You Play Better Chess When You Stop Caring About the Number

Lex Fridman opens with Alexandra and Andrea Botez just back from Italy, a trip they booked on a whim. They had only the first night's hotel reserved, rented a car, and drove through about five cities in a little more than a week. Andrea calls it the most stressful vacation of their lives: bags lost and never recovered, a giant van on streets that should have been one-way, and constant arguments with Italian drivers. Alexandra did most of the driving, including cliffside beach roads where oncoming cars had to inch past.

Lex asks whether losing the luggage was, in a sideways way, liberating. Andrea says it was. She has overpacked her whole life; both sisters brought giant extra bags they did not need. Hauling that weight through Venice's boats and alleys, with no Ubers, would have been miserable. The loss became the first time she could travel without checking a bag. "This sounds very dramatic," she says, "but it was really a big learning lesson for me."

The chaos had another silver lining. Making videos online, Alexandra says, means you are always thinking about what comes next. In Italy the driving took all of her focus, so she did not think about work for a week and a bit. "I was just trying to keep us alive. Higher priority. And that was kind of fun." They even ran into two friends in the same city and traveled with them for half the trip. Italian grandmothers scolded them for leaving food on the plate, which yanked them back to the Romanian immigrant neighborhood where they grew up: not finishing a plate is disrespect to the people who cooked.

Alexandra has a gluten allergy and usually gets sick from pasta in the United States, yet in Italy she ate a lot of it and felt fine. She still found the food overrated. Lex compares the country to Las Vegas: stay too long and you do things you regret. Portions are huge, everyone pushes pasta, pizza, and bread, and it is delicious. Italians stay fit, the sisters notice, because they walk all day and know how to moderate. Americans are not clueless about restraint, Andrea adds. The environment itself keeps reminding you to eat junk.

Both sisters started chess around age six, taught by their father. Alexandra got good results early, but a lot of it was being pushed. She only started loving the game after the family left Canada and kept moving. Chess was the one stable thing, and it was where her friends were. That is when she began studying intensely of her own will, spending summer vacations preparing for tournaments while her mother told her to go outside and make friends. She even wanted to take time off college to train and compete. Looking back, she is not sure she would have gone back to school if she had taken that gap year.

Andrea's path was the opposite. In high school she was more balanced, with other hobbies and a social life. Chess was for college and a resume, and the pressure made the game hard to enjoy. The happiest she has felt at the board, she says, was her most recent tournament, after a two-year pandemic break and after they had already become streamers. It was live on Twitch, so there was still pressure, but she was eager to sit and study for the first time in years. She hit her highest rating. It was her best event ever, and she thinks most of that came from playing for her own enjoyment.

The numbers make the paradox sharp. In high school she studied six hours a day and could not pass one rating for three years. For this tournament she barely prepared, and she jumped about seventy points. "As soon as you stop worrying about the competitions, the games get much better." She had been stuck at 1900, a hundred points short of the colloquial "expert" label people use around 2000. National Master in the United States is 2200. International Master, on the FIDE system, is 2400 plus three norms. Magnus Carlsen has lived above 2800; when he called a rating in the 2860s "pretty decent," the sisters say he meant it accurately captured his strength, not that he was being modest.

Andrea's section at that event averaged about 200 points above her rating. She was rusty and nervous. She still won. Before every round she was vlogging and doing meet-and-greets she had never run before. Fans asked serious questions, more seminar than photo line, and the sisters cut the footage because it was slow and bad for YouTube retention. Lex's reply is simple: not everything in life needs to be on YouTube.

Twitch changed how Andrea approaches chess. Competitive chess had been lonely; streaming introduced her to other chess creators and to playing for fun. Lex wonders whether live video forces you to be who you really are. Andrea has talked with other streamers about the opposite: you over-exaggerate one side of your personality and stay "on." People know her for ADHD energy and for being the younger sibling who causes trouble. That switch is sometimes real and sometimes deliberately twisted open.

Plenty of her does not make it onto camera because it is not entertaining, including the serious competitor who can sit and think for a long time. Competitive chess is what she actually loves, and she knows it is not great television. So she takes what she likes and adapts it for the format. Sometimes that feels inauthentic. Sometimes it is just repackaging what she loves so a wider audience can enjoy it.

Alexandra says they have been learning YouTube, which means the "Beastification" of content: get to the point in the first ten seconds, keep stakes high, design everything so people stay on the platform. In some ways it is a trap. The work you actually want to make has to be squeezed through a thumbnail and a title. Lex wrote a Chrome extension that hides views and likes. He does not look at Twitch numbers either. Andrea does. He likes numbers too, which is why he refuses them. You start thinking a conversation sucked because it did not get views. "The YouTube algorithm is this monster," he says. "If you let it control your mind, I feel like it's going to destroy you creatively."

