Man i hope I didn't self-contradict myself in that post. What would I do? Just consider all my thoughts a black hole I think...

Great.

I'm not too confident that I'll win or that it'll be enough to get a hot dog.

Man, it feels like everybody is making a living doing some really niche things. You guys should be life coaching us working class peasants (for big money, of course!)

We probably need a breakout thread for chess, poker and esports.

honestly been trying to get back into app development last two years but the industry is so dead right now that the jobs that show you the amount of applicants usually have 500+ applicants and i'm going up against people who were at facebook the last 5 years before getting laid off whereas i was spending that time traveling and betting on which korean kid was better at clicking the mouse really fast so it's a tough nut to crack

nor that i'm no longer traveling the globe and capable of doing a regular 9-5 again, I would 100% go back to tech world in a heartbeat over grinding $100 limits and repeatedly seeking out fresh accounts after losing or getting limited on the existing ones

i brought it up strictly to point out that this is a field in which i have to be intimately familiar with, otherwise i can't afford to buy groceries and am thus not speculating in the slightest here

i'm not being an ill informed jackass who decides to ask chatgpt and when that doesn't know decide to refute reality which is known by someone who is a genuine expert in this field because when you are a "trans ally" that requires you to lie and ignore basic facts because facts and reality are not essential, being an ally is and when being an "ally" leads to some difficult realities, it's easier to wash them away with nonsense instead of accepting that yes, allowing transfemales to compete as women will push out women and make them an afterthought

Sure, I don't know anything about Esports so I looked at a Reddit thread full of esporters where the overwhelming consensus is that you are wrong. GPT also thinks you are wrong. Your personal anecdotes and cherry picked facts don't prove your point. That's not how research works.

I did indeed like my own post. I don't usually use the new skin with likes so I was wondering if that was possible and then it was so much fun I liked all the posts. It's always amusing to see terrible comments on YouTube videos with one like, knowing the person who posted it is the one that liked it. In this case, however, the likes are justified

If you could field a competitive female team in mainstream esports, someone would've done it by now.

Admittedly, I only watch Starcraft and Dota2.

Esports and chess are both activities where it's probably more of a social barrier than a physical one. I don't know if that makes it better or worse. It seems like you should be leaving it up entirely to the organizers of the female leagues, who will hopefully reach out to their current participants for input.

LOL at looking to reddit for an unbiased take on the transgender movement.

Do you conduct all of your research on the affects and consequences of cobalt mining at a Tesla investor conference, by chance?

Looking at a list of women's FIDE rankings, it's interesting that while I consume a decent amount of chess content, I don't actually know who any of these women are whereas if i look at a list of the top rankings overall I've heard of most of them.

But also interesting is that the top woman in the world, Yifan Hou, is just a total outlier with a FIDE ranking of 2632 while the next woman is at 2554. By comparison, Carlson is at 2830, the #2 in the world Fabiano is at 2804 and if you go all the way down to #10, Anish Giri is at 2749 which is about the same gap as between the #1 and #2 women.

What a bizarre thing to get so emotional about, who cares who’s likening whatever post.

ELO ratings are basically exponential so a gap of 100 points means more the higher the rating is. The gap between a 2750 and an 2850 is much larger (in the sense of how "hard" that 100 points was to attain) than the gap between a 2250 and a 2350. At least I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

it's been attempted, the most famous being a low level russian lol league and the results were so embarassing the league had to step in and physically remove them because the matches were so lopsided

mind you none of the people in the league were even in the top thousand best in the world, this is the minor leagues of esports and it was that bad - not a single person playing in this league was ever going to sniff being on a roster of the top leagues and competing in worlds - the difference between men and women in esports is just as large of a gap as it is in traditional sports

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaevictis_Esports

greg's an idiot and doesn't understand that when you need to squint your eyes and filter out facts until you find something that basically agrees with your general position then perhaps your position needs revisiting

this is the problem with these threads

they can't be honest - they can't just say "you know what I don't know the first thing about this" instead they'll spend 5 minutes on reddit and chatgpt and assume they now undestand it more than someone who bets on it for a living

they also are incapable of admitting facts, they can't just say "yes trans woman will dominate women's leagues" but instead lie and pretend like that isn't actually happening nor that it will happen

and when pressed to it with a monetary value on it, they suddenly agree that yes a transwoman is indeed going to be the #1 ranked female chess player within the next few years - all while previously arguing in bad faith that wouldn't happen

you guys lack substance, you have no grounds to stand upon and just cling to this false moral superiority

just be honest, say "yes trans woman are going to absolutely crush and dominate women's sports and I'm ok with that" - just say it, and we can move on and carry on this conversation like adults

stop this disgusting ratfaced lying

Those with 20,000 posts and no "likes"?

Yeah, I had heard about the League of Legends girl power group, which is why I specified "competitive team" in there.

There's nothing physically stopping a girl from being competitive at video games or chess, though. That's why I say it's a social barrier instead of a physical one, and why it should be entirely up to the female-only leagues to decide if they want to invite men into their private club or not. We're a long way off from legislators adding transgenderism to the list of protected classes/conditions.

Is the chess world like most sports in that anyone can join the "mens" league, but a women's league was set up to promote female participation? If so, then just honor that. Let them men in skirts compete in the main league. Or let them ask permission from the people running the female show and abide by their decision.

ELO ratings are not comparable between two different groups. You might as well be comparing the ratings of a MLB team against a EPL team.

