Joseph: [00:00:00] How'd it first come online? And how does that game of chess lure you to be a pro? Well,
Nic: I was already very enthusiastic.
Nic: Welcome to the Hey, Good Game podcast, where we chat with the creators of your favorite games that you secretly play in the cracks.
Joseph: Aaron, we just had a great conversation about chess of all things. I mean, I played when I was in. fourth grade. And I love to hear the kind of giggling and the happiness between these two brothers when they were talking chess.
Aaron: Yeah. So today we're talking to Trifon and Nick Gabriel. Trifon also known as Kings Crusher. Trifon started the site chessworld. net. He sometimes gets some help from his brother, Nick. So Nick joined us for today's conversation. But I think the biggest takeaway I had from the conversation is Trefon loves to [00:01:00] play chess and he's built his entire life and mini empire, if you will, around it.
Aaron: He's got chessworld. net. He's got some Udemy courses. He's got YouTube channel. And for 20 years now, basically like this is his full time gig and he's doing what he loves. And how cool is that? Joseph, what were, what were some of your takeaways? Yeah,
Joseph: the, the joy in that Nick kind of asked him in a couple moments about whether it didn't seem like Trifon was ready to reflect on how, how life was going more just that he really likes playing chess.
Joseph: And I thought it was a really interesting moment when he talked about paying for servers, being paying in advance is a much better idea than paying per second. So I really enjoyed the conversation, and I look forward to hearing back from y'all listeners about what stood out to you. [00:02:00] So here's the stories.
Joseph: I'm Joseph Reuter, and we're here with my co host Aaron Cardell of Hey. gg. We're excited to speak with Nick. And Trifon of, well he's also known as King's Crusher. We'll get into that in a little bit. He runs a YouTube channel of the same name, approaching 64 million views. It's full of hours of chess goodies and tips.
Joseph: And a recent video exceeded 11 hours of edutainment. We'll get into some of that. And Trifon and Nick are creators of Chessworld. net. It's early two thousands, and it's a free to play chess site where you can play at your own pace. It's less lightning round, more friendly and supportive community than maybe the others that have come along.
Joseph: And the site features a wide varieties of chess modes and learning content for those who pursue bettering their chess [00:03:00] skills. So welcome Nick and Trefon. Thanks guys.
Crusher: We're thrilled you're here. Triff was really the creator. What I do is he calls upon me to clear up the occasional disaster, occasional technical support, some sequel, and a bit of, you know, a bit of front end based stuff every now and then.
Crusher: But he's the driver, he's the, he's the man who created it. Yeah,
Joseph: that's wonderful. And where do we find you guys today? Well, we're
Crusher: in London at the moment, North London, Hertfordshire. It's a sunny day, a bit windy. Storm, apparently last night, it's left us intact. Good.
Joseph: Good. Well, it's been negatives here in Minneapolis for a couple of weeks and it's like 20 Fahrenheit today and it's lovely.
Joseph: So sun's out and we've got that in common. So you were sharing just a little bit, one of you guys drives, one of you guys codes. Aaron and I know a little bit about that. Good instigation and coding. [00:04:00] What are your favorite games to play these days?
Nic: Mainly is there a choice? Mainly chess. Mainly chess, really.
Nic: Mainly as in absolutely, totally, and completely.
Crusher: Me, I don't know. I had an interesting experience when I was in my late teens, when I started playing, a video game, which I got obsessed. I looked down and started playing a video game. it was on a BBC micro. And then I looked up and two years had gone by.
Crusher: So I tend to try to steer away from games
Nic: because Oh, Defender, Planetoid. Planetoid, Defender. Oh, yes. But also we used to play slot racers on the Atari 100. Oh, yeah. That was quite obsessive. Yeah. We have many fights slot races was the Atari 100 days were really good days. Do you remember those days guys?
Nic: Sorry, 100. We had the, cartridges and that was good. God. Yeah. There were some great games, but the BBC micro was very good for our education in computing. Wasn't that? We learned how to program, not just basic, but a similar, had a similar, quite easy to learn how to [00:05:00] program with the BBC micro. It was good.
Nic: That was part of an educational shift, wasn't it, by the BBC to sponsor the computer? Yeah, we were lucky
Crusher: because they, they kind of wanted to make it a national thing. So they kind of provided it to schools and, and we got one and, yeah, that was
Nic: a good intro. Yeah, because you know, my site is still classic ASP.
Nic: I didn't go to NET. So classic ASP resembles PPC basically a bit, you know, if thens and everything, a lot of basic constructs. It's basically like, yeah, it's not such a, you know, high tech language. Like what's those high tech ones though? Rust. Rust. Yes. Rust hieroglyphics. or APL.
Crusher: No, BBC was good.
Crusher: Certainly taught me how to program because you discover on a BBC that as soon as you try and write a structured program, you run out of memory almost entirely.
So
Nic: it was good. Well, mode two or something, you just got 7k or something from the 2k left. You're just going into mode two. But people were very resourceful back then because elites was written.
Nic: They rewrite the [00:06:00] graphics mode, so it took less memory. That's right. Phenomenal. Brabham and Bell, they did a really good job of elite. That was one of the. Good games on BBC.
Crusher: Yeah. Even grabbing the odd port as a useful bite of storage every now and then. Yeah. The way to optimize code. It's,
Nic: it's shifted, hasn't it?
Nic: Program. It's more about readability now, but then it was like squeezing every ounce of resource from the machine. Well,
Joseph: I, I'm only a good programmer of chat. GPT is involved. So one step past that.
Crusher: The new year of programming, it's
Nic: going to be prompt that has, has become super good recently. I've been doing some GBT on some SQL queries.
Nic: I was amazed. I showed Nick just a sanity check. Is this really good? I think Nick thought it was quite good. The new GPTs, I think they're upping their game on the SQL. Yeah, for example, I asked her
Crusher: to write a, huge saturation luminance calculator in Transact SQL version 2008 and it did it. I mean, two edge cases, but it did it.
