One Of The Top Chess Players Talks Computers & Options Trading

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Joe Weisenthal (0:25)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:33)

So Tracy, before we got on here, you were joking that today's episode, if we wanted, we could probably go for three hours, or at least I could.

Tracy Alloway (0:45)

Yeah, I was joking about that, and I'm laughing right now because I think I can sense your excitement from thousands and thousands of miles away from New York.

Joe Weisenthal (0:56)

Yeah, I'm not going to deny that I'm extremely excited about today's episode. And if we didn't have time constraints, we could probably go a long time. But I really think our guest today is right in the sweet spot of some of the biggest themes that we've covered on this podcast in all the time that we've done it.

Tracy Alloway (1:15)

Wait, so who is it and why do you think that?

Joe Weisenthal (1:19)

Oh, so we're not, we're just going to completely dispense with all the preamble and jump straight into the guest and just get right into it.

Tracy Alloway (1:26)

Well, I have a major preamble that I want to give before we get to the guest, but why don't you say who it is? Because I know that you want to talk about him.

Joe Weisenthal (1:34)

Okay, I'm very excited. Our guest today is maybe the first sort of legit celebrity that we've had on the Odd Lots podcast. His name is Hikaru Nakamura. He is one of the top chess players in the entire world. Right now, he's rated around number seven. I believe he was a prodigy. He earned his... He became a Grand Master at age 10, if Wikipedia is correct.

Oh, he's giving me a face. I don't know if that's completely accurate, but very young.

And in addition to being a chess phenom, he also does other stuff like trading options and at times play poker competitively. So he's just a completely sweet spot, Odd Lots guest here.

Tracy Alloway (2:18)

All right, and obviously we've had a lot of episodes about trading and investing. We've also had episodes in the past about chess and poker. So I can see how you would be very, very enthusiastic about this one. Here is my major preamble for you, Joe.

I know absolutely nothing about chess. In fact, I find chess extremely frustrating because whenever I play with my husband, he doesn't let me win ever. In fact, he uses that, what's that thing where you win in like two moves?

Joe Weisenthal (2:49)

This is so cringe, so cringe. The scholars mate.

Tracy Alloway (2:53)

Well, whatever it is, he's done it to me several times now and I fall for it every single time.

So everyone is just gonna have to bear with me asking very, very basic questions about chess. But I actually read on Hikaru's Wikipedia page as well that he has an uncommon enthusiasm for chess and is known for being far more approachable than other players of his abilities. So I'm sure he's gonna humor me, right?

Joe Weisenthal (3:21)

Well, I think that sounds like an ideal guest, so I say we should just get started. Hikaru, welcome to the show.

Hikaru Nakamura (3:37)

It's good to be here, Joe.

Joe Weisenthal (3:39)

So, you were making a face, I said something about when you achieved Grand Master status. When did you become a Grand Master? And I think it said you got there faster than Bobby Fisher did, is that right?

Hikaru Nakamura (3:50)

Yeah, so when you referred to being 10 years old, that's when I became the youngest master. That's a slightly lower ranking. But at the time at least, they had, they kept that record in the Guinness Book of World Records. So when I was very young, like I was trying to get to that level, and so that was important. But I became a grandmaster when I was 15 years old.

I was about a month and a half younger than Bobby Fischer, so that made me the youngest American grandmaster in the world at the time.

Joe Weisenthal (4:15)

I guess that's impressive.

When did you, so, you know, it's always sort of an interesting question with sort of young prodigies, phenoms. What was the moment early on where someone or you recognized that you were on a different level than other people who were learning at the same time?