Chess players, Alexandra says, drink a lot and still play at a high level. Psychedelics are another story. They usually stay away, because they do not want to mess anything up in the brain. The "drinking problem" joke on their stream is mostly a meme: the occasional White Claw gets amplified into a personality, the same exaggeration Andrea described. Andrea is under 21 on this recording, so Alexandra answers the Magnus question about whether alcohol helps creativity.

She actually enjoys drinking over chess more than pre-gaming for a club. Against opponents who are also having a beer, the game can feel fresher: liquid confidence, a little more creativity, a sense you can pull things off. The limit is real. One drink or two, then you start missing tactics. Andrea adds that it only helps in very short time controls. She once told a grandmaster on stream, before a bullet game, to take four shots. He got about ten times stronger, "transformed into the Hulk," and destroyed her more than the game before.

The split is intuition versus calculation. Blitz and bullet are pattern recognition; a three-hour classical game will just get worse as you drink. When they look at a board, the mix of calculation, intuition, and memorized openings depends on the time control. Andrea loves blitz now because that is most of what she does, and it is how she got into streaming in college: long sessions she could log into without giving up weekends to tournaments. Talking while playing, which their streams require, only works because so much of blitz is intuition. You return to the board and just understand what to do, until you have burned half your clock.

Wikipedia says Alexandra's most-played opening is the King's Indian Defense, in which Black lets White take the center with pawns. She confirms it. A grandmaster coach once told her he had played it for ten years and still did not understand it. Computers, at least Stockfish, dislike it. White gets three pawns in the center; Black has none past the fifth rank. The fun is the asymmetry: Black often gets wild kingside attacks while White attacks the queenside. If Black does not pull the attack off, the endgame is lost. Many strong players now refuse the classical lines and play slower setups that never let the kingside storm start.

She likes it because it is a fun, aggressive defense: throw pieces toward White's king, with many chances to sacrifice. Tactical games, for some reason, always feel the most beautiful and the most satisfying. The cost is that she has suffered for the love, playing incorrect ideas, watching the attack fail, and then defending a lifeless position. Online, she drifted toward instant gratification and attacking even when it was not sound, because you get so many games. Andrea prefers positional chess with d4, then gets more reckless in blitz against viewers.

The model game they walk through is Hikaru Nakamura versus Boris Gelfand in 2009, King's Indian with Nakamura as Black. Higher-rated players now have a line that "just destroys" Andrea's King's Indian, which is why she stopped playing it. In this game Nakamura moves a knight three times in a row to make room for a pawn, violating the beginner rule against moving the same piece twice. Pieces sit on the back rank; kingside pawns storm forward; the dark-squared bishop is blocked. None of it makes sense, and that is the point. Lex says it feels like so much is in danger. Andrea's reply: that is the beauty of the King's Indian.

Nakamura leaves his queen hanging for several moves while White still cannot take it. Sacrifices open the king. If the attack had failed, Black would have been completely lost. That do-or-die quality is what Alexandra loves in online chess and will not casually repeat in a slow tournament, where a sacrifice has to be calculated with real confidence. Opening principles they teach along the way are the usual ones: control the center, develop knights and bishops before the queen, castle, do not move the same piece twice. The King's Indian exists to break those rules on purpose.

Training now is squeezed by content. Alexandra no longer trains chess when she is focused on creating; she still does opening prep and daily tactics when a tournament is coming. Tactics split into two drills: fast pattern-recognition puzzles, and combinations that can take twenty minutes of calculation. Andrea runs training streams with a coach, does Puzzle Rush until she hits a high score before she allows herself blitz, and insists on analyzing losses herself before checking the computer. A hobbyist, she argues, should train what they will actually stick with. Consistency beats the most virtuous form of suffering.

Lex asks for the most embarrassing loss of a career. Alexandra has a stack of them. The one that still stings is a chess-scholarship tiebreak she lost to a twelve-year-old girl who could not even use the scholarship. "She's 2300 now," Alexandra tells herself, "so it makes sense." Kids at the board have no etiquette. Andrea, playing in Las Vegas, watched a neighboring game: a child of ten or twelve made a fake phone with his hand, the kid on the diagonal picked up a banana, and they silently talked while two adults stared at their positions. One adult looked up, saw the banana phones, and sighed.

On their channel a young master, titled around age nine, beat Andrea and stood up to do a Fortnite dance. "You gotta just swallow your pride in those moments." Street chess is a different culture. In Union Square and Washington Square Park they found professional hustlers who play every day, often self-taught, a tight social world. It is a chess experience, Alexandra says, not just a game: personality, tips, chatter. At first they hid their ratings and loved surprising people. Now the regulars know them. So they once dressed as grandmothers, prosthetics and all, code names including Edna. Andrea dropped her cane and strangers rushed to help. The cover died when a player said, "The way you held your pawn, I knew it was you."

The most fun board was not a park at all. They carried a table into Times Square, where nobody usually plays chess. Lights, music, cars, street dancers, even naked people they had to keep off camera so they would not get banned. Strangers kept sitting down to play. It was the opposite of classical chess, and Alexandra loved the chaos because it lets the game leak into mainstream culture without faking what they actually enjoy: the atmosphere and the people across the board.