Joseph: If we go [00:07:00] back, you're working through the BBC micro. How do you chart a path from that process? Learning a code and play. To starting well, to being known as King's crusher.
Nic: Well, that's quite a big path. So computing was a hobby at that point. And I wanted to, my major was in computer science at Brunel university.
Nic: that was computing in business though. It had a business element to it as well. But that university degree, they didn't really teach classic programming, it was more like functional programming and quite a lot of interesting concepts. But yeah, so that didn't really help too much. It was basically my BBC background really helped for creating Chessworld, more normal programming.
Nic: And I did start off with an IT consultancy doing accountancy software. And that taught me, I don't really want to do these invoices. I was really bored. And there were quite a lot. I also learned my first lesson about company structure, that if the company is consisted of people that went to uni together, [00:08:00] like three or four, they're going to treat the rest of the people like slaves.
Nic: And I was recruited with this other person. It's like we're in Competition for which ones get rid of. Thankfully I was gotten rid of cause I, I didn't really like it anyway, doing accounting yet. So I realized there's something about what I program, actually, if I'm interested in what I program, I think I do more of an effort anyway.
Nic: So I then worked for Dexian for a while. This in Hamilton is this, racking the it department of Dexian. That was quite interesting. I did quotation software for salesman. Then I worked for UBS and I found another structure where there were very powerful people like fund managers and traders are doing like trading software for a while with Visual Basic and then there was a series of like mergers and transitions and on the latest one it was a kind of merger which they call a takeover.
Nic: Sorry, it was kind of a takeover, they call them. And I ended up having this opportunity to leave with some money behind me. And I thought, [00:09:00] instead of joining another sort of IT and finance, what about if I You know, Nick told me one day I could actually do a correspondence site because he basically alluded to the idea I could store a chess game position in a database and immediately from that you can visualize that actually that's ideal for correspondence style chess so I could use all the SQL skills I have for trade software and generally I've always been really good at SQL from Brunel they did have a large number of you you know, lectures and training on SQL with Oracle at Brunel.
Nic: So I did have good SQL skills. I'm next better though SQL. And he persuaded me, you know, I could actually create, you know, a chess server, because we can store all the positions. And that's fundamentally chess world is not real time, it's correspondence. So you could have 100 opponents all around the world, and it stores the position.
Nic: So when you re log in, you can you know, play those games and just have email notification, you know, [00:10:00] asynchronous, you know, have email notification, move that your opponents get notified. And then, you know, all the different time limits and it's sort of built up from that, then different tournament formats, like all playable tournaments, knockouts, even, you know, pyramid structure tournament.
Nic: And yeah, just built from that. It's, you know, basically, you know, SQL skills, you know, behind chess, but it's got a powerful, database. One of the issues in the early times, some providers, but I got kicked off one provider, too much activity. I had to like move providers, had another provider, which was going to take us off the network and charge an incredibly monthly fee just to go to the, what was that end of transition fee?
Nic: Yeah. So we had to move to escape with Nick's help. We managed to export the key databases and get them onto Microsoft's cloud. And that's actually worked out much cheaper than their proposition for kind of cloud. version. So it's actually on Azure at the moment, the back ends on Azure. So, [00:11:00] and if you schedule an advance, allocate in advance, you get a much lower cost.
Nic: I think one of the early mistakes was paying per second. That's not a good idea. It's good to pay. Yeah. Don't pay. Don't pay. If it's a zoo, I think maybe it's different for the other kinds of trends. But yeah, I sort of. By and advance, you know, for the SQL server and you kind of, you,
Crusher: you have one, two dedicated machines.
Crusher: Now it seems to work out that it's much cheaper to have a dedicated machine where possible rather than try and scale up because you don't get the huge spikes, you get, you know, more and even flow. So with that,
Nic: yeah, it works out better. The advantage of that cloud thing is this can update that you can always get the latest SQL server now because they update the server bit.
Nic: So that's cool. And it seems to, you know, get maybe sometimes faster and faster. But also now if there's any, any timeouts got this interesting error log, if there's any timeouts can even use GPT now to say, look, can you want [00:12:00] this and it can. So I'm very actually, I feel fundamentally very optimistic that yeah.
Nic: A lot of little improvements can be made just with, you know, GPT this year, maybe even brand new features like chess quiz could be on the horizon because I like quizzes on TV. Why not, you know, chess quiz section, if it will create their own quizzes and stuff and, you know, a lot of potential to improve the site for sure.
Nic: So you've got
Joseph: this coding dynamic happening and you were interested in chess from an early like experiences. Talk to me about, how did it first come online? Because you're early 2000s, right? Yes. Yeah, how did it first come online? And how does that game of chess lure you to be a pro?
Nic: Well, I was already very enthusiastic.
Nic: I mean, it was both computing and programming at an early age, about like seven, I was experimenting in both. And in fact, the old headmaster, you know, Robin Howard got me to try and do something for, for the school with that [00:13:00] was basic and assembler and some sort of database thing for the school. So I was always interested.
Nic: I was like one of the strongest in the school at Norfolk house. And I took up chess again. I, there was a period I actually gave up chess after losing badly in the tournament. I was crying and I gave up for a few years, came back into chess, ended up winning the Lloyd's bank sponsored national under 18 in 1989.
Nic: So I beat a few people, much higher rated. So I've That was cool. And I basically got a FIDE rating over 2200 around 1992, which qualified me. I'm actually a candidate master because of that. If ever you go over 2200, you become a candidate master. If you go over 2300, it's FIDE master to become an IM you need Norms as well as rating and GM is even harder, but I've got the basic qualification you can get in chess, candidate master, because I was good as a, as a junior, you know, I won this junior tournament, this national junior tournament in 1999, that was a [00:14:00] glorious day.