They kinda are though. If you put all online chess players into 2 groups, and one group plays exclusively on chess.com and the other plays exclusively on lichess, the rating a given player converges to will be the same regardless of which group they are in. I don't think it even matters if you put the top 50% of players on chess.com and the bottom 50% on lichess (rather than selecting the groups at random), as the rating is relative to the competition.

In any group, someone is going to be the best and someone the worst. You gain/lose points based on the rating of who you win/lose against. Eventually, the best players in a group will have high ratings. Maybe as high as someone who is the best in a much more advanced group. (This mostly applies if the groups are closed.) You cannot take an absolute ELO rating and use it to compare participants in two different groups. You may know subjectively that the groups are equivalent and compare that way. But with out knowing anything else other than the raw number, all you know is how they rank in the group.

Ok, yes, fair point.

they arent different groups, the women play against the men all the time. a 2100 woman is equal to a 2100 man

Actually, I think while you're correct as far as comparing rating x from group 1 to rating x from group 2, it's still valid to compare the difference between the #1 and #2 player from group 1 against the difference between the #1 and #2 player from group 2, which is what Luckbox was doing. However, Luckbox erroneously assumed that a 100 point difference between 2550 and 2650 is the same as a 100 point difference between 2750 and 2850, which it isn't.

Rick, my main position on this is that all your posts on the subject resemble the thought process I would expect from someone who is transphobic. As a result I find it hard to accept anything that you claim at face value because I think it is biased by transphobia.

Did you read the comments that the trans chess player posted on twitter?Those are the types of people that I associate your views with. It is certainly possible that you are correct on some points that I am dismissing out of hand. Because of my biases against people whose views I regard as transphobic, I tend to ignore any claims they make regarding transfolk.

Inso0, I will take the consensus opinion regarding the impact of trans women in women's Esports from the Esports board on Reddit over the personal opinion of someone whose views I consider transphobic

I have to admit, I do find the self-liking rather odd. Seems like the conversational equivalent would be after you finished speaking, congratulating yourself out loud on a point well made.

What is the "meat and potatoes"? A trans woman becoming the first ever trans WIM is a complete nothing burger. Great for her. Happy for her. If you want to make a bunch of hypobolic - err "rhetorical" - screaching about trans women about to imminently take over women's chess that's on you, but I wouldn't try to frame it as us 100% agreeing.

yeah there was a noted guy who was in prison in the usa and by signing up various prisoners to get elo ratings and then repeatedly beating them and submitting the match results managed to gamify his way up to an absurdly high rank iirc

but those women do sometimes compete in the open events against men so their elo, while somewhat inflated from playing against other women a high percentage of time, is not going to be too inflated

and yes, to answer your question insoo, there are no "men's only leagues" in pretty much anything, it's always open

there's no rules about women playing in the nfl, mlb, nba, nhl (tampa bay had a female goalie who for a few years who played some exhibition games and in the event of 2-3 other goalies all getting hurt at the same time would have ended up making an actual nhl start - she was good enough to be in the "break glass in case of emergency" situation but still not quite good enough to make the squad outright - and they definitely had every incentive in the world to play her and certainly would have let her play a meaningless game at the end of the season had they not been worried it'd be an embarassment),

nor are there rules against women competing against men in esports or chess

the creation of women's only leagues was to allow them the chance to compete because they otherwise are unable to do so - whether it be running, throwing a ball, thinking 10 steps ahead of what moving your pawn will mean, or just clicking a mouse - at the very top levels they are not competive

this is not to say women are bad at esports or chess, if you take the general population of chess players, women only have a 10 point elo disadvantage vs men, which is quite insignificant at that level - likewise, there are plenty of female streamers who are good enough to play extremely well against the general population they are facing

likewise, if i were to play tennis against serena williams, she would absolutely toast me

it's only when you get into the highest levels of competition where little tiny things like having abnormally large hands and feet make a huge difference then the gap between men and women becomes incredible


going back to scarlett, for years i thought she was a cisgender woman, nobody ever mentions that she's trans, you'll notice in that new yorker article, they not once mention she's trans

i only learned about it when i was researching her for an upcoming match in the process came across groups complaining that she was dominating women's only competitions

here's the thing, it's not the men who care about that, it's the women who dislike scarlett

scarlett was competing in 100k contests and winning them and that same week entering women's only contests where the winner gets $250

from her perspective, she was going to play every day no matter what in order to train and practice, so why not train and practice where she can make $250 that day instead of playing random people where she earns nothing

scarlett won every single women's event she played in, a span of over 2 years where she won everything

it wasn't until there was a female only tournament in which you needed to be an active university student in order to play that the streak of consecutive women's events starcraft events was broken because she was not allowed to enter as she wasn't a college student

they mostly don't offer women's only events now strictly because otherwise scarlett would just win it anyway


i can't stress this enough, the men and general fans do not care about any of this, they welcome scarlett with open arms, she is one of the most popular players who has a unique style which changed the way people played as zerg - a true pioneer in playing as that race

nobody cared about her winning those tiny female only events that maybe an audience of 127 watched live

the people who were upset with scarlett were the cisgender women, not the men, not the fans, but the other women who were trying to hard to make a genuine run at being a professional starcraft player and were always in a position of starting the day competing for 2nd place

scarlett playing in female only events killed female only events and why they largely don't exist anymore



the same thing will happen in chess, if any of those guys in the top 100 come out as trans and start competing in the women's only events and sweeping them like scarlett did, it'll undermine the integrity of it all and at some point the sponsors will stop sponsoring them because nothing good will come from hosting it and we'll go back to only having open events for all genders