emails about them to Mauricio and I, for example. But of course, all of these websites are not bad. Some of them are really cool. And in fact, I wanted to give a shout out to friend of the pod, Chris Wainscott, longtime listener and Patreon sub, who built a website using Claude code called guessthemove.net. Now, guessthemove.net, if you've listened to this pod a bunch, you know the value of solitaire chess. You've heard people like Grandmaster Alex Fishbein and Grandmaster Grigory Khaydanov talk about that. Well, Chris wanted a website. He found something that he wanted to exist and it didn't exist in the form he wanted. So he used Claude code to build it. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. You can also use it for deep research about whatever topic you're interested in. You can feed it PGNs and have it look for certain opening moves or whatever you might want to do chess wise. You can have it design spreadsheets for you, tracking whatever data you want to, whether it's in a professional or a household finance endeavor.

So for problems worth solving, get started with Claude at ClaudeAI slash Chess. If you're ready to have an AI agent that can tackle real work, try ClaudeAI slash Chess. Without further ado, here's a great interview with Grandmaster Mauricio Flores Rios talking about the own coding that he's doing along with Chess Improvement, the Olympiad, the list goes on. Here it is.

We are honored to be joined by a third time guest. He is a Chilean-born, Seattle-based, renowned author and Grandmaster, five-time member of the Chilean National Team. He has an Applied Mathematics Ph.D. and he is the author of two fantastic books, the classic Chess Structures and more recently, Chess Imbalances, a Grandmaster Guide. He's been on the podcast discussing those books, definitely instructive interviews worth checking out, episodes 109 and 434 He's also the founder of a new learning platform called ChessMind AI that aims to help your game. And he's been posting on his great YouTube channel, covering events like the Chess Olympiad, which we're going to discuss in detail and providing instructional content. And he also contributes to Chess Reads, discussing our mutual love for chess books. And I am pleased as always to welcome back to the program, Grandmaster Mauricio Flores Rios. Welcome Mauricio.

Mauricio Flores Rios (4:30)

Hi. Thank you for having me.

Ben Johnson (4:32)

Yeah, it's great to chat again. And as I was telling you, right before we recorded, I just caught up on all your Olympiad videos and they're so good, they're so instructive. So we'll be discussing that in detail in time. But thanks for all that work.