Nic: You know, John Nunn awarded me my thing. He's like this PhD mathematician and grandmaster. It's a glorious day. All these girls that came, it was a fantastic day. That was one of my highlight days, but anyway, yeah. So when I started the site, yeah, I. Yeah, I was very interested from the chess angle. It's less, I saw some other sites, they're a bit more techie focused, but I really like the chess and I wanted to have things like annotated games, puzzles, things like that, which a lot of sites didn't even have because I was interested in chess in itself as well.
Nic: And trying to get people to, you know, chat about games and stuff. That was also why I started the YouTube channel because there was a certain bit of frustration, even though people were playing. a lot. People weren't chatting about games. So the YouTube channel in parallel, I found not only that was good marketing for chess world, but I got people, you know, chatting about games and I discovered also I could do live commentary, which is like effortless content.
Nic: I just talk about what moves I want to fans. People seem to like that as well. So at some point I was reaching rank 10 [00:15:00] in the YouTube chess channels at some point, but now it's like fiercely competitive. I dropped that was a long time ago. And. Yeah, I noticed also, we noticed that some people were starting to create courses when we were looking at our IT videos.
Nic: And I thought, hang on, Udemy, why don't I create a chess course at Udemy? So the last three years, I've actually been creating some chess courses at Udemy, which has been actually better than more satisfying than YouTube in many ways as well. Because YouTube seems to be optimized for clickbait and grabbing attention.
Nic: I'm not really like that. I like to when I annotate a game, I like to get all the fine little nerdy details because I know that I'll need that if I ever want to beat people strong online or I need to be, you know, the nerd, not the entertainer. So Udemy sort of suits me better that I can try and improve my chess while creating courses.
Nic: But also on Udemy, you can have this bonus that you can link back to the site as well. So a bit of promotion as well for Chessworld, not just [00:16:00] YouTube, but also Udemy, a bit of promotion. When
Joseph: there's a taxonomy for like a pedagogy assist there, where the learning management system helps you chunk things together and the learner can pause in a different way than YouTube, right?
Joseph: It's Much more stream of consciousness and whatever the algorithm puts in front of you, is that part of the success there or your enjoyment?
Nic: Well, I don't like having to package and polish and put thumbnails and catchy titles and all of that. I just like the. crunching through games, looking at all the details, and then just look, that's the video for that game.
Nic: Then go on to the next game and try and do a few master games a day. So I, it's a way of fast tracking my, my knowledge in detail of, of games. I'm currently looking at Sultan Khan, Mir Sultan Khan, this guy that came from India was his absolute sensation. And he won three British championships, did Olympiad, even beat Kemperberger.
Nic: So I, I actually love that part of the day. Part of the day now is, is doing [00:17:00] Udemy. lectures. And another part is doing chess balls, especially when there's, there's a particular issues to address, then sure. I'm all chess ball.
Joseph: Oh, that's fun. So less Mr. Beast, more what you want to do. Yeah.
Nic: Just to make sure my game is getting improved.
Nic: It's really, I'm having fun. I
Crusher: think what you said earlier that we described, I think there is something in the structure. And the structuring of a course,
Nic: which is useful. Oh, yeah. I like that. From essay, right? I like structuring essays. So that's nice to be able to structure things as well. To
Crusher: make it education, like you say, pedagogical.
Crusher: There's got to be a structure which is, is, makes it as easy as possible for the student. And I think also it helps you because, you know, it gives you, gives you a framework and you can build into it and you can see the gaps.
Nic: I think chessboard at the moment, it's got the core features for correspondence chess.
Nic: There was a time I also got some help from this genius German programmer, Lutz Tosenham, and he helped with conditional moves. So [00:18:00] sometimes I have got help from other programmers. He really contributed quite a bit. For the interactive JavaScript bits of the site. Sometimes those can be super tricky.
Nic: Sometimes I'm able to do the JavaScript myself, but yeah, the advanced JavaScript like analysis board, yeah, sometimes it's good to get help from someone who really knows their JavaScript. It was an amazing, you know, at the time with the developer tools, as they were, he still did amazing stuff in JavaScript.
Nic: I see this code.
Crusher: I think it's phenomenal. I mean, he's a superb programmer. Yeah.
Aaron: I see on your site that, you know, you allow time limits of 1 to 15 days per move. Do you think that's kind of a standout feature of, like, is Chessworld the site for correspondence chess and kind of more this casual, slow paced
Nic: game?
Nic: It's dedicated correspondence. I had thoughts that, you know, if I ever added real time, it sort of dilutes the culture of the site because there are different priorities. One is more instant gratification. The other is more research of moves. I did have a 20 day time [00:19:00] here, but people started complaining because there was like, in a tournament, there's this.
Nic: plan that was just leave his moves to the very last minute. So games could potentially take years and years and years. So I had to get rid of that 20 day time limit just because there's certain people that really would go to the limit all the time regardless of the possession. So usually people, I think the most popular time limit is, five days a move, but yeah, it's a dedicated site and there is that concern.
Nic: Should I be diluting it by adding blitz chess to it? I think I like it being a sort of. A niche site, because the whole culture of the site is clearer if it's plugged in two different directions to satisfy instant gratification of say, bullet chess, where all moves are in 60 seconds. The funny thing is I do relax with bullet chess myself in the evening on some other chess sites.
Nic: So yeah, I do play very fast chess myself, with some success as relaxation.
Joseph: Super interesting. It's like limiting the compute power. [00:20:00] And depending on how you look at it, like, do you give the human 20 days to crunch on what their next move is, right? Like loading in more GPU to this?
Nic: Yeah, it gets more of the perfect move for that particular position rather than any general principles.
Nic: If you're on a fast time, it's all more with general principles. You're not trying to find the perfect move. There's no time. You end up losing on time, basically, if you're trying to be a perfectionist. So, yes, there's a trade off in chess. between, you know, being practical and being a perfectionist. So having such casual time limits, yeah, people can play one day move, which is relatively fast, because they can have lots of games at one day move, so they can end up blitzing their moves anyway.
