Laid down the diatomaceous earth around the perimeter.

Are you on chess.com though or the other one, they have a different lower rating system I think, lichess.com I think the latter might even be non profit but I still used chess.com because I was already there when I learned that.

It's not middling, it's an early-advanced rating. For perspective, an Elo differential of 400 implies 10:1 win:loss odds.

1650+ is about the top 40% of chess.com players (say 5%, not all humans).

Pluck a random off the street and your 800 will beat 19 out of 20.

It's okay bro, I've been practicing getting better at chess for like 10 years now and I'm still 1100. Chess is fucking hard.

"I keep losing because this game is TOO SPUPID"

Oh you can cheat at chess.com. People use engines to suss out the best moves and plug them into their games. Chess.com spots many, but not all of them, you will get notices after the fact that your rating has been changed upwards because they detected them cheating.

It's quite common.

If it's real, it's the first tweet by him I've seen that's actually funny. Perfectly leans into the absurdity of that position.

I mean, he could very easily do both of those things. Chess teams are a thing, and they need sponsors to be able to attend tournaments - I suppose that counts as "managing" a team. Chess coaches are also a thing, and even some of the worst novice players have seen massive improvement in their chess game after being paired up with famous chess streamers, but without him putting in the actual effort to absorb the information, he'll never get any better.

When all else fails, he could create an account and pay some broke ass GM to smurf for him. Nobody gets rich off of playing chess for a living, so him paying them to improve his elo and then him taking all the credit publicly would be par for the course and highly effective. Nobody is really going to call him out on that because he has a cult of personality surrounding him that built him up to be a genius. I mean, if you ask him to explain why he made a certain move in a high level game, the illusion would fall apart, but the media wouldn't dare hold his feet to the fire like that.

Generally random factors allow players with less skill to win. I think about that with games a lot.

It's one of the (many) reasons I don't really like DND very much. Huge random factor. You can make excellent tactical decisions and lose. You can be an absolute baffoon and triumph.

Some randomness is okay but not like that.

Yes, because of his financial success, he considers himself a genius—which he very obviously never was. This is a common trait among billionaires. Many of them are psychopaths who have amassed their wealth through utter unscrupulousness, irresponsibility in the form of an absurd willingness to take risks, and sheer luck.

In the case of Musk, Thiel, and various others, that stroke of luck was PayPal. That company was so successful that it made all of its investors immeasurably rich—it was more a matter of chance that PayPal succeeded, and everything that followed really wasn’t all that difficult because that kind of money cannot lose anymore no matter how ridiculous stupid someone might be.

That’s precisely the problem: We only hear about the people who bet everything on one card and won—they’re portrayed as geniuses, which they never were. We never hear anything about all those who failed miserably—and that’s the vast majority.

Billionaires aren’t geniuses or even above-average in intelligence. Their financial success has, in the rarest of cases, anything to do with intelligence.