Nic: It used to be that chess world had the advantage that a lot of company firewalls wouldn't allow a site based on telnet, you know, for real time chess. So People would like to play Chess World because they could play it at work. It's not, you know, needing some extra port. It's not requiring that. So it's kind of independent of time schedule, you know, [00:21:00] ports, and it lets people play at their own pace.
Nic: And you can also look up openings. You're allowed to look up openings. You just, not encouraged to use engines, though. Some correspondence organizations like ICCF, the official one does allow engine use, but they're suffering because if you look at their latest world championship, it's mostly just draws because the computer engine software is so powerful nowadays.
Nic: Yeah, that is, you know, it's very hard to beat someone who's going to use like the latest stock fish.
Aaron: Curious. Do you have any way of. Kind of detecting people who may be using that. And is that a rampant problem for you? I
Nic: think it could be a major problem if, for example, there are certain features I would consider very controversial to add.
Nic: So the idea of having. an online analysis of your game to click and say, look, where are the mistakes? What's the percentage accuracy? I'm a bit wary of adding that because I feel it might actually see some players complaining, look, my [00:22:00] opponent had 95 percent accuracy. I don't want all of those complaints about engine usage.
Nic: And so far, you know, in the last few years, I haven't really been hassle too much about, you know, engine accusations. Cause I say, cause also there, there are certain things that happen in team events. I only allow one player. over 2500 per team, so they can play each other if they're going to sometimes the engine abusers or subtle ones, they have these very big ratings.
Nic: So let them play each other if there is that risk, if there is that risk. So yeah, I'm not I don't want to spend my days analyzing games and using vast computing power just to prove someone's like an engine abuser, because you can get false positives as well. But also, I don't want to create features, which might create more suspicion and paranoia.
Nic: I know that other similar sites They've been dominated for weeks with these like cheating accusations of paranoia and don't want to go there, basically, that's something I want to avoid. So if I had a blitz site, then I think there's more of a case for making sure games can be, [00:23:00] you know, auto annotated to see actually nothing but in correspondence, because there's so much time to move.
Nic: I think it's very dangerous to create these false positives. Someone really might have researched quite a lot for their moves to be that accurate. So that's an area which I'm aware of. and is a big issue, especially for blitz sites, and especially when they do prize tournaments. So that's another thing. I wouldn't want to create prize tournaments for the same reason.
Nic: It would just incentivize cheating. That is a big issue in modern engine chess. Currently, Kramnik is going on and on about these very famous streamers, you know, their accuracy ratings as if, you know, I don't know. He says he's not accusing anyone, but it seems it comes a bit weird. You know, people read it and think these constantly cram the analysis of other players, so I don't want to go into that area and it's a, it's a big, huge area, you know, in the last few years, I haven't really been, you know, hassled in that way, because I think you just choose opponents with a certain rating, and you can look, but have they lost lots of games before?
Nic: And you can only, [00:24:00] you can create your own tournaments with particular friends anyway, if you really want, you can make the tournaments really selective there. So I try and mitigate against That's it. engine use in various ways. I'm sure that's a problem for other games that you've interviewed as well, I guess, isn't it?
Nic: Computer
Joseph: technology. Yeah. It's like if you could get a CAPTCHA on the robots. Yeah. Do you get a test of human, test of robot? Yeah, exactly.
Crusher: Also, the culture of Chessworld, it's more like it's about the journey, not the destination. So it's about working out the best move. It's about thinking about the game.
Crusher: I think that's, That's because that's central in the culture, it would be kind of a waste to use an engine to basically do the
Nic: fun part of what people are there for. I think so. Outsourcing yourself. Yeah, exactly.
Crusher: Why would you go to a site where you, you enjoy the thinking about the game and then get a robot to do it for you?
Crusher: This doesn't make sense. [00:25:00]
Nic: But I do think, yeah, money is like the source of all evil. Sometimes, you know, sites which do have these prize events, they're just attracting, you know, engine abusers.
Joseph: So if I was just starting chess, I played when I was a kid, I got into chess league, you know, like, what are you like fourth grade and we had little flip out chess, the magnet boards, little tiny pieces.
Joseph: You're dealing with, you know, half inch, right? Tiny, tiny little boards. And I did, I did okay. How would you suggest persons get good at the fun part? Like you're suggesting that Setting up the automated systems, the AI to help you do the fun part is a waste. Do you have tips and tricks for people starting to build their love of the
Nic: game?
Nic: Well, for me, I was asked recently, what order of my courses would I recommend a beginner player? And there's a simple way of answering that question, I think, whatever. turns up most frequently [00:26:00] in every single game. So for me, chess tactics is super important because that turns up in basically every single game.
Nic: And so I've got these core skill courses, chess visualization, I've got a course on chess visualization. at Udemy. Calculation, evaluation. So I've got the core skill courses that I'd recommend people hone their skills in. So particularly tactics, you know, and calculation are going to be major, even if you don't know any openings.
Nic: You know, like Sultan Khan, he didn't apparently know many openings. He still won the British Championship multiple times because he was really good positionally and tactically. So, but if you're under 2200, yeah, tactics is super important. That's how most games are won. Or lost tactically, so I'll go on tactics courses, my complete guide to chess tactics at Udemy.
Nic: If you search that for, you know, King's Crusher, that's, that's a good starting point, but there's lots of tactics, puzzles, systems online as well. You can practice for free, you know, puzzles [00:27:00] and stuff. I mean, chess world is a puzzle section. Is there
Joseph: a course there that can help me be the rook crusher?
Nic: The
Joseph: pawn crusher?
Joseph: Why the King's
Nic: Crusher? You see, the pawn, if you win a pawn or a rook, that only wins a battle, it doesn't end the war. You know, when you checkmate the king, you're winning the war. Yeah, you're not winning a battle. Checkmate is the objective of the game. You can beat all the material down, you know, you can beat all the rooks and queens down.
Nic: If you can checkmate with a pawn, you won, you know. So, that's prioritization, you know, King's Crusher. Checkmate the opponent's king.
Joseph: Yeah, I noticed it wasn't, Queen's Crusher carries some other potential downsides. Ha ha ha ha ha
Nic: ha ha ha ha ha ha. Yeah, you don't win the game. You don't win the game. Ha ha
Aaron: ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Aaron: I think earlier you had said something along the lines of money's the root of all evil on some of these tournaments and, and that kind of thing. From what I gather, it looks like you're, I don't think you [00:28:00] have ads. You're mostly subscription supported. Yeah. Just, just curious how you've thought about chess world from a business perspective so far and did you ever consider an ad supported model and how did you land on the current subscription
Nic: model?
Nic: Well, I'm making extra revenue from creating courses at Udemy now. I mean, there was YouTube, that was quite good for a while. You know, especially when I was, you know, ranked 10, was good income as well. So, I kind of like it, kind of, compared to the price to other sites. And no, I didn't want ads because I don't know, corrupt it.
Nic: Didn't need to. I don't think you get much ad income nowadays anyway. I didn't think maybe there was a time it was paying better ad income, but at the moment, yeah, I just think it would distract.
Crusher: It's not really about the money, isn't it? It's because it's the joy of it. And if you can pay the bills, that's plenty.
Crusher: And if you can get it to be a great experience without ticking it full of ads and [00:29:00] whatever other noise and get it to be a great experience for people and for you to maintain it to create it to push it and you still can pay your bills.
Nic: What more do you want? Yeah. That's a bit like YouTube versus Udemy.
Nic: On Udemy you don't get ads. When you buy a course, you buy a course, there's no ads, is there? But on YouTube you have to sit through ads all the time, usually. God, yes. Get
Crusher: slapped in the face every 10 seconds. Or 30 seconds,
Aaron: whatever it is now. Well, and you mentioned something in there, it sounds like, it sounds like the site and kind of everything you're doing around chess is supporting your lifestyle right now.
Aaron: And I think a statement was made, what more would you want? So is that, how long have you been doing this as, as your full time thing, Trifon?
Nic: 20 years, more than 20 years. That's awesome. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely. Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. The chess is his lifestyle.
Crusher: That is everything. That this house could collapse, and as long as there was a place for a chessboard, it'd be [00:30:00] fine.
Crusher: You wouldn't notice. How many games do you have
Aaron: going on Chessworld right now, Trifon?
Nic: Oh, hundreds, yeah. I like to invite people to, you know, to make sure people are finding the advantages of chessboard. and I don't mind losing to people, you know, I play quickly. I'm not gonna be a perfectionist if I'm playing hundreds of games, I'm not gonna be a perfectionist.
Nic: So yeah, I'm playing, you know, a few hundred games. Yeah. At the moment. Yeah. It's quite interesting. You do take it. It doesn't affect you
Crusher: when you lose games. No, no, no, no. Not on
Nic: chessboard. I think that's emotional. That's different. Yeah. No, no. If I, if I lose blitz games, okay. I could have been at some GM instead.
Nic: I love this defensive resource. I'm still thinking about it next day. I might even do a blog about it. Yeah. That's slightly different. If I missed opportunities against grandmasters, here's something that which gets my go. There's a strong, there's gotta be a
Crusher: strong emotional element to playing chess.
Crusher: Isn't [00:31:00] it's part of the passion of it.
Nic: So yeah, it's natural, isn't it?
Joseph: Yeah. If I go to the gym too many days in a row, I, my, my muscles, I'll get tired and I have to take a rest day. Does that ever happen for you with
Nic: chess? Well, yeah. After that marathon video uploaded to YouTube, we seen that 11 hours. I didn't really, I wasn't too keen to play for the next few nights and say leashes whenever I did take it easy.
Nic: I think I can overdose quite easily when I play like that. I'm a bit wary about that overdoing. in the evenings, whatever. But yeah, marathons could be exhausting. Those, those leachess marathons. but yeah, no, I just for chess while I manage it, I just play a certain amount of moves in the morning until I know I'm not going to like easily run out of time until the next day.
Nic: So I don't try and clear out all my 265. games where it's waiting my turn. I might, you know, play 30, 40, 50 of those, maybe max. yeah, it's important not to be [00:32:00] burnt out. I had the experience of being burnt out this while I was working in that it consultancy after I graduated. That was an experience of being burnt out with that accountancy company as well.
Nic: No, I don't like to try and burn myself out. I'm not going to. Do that in various ways. Now that's something to be aware of, you
Crusher: know, at least on anything that isn't chess,
Crusher: you know, but it's worth it.
Aaron: I think it's just awesome that you've got something that directly connects to one of your passions and it, it kind of supports your lifestyle. We've talked to a lot of different site and game creators, not a lot that are doing kind of a pure subscription model. So I'm, I'm just kind of curious as you look at users of your site, do you know, like what percentage opt to become a full member versus are maybe.
Aaron: active and don't choose to pay.
Nic: Actually, you know what? I'm not actually, as long as I get a [00:33:00] few full members a day, I don't really do even detailed statistical analysis. Perhaps I should if I was more more business oriented, but because I feel, okay, I've got a few members this day. That's okay. If you form it, I don't really do that.
Nic: That would just be accessible. I do like looking at the charts on, you know, like Udemy for how much I can make on courses and that helps, financial reassurance. Also December, you know, I did actually run a promotion. If things are getting sometimes seems, seems not many on the day I might do a promotion.
Nic: If, if there, if it did come to a point, I wasn't getting that can run promotions if needed. Yeah. I don't like to fill. financially as if I'm going down for sure, but I don't go out my way to also analyze percentage of active members, the full members. I don't really, I'm not really going into that level of detail.
Nic: I'm just,
Crusher: Yeah. It's not, you know, [00:34:00] you don't apply for business methods and funnels. So I
Nic: really don't know the answer to your question cause I haven't really done the analysis. I probably should do the analysis. Fair
Aaron: enough. I mean, it's, it's working for you and, so this is going to be the last business oriented question I'll ask then just, are you, it sounds like maybe Udemy course and the, the YouTube income than, than on the site.
Aaron: Is that a fair statement? Just curious.
Nic: No, there are some days I get quite a few full members on a particular day, which is why it varies. It's like, I see it like a bit like fishing, actually. Some days there's no fish, and there's hardly any fish, and some days there's quite a few. I know that during, you know, the Netflix Queen's Gambit series, the site was really getting A lot of activity and a lot of quite a lot of full members every day.
Nic: And, and it was actually the servers were getting overloaded. I think Azure was in trouble as well during that pandemic. It was like intense pressure on, on servers. And no, sometimes it varies and seasonal as well. So it is a bit like phishing. So having supplementing that with more [00:35:00] consistent income from Udemy is, is very reassuring financially for my sanity and reassurance, yeah, from a financial perspective, some days Udemy does beat the site and a lot of days the site does beat Udemy basically.
Nic: If there was some financial need, I might start a third strands, you know, of income, but I don't need it at the moment, a third idea. Maybe it's an IT consultancy on the side, but no, I don't need to do that at the moment.
Joseph: That's great. So, how has developing chess world helped your chess strategy? Does the designer thinking path help you as a player?
Aaron: Well,
Nic: that's an interesting one. Good question. Well, opponents are like these scripts people that come in and they're running these scripts. Jetson has to go, I think you need to have good tight defenses, like in a chess game, to try and, prophylaxis prevention measures, you know, to make sure they can't do any damage, you know, so lots of security, front end, back end, and make sure it's bulletproof.
Nic: That could be just [00:36:00] from From users putting in wrong data. So I think there's an element of defensive programming. I can see a parallel to chess for having good defenses in your position. But to be fair,
Crusher: you do transform every situation into a chess paradigm. Even this conversation we're having now, I guarantee you he's translating it into chess, processing it, and then translating it back into normal sort of thing to be able to
Joseph: reply.
Joseph: Super interesting. Yeah. Do you have some examples of that in life? You're out to eat, you're buying a car. How does chess impact your life? Well, buying
Nic: a car, they're trying to flog these cars, aren't they, on the TV. And I think that's because there's a deadline for all these cars, you know, and that would be good, aren't they?
Nic: These carbon emissions. So it's like, that's like a time sensitive opportunity. On a chessboard, you might have a time sensitive opportunity where you've got the initiative and you've got to use it, otherwise you lose it. So I think you can see parallels to business. I think. Garry Kasparov wrote a book about how, I keep getting this wrong, [00:37:00] how life imitates chess or is it the other way around?
Nic: But there's this book by Kasparov, which shows elements of life and chess, it contrasts and you know, you can have time, quality, something else. These three major factors, materials, you can sometimes trade off material for time. So trade offs in life and in chess. So Paying lots to do some complicated JavaScript years ago, you know, save a lot of time, you know, lose a bit material, but get a lot of time.
Nic: You know, that's like trade offs isn't that trade off theory applies not to just chess, but to life. We're, we're making trade offs a lot of the time, aren't we? Yeah. It's
Joseph: okay to lose that pond. It's not part of my strategy, whatever it's over there. Go ahead and take it. Interesting. Well, this question was instigated by my watching, I think, maybe the video.
Joseph: It was two years ago. You were live streaming. I was into like, I don't know where I was. And you introspectively suggested that you would play more chicken mode. [00:38:00] Do you remember this?
Nic: Yeah, but you see, the thing is, Lichess has this berserk option. So you actually halve your time. So you're giving time odds, say, 30 seconds against the minute.
Nic: And chicken mode, it's like, that's a temptation. And I was trying to resist that temptation. So chicken mode is also extends not just to not giving time odds, but also playing an opening more boringly, you know, less ambitiously for, for a win, because the more you pay play for a win, you're also often playing for a loss as well.
Nic: Also for in chicken mode, you're trying to risk minimize. So you don't care so much if you draw as long as you don't. lose. So, but my sort of chess generally is aggressive risk taking generally, because I try, I like to win quickly if I'm playing online blitz. But yeah, Tsukimo can be good to sort of psychologically change approach to be more about minimizing risk.
Nic: It
Joseph: had me wondering about what I was Playing chicken mode on in my life. Like, [00:39:00] you called it low contempt. I was just reflective. Like, where should I be more aggressive versus just let it play?
Nic: Yeah, I think, well, where you don't want to lose. There was this, this world champion, Tigran Matrosian, who really hated losing.
Nic: So he had the whole thing about prophylaxis prevention. He prevented the opponent's plans even before the opponent's even thought of their attacking plans. He had already started guarding against these plans. So, And he had a very defensive style and he mostly drew, but the thing is, because he could win the odd game in a match, he became world chess champion with that very cautious, boring style of play, some people would say.
Nic: I enjoyed looking at his wins, though, for one of the courses I did on Betrothed, where Even a chicken mode player, you can have, you know, brilliant, be brilliant tactically. And as long as they can win the odd game in a match, they're going to win the whole match. You know, they can have 15 draws and one win and they win the match, but in a normal Swiss tournament, you know, where you've got to build up your points, it's no good to draw [00:40:00] half your games.
Nic: You can try and win every game with white and black. Players like Fischer and Kasparov were trying to win with black, playing things like Sicilian Nidor, very razor sharp, you know, double edged openings. They didn't mind taking the risk. They wanted to win even with black, where you might think, oh, well, you know, disadvantage there.
Nic: And so, you know, it has its place, you know, chicken mode has its place. If you only need to win by one point, or you need to stack up the points, then if you need to stack up points, you need to stack up the points. You need to take risks to be able to win with, say, the black pieces. So yes, this, you know, risk and reward, you've got to assess the context that's in.
Nic: Boris Spassky would win lots of tournaments the same year Petrosian was world champion, because he was more of a risk taker. Eventually he beat Petrosian in a world championship match, but he had to play even better, you know, to be able to overcome Petrosian. So Spassky was more of a risk taker. And then Fischer beat Spassky in 1972.
Nic: That was a classic epic match.
Joseph: I feel like I'm just negotiating with my internet service provider and trying to play [00:41:00] chicken boat.
Aaron: Oh, right.
Joseph: Yeah. You guys are going to give me a deal at some point.
Crusher: How do you go about that? How do you
Nic: negotiate with your internet service provider? I think it's usually when you say you've got potential better offers, if you think you're not exclusive to them, as long as I think the principle there is more about not being chat maters. You say, look, you're not the only.
Nic: show in town. If you give the impression you're chatmated by them, then you've got no options if you're metaphorically chatmated. I think in negotiation,
Crusher: I think the best strategy is actually to have the options. And I think some of that is letting them know that you know that you
Nic: have the options. Yes, I think that's, isn't that, when you say that, it's a good negotiation idea to maximize your position of strength that you've got lots of options.
Nic: Question was transformed
Crusher: into a chess position and then
Nic: transformed back to give. Jeopardy, I'm giving question a question. Would you, would you say that's a good negotiation? Well,
Joseph: this is like you're trying to solve some of these [00:42:00] puzzles where the only way to solve it is to go off the board. I mean, chess has these distinct rules where you can't just make the box bigger and play outside of it.
Joseph: I had a couple daydreams after listening to you talk through chicken mode about when to push, when to sit back. Really interesting to hear you talking about playing a defensive style largely resulting in draws, right? So you're not risking losing as often, but you also don't risk winning.
Nic: It has its place, you know, if you were playing a match against someone, then you don't care about beating them every game, you just want to win by one point, say, so maybe, you know, that could really work.
Nic: They call it in chess playing solidly, that's when you play very solidly, so you're not taking too many risks, you know, there's no major weaknesses in your possession, usually solid pawn structure doesn't usually have too many weaknesses in it. And so the risk of winning is also reduced as well as the risk of losing is reduced.
Nic: Yeah. If you play [00:43:00] solidly.
Joseph: Well, my son is starting to want to invest and just in the, like the market, like, Hey, dad, I want an account. I want to put money in NVIDIA. And I was like, why? And he's like, cause they make graphics cards. It's like, that's a good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're at their 52 week high.
Joseph: Are you okay with losing some dollars if they don't just keep on a rocket ship here? And he's like, yeah, sure. Whatever. Like, real carefree. Doesn't matter. Put the chips on the table. He hasn't felt losing yet. Like, very little downside analysis. And, he's just playing, right? Just move it. Doesn't matter.
Joseph: Let it rip. And I love that kind of carefreeness about youth. But sometimes the elders can help. We can help. Guide. If you're going to give some suggestions to game creators, based on your experience of building out chess world, Do any come to
Nic: mind? Well, I think it's good to be in the cloud nowadays. I think the cloud's getting more competitive, like emails as well.
Nic: I use another [00:44:00] cloud, multi cloud. I use Amazon for, you know, emails. That's very good. Cloud based is good, because I think sometimes, yeah, there's lots of facilities on offer as well, other services. In a more general
Crusher: sense, you could say that, be
Nic: careful with your infrastructure. Yeah, because that was,
Crusher: that was one of the, I think, one of the bigger potential.
Crusher: Showstoppers, wasn't it? ISP decided to get silly about things. I think, infrastructure, but beyond
Nic: that I think there's also clarity of the culture of the site, not maybe to mix too many cultures, like Blitz with Correspondence. Yeah. Maybe clarity with the culture of the site. A vivid vision of what it I think it's like, called like Porter's niche focus strategy, when you focus on one particular segment of players, and do that really well, rather than trying to get jack of all trades.
Crusher: Yeah. Start with the central thing and build outwards from that. Everything that supports it. Yeah. Never lose focus of
Nic: the central focus. I've been trying to have good code [00:45:00] quality. I don't know if you'd name it. Fun.
Crusher: We keep forgetting fun. Fun,
Nic: I think, is really important. Oh, fun. But I think it's important to have fun.
Nic: Good, good code quality as well. That helps. Good code
Joseph: quality. Hey, let's have some fun tonight. Let's build some good code.
Crusher: Code is a continuous evolution. I mean, you can look back a week, like I've been looking back a week for the last 30 years. I look back a week, every week, and I can see better ways of doing the code that I wrote last week.
Crusher: It's a continuous thing, but I think it's the fun and the passion, isn't it? That's what's core. If you're getting, if you're having fun and you have the passion, everything else will improve according to that. given time. So you've got a game and you want to make
Nic: that game happen. Because that's payments in itself.
Nic: Even if you don't have financial payment, you can have payment, you know, that you haven't, you spent, you know, your life is limited, right? So you want to spend time doing something, which you're passionate about, not just modifying invoice layouts for an account.
Joseph: You can make some [00:46:00] fierce pivot tables. I, I know about it.
Crusher: Yeah. Ultimately you, you pivoted on
Nic: that particular exploit, wouldn't you? But I think if you realize you're, you're fundamentally lazy like me, I do need to have, fun doing whatever I'm doing. That adds more motivation to, you know, put the hours in. So they say, you know, if, if you're having fun, it doesn't feel like work.
Nic: So you don't do a day of work if you follow your passion. Absolutely.
Aaron: So as you're, planning ahead, what's next for you?
Nic: Well, I might, I enjoy doing the chess courses at the moment. I might be putting some new features into the site as these AIs get more intelligent. I'll just ask the AI one day, look, can you check out chess mod and tell me what things should be added and give me all the code.
Nic: You know, we can expect a day like that, not probably this year, isn't it? The way things are going at the moment. I think it's good to be, The manager of a system rather than, you know, [00:47:00] sometimes the program or the film director, rather than the actor, what do you think about the AI? How that's, I mean, there's big opportunities of AI basically emerging to improve things.
Nic: All my existing features could be improved. I can find out what new features to add. And yeah, I think it's going to be a very interesting. I'm also creating chess courses as well, of course, but yeah, I think it's going to be a very, very interesting year where I can solidify what I've gotten and try and do some new, exciting features as well.
Nic: Sounds good. Honestly, I
Crusher: would guess that long term strategy is to play and enjoy as much chess as possible for as long as possible. It's gotta be, isn't it? I mean, come on. It's gonna be
Nic: chess all the way. Yeah, I haven't got any other games in mind.
Joseph: That's great. I was going to ask if you could describe the feeling you have when you play.
Joseph: Is it what drives you back to play? Or is [00:48:00] there, are there other results? Is there, when you get the instinct to go play, what's the motivation? What are you excited about? What keeps you coming back? Well, on
Nic: chessboard, it's when I can play a very nice move that I've researched. On a blitz side, it's like, you know, sometimes winning the tournament or winning a tournament, basically.
Nic: It's not going to be egotistical sometimes, but a lot of times it's more scientific. And actually, if I play, I used to play a lot of over the board chess, and sometimes I would be like losing him. And I noticed, you know, the quicker I can turn that experience from a sporting experience to more scientific one, you know, find out where I went wrong for future games.
Nic: That's a great way of healing after a loss. I find you got to try. convert it from a sporting thing to a scientific, if you've just lost, if you've just won, fine, can we keep it as sporting, you can just enjoy the victory. But yeah, chess can be a cruel game, you know, losing can be much more painful than the fun of winning.
Nic: That's something to bear in mind for chess enthusiasts generally. So, and but, you know, from the losses, you learn [00:49:00] the most for, you know, the future lessons. I remember one over the board game, I call it, you know, chicken Kebab disaster. So I was really dopey during the game and he had a brilliant position at the opening.
Nic: I lost and I went through it with my friend, Paul Georgiou, and there was a move giving up Bishop for a night, which is a kind of sacrifice, but went over that game. I've won hundreds of games with this. Bishop takes night now in that same sort of position. So your loss is a real clues for how you win in the future, all the pain.
Nic: The more painful, you can get bigger lessons as well. I remember in Gibraltar, big time limits, very, very painful losses. But after that tournament, I had lots of new notions like positional sacrifices, which I then used to sort of win lots of games. So you could take all that pain and it becomes positive after.
Nic: So yeah, learning from losses are very, very big thing about chess. Camp Blanca said that, you know, you learn more from the games you've lost than the games you've won. You've got to say why you called it the [00:50:00] chicken kebab disaster. Yeah, I just found that if I have chicken before a game, my stomach takes over my brain.
Nic: Feeling like it's extremely dopey. And also you can do that with too much coffee as well. I had this game in a tour, I had too much coffee and then I was struggling to keep my eyes open during the game. So, you know, it's better ways of maintaining energy, like just. Just pistachio nuts during a game or something.
Nic: There's better ways than, than drinking coffee. Yeah. No, for the marathon, I didn't drink coffee. I mentioned I, I was eating nuts during the marathon for that 11 hour marathon. I think there are better ways of maintaining consistent energy. I think caffeine, I think my, for me, I think I'd only recommend one cup a day in the morning.
Nic: I think it's bad for your system, isn't
Crusher: it? I think so. Yeah. I don't even have coffee these days. I have a cup of tea and that gets me through the day. Takes some getting used to. It was
Joseph: interesting when you're talking about. Learning from losses, there's this phrase, are you, that you can ask yourself that certain persons have made more famous lately, [00:51:00] are you reacting to something, or are you responding to it?
Joseph: Right? The reacting is much more emotional kind of in the moment. And it sounds like you're listening to yourself. Process a loss and finding ways to proactively react to them later.
Nic: Yes. I mean, basically it comes down to the number of, if it was an over the board game, you know, sometimes I would lose two, three nights of sleep.
Nic: I found it was much quicker to get over a loss. by starting to analyze it scientifically. So yeah, moving it from a sporting event, SAP to a more scientific, Oh, it was an experiment. The experiment went wrong. Here's how I can learn from the experiment, because you're getting some relief in that. Well, you've got some good stuff down the toolkit, because you lost, you've got some new good tools, you're looking forward to when those tools.
Nic: So yes, trying to not just emotionally respond as though it was a sporting event, but get all the lessons to be learned as if it was a scientific experiment. That's what I mean by say, change [00:52:00] sporting events into scientific experiments. And then that gives you a much thicker skin for when you lose at chess or other games, maybe.
Nic: So in a way you're
Crusher: kind of taking the emotional part of it and making it, turning it into pure motivation. to do something more thoughtful and considered and scientific.
Nic: Yeah. Yeah. And in chess, you know, the winning and losing, it's just could be a very small threshold of a certain inaccurate move. So, you know, it's all these thresholds.
Nic: As I am, once coach was saying, you know, can be a very thin line between winning and losing and chess. So, It's good to try and, you know, get the lessons and try and play more precisely next time and stuff like that.
Joseph: It reminds me of how thin the line is between life and death sometimes, right? We live on that line, sometimes closer or further away.
Aaron: Well, Trifon and Nick, we really appreciate your, time here today. If people want to find you online, where, where should they look?
Nic: Well, for my Udemy courses, it's [00:53:00] kingscrusher. tv. And for Chessworld, it's, you know, chessworld. net. So that's my playing server, chessworld. net, but by courses which have the coupon codes, kingscrusher.
Nic: tv. So like, if you're starting in chess, get the core skill courses. They turn up in every game, you know, tactics, visualization, calculation, and that'll be a great way to start if you want to start in chess. I also have a complete beginner's guide to chess as well, of course. Which gives you all aspects of the game to a certain level.
Nic: I
Aaron: think I need to go check that out myself so I can level up
Joseph: a bit here. Yeah, my son is getting better.
Aaron: We really appreciate you being here, Trifon and Nick. It was our pleasure.
Nic: Yeah, pleasure, pleasure. Absolute
Crusher: pleasure. Good talking to you guys. Yeah, great stuff. Thanks guys.