They turn to famous games. The so-called Game of the Century, in 1956, was thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer against International Master Donald Byrne, with a queen sacrifice. A journalist coined the name and it stuck. Alexandra's reading is atmospheric: a U.S. junior champion, a nobody, in his first hard landscape against top Americans, showing tactical brilliance while grandmasters around the board supposedly muttered that he was lost. The 1971 Candidates game against Tigran Petrosian is, for her, a textbook: Petrosian brought the queen out too early and delayed castling, Fischer punished both mistakes, then found something like twelve perfect moves in a row. Fischer then swept two top grandmasters in that cycle and, still in his twenties, quit chess. "It is sad that we lost such a brilliant mind so early on," she says, and sadder still what happened to his life.

Lex asks whether chess itself opens a door to madness: the stress, the anxiety, the isolation. Alexandra's answer is about obsession. You can optimize an entire life to beat another person at pushing wooden pieces, and it does not necessarily translate to anything else. She has had stretches where she did not want to do anything but chess, including the gap year her parents blocked. Andrea says the obsession is universal if you want to be the best at anything. Alexandra grants that, then draws the distinction: some obsessions transfer to a balanced social life. Chess is a lot less social than most sports.

A blunder after five or six hours can throw not just a game but a whole tournament. There is no one to blame but yourself. Earlier in the year Alexandra went to Canada to try to qualify for the Olympiad team, ranked around fourth among women in the country, telling herself she was an adult now and would not get emotional. Day one she lost to someone lower-rated after a blunder. She went back to her room: she was not an adult, she was not eating, she was not leaving. She did qualify. She still did not play, because she lacked training time and the losses felt not worth it. Andrea remembers weekends in high school spent crying after the same cycle of preparation and defeat. The other side is real too: win a four-hour game after months of work, and the dopamine is enormous.

Lex walked away from chess as a young man after watching someone play blindfold from a couch, drinking and smoking, yelling moves across the room. If a person could live inside that board, he thought, you could create beautiful patterns in your mind. The pull was so strong he decided it had to be everything or nothing. He chose mathematics and everything else that was beautiful, because chess would pull him all in. Alexandra has looked at grandmasters who will never be top players, making maybe thirty or forty thousand dollars a year, teaching work they do not like because the obsession is that intellectually rewarding. You can get that reward from other things. Chess just happens to be unusually good at consuming the people who find it.

Alexandra started streaming her senior year of college, when work and school had turned chess into a lost love. The longer she stayed away, the more she missed playing it casually, with fresh eyes. Tournaments did not fit, so she streamed once a week, Thursdays at 8 p.m., and built a small community. She also says, without being asked first, that she has struggled with depression for at least ten years. Chess and streaming were a huge distraction and a huge joy, so she kept doing them because she really liked them. When another project failed, she took the leap to stream full-time. It seemed like a weird job. It was terrifying. Previous leaps had not worked out, and knowing failure was survivable made the strange one easier to try.

Lex asks how she gets out of the dark places. The scariest part, she says, is the feeling that she will never get rid of it. She looks back across longer timespans and remembers that every time, she got through it. The feeling is temporary. She tries to have faith it will go away and to take action so that it does. She has also tried to spin depression as a motivator. Left with her own brain, she gets very depressed, so she needs work, needs to focus. Feeling bad becomes a signal that something in life is off and could be improved.

Andrea says she did not inherit the same clinical weight her sister and mother carry. Her lows are shorter, closer to the "feeling shitty" Lex describes after a failed Magnus recording. In content she cycles through existential crises: she does not like what she is making, it feels hopeless, and that pressure forces her toward work she might actually care about. Long term it taught her a more balanced life, small daily things like training and eating better. Skip those for weeks and she gets a lot more depressed. Lex, who says he does not have a depressive tilt, uses self-criticism as fuel and cites Marvin Minsky's line that the secret of success was always hating everything he had done in the past. He would not prescribe it. Alexandra answers with another quote: be happy, but never satisfied.

Chess, Andrea now thinks, does not magically transfer into life skills the way she used to tell kids in juvenile programs and prisons. What it did teach her is patience: weekends spent studying while friends had fun, two or three years with nothing to show. That is the muscle you need for a real job, even if she went straight into streaming. Lex asks whether creative work is lonely. They are lucky, they say, to have each other. Early streams felt like a community: two or three hundred viewers, thirty or forty people actually chatting, almost personally known. As the audience grew, people came to be entertained, not to know them. Alexandra became more self-conscious and started thinking of herself as a product, a defense so that comments based on a tiny clip would not feel personal.

The loneliest part of being a creator, she says, is burnout, which is bound to happen. It is a numbers game: you go viral, then you fall, then you grind for months. She walks into Andrea's room and says they are no longer relevant. Most creator friends go through that alone, without a sibling who is also a business partner working beside them. Andrea adds the structural trap: you tie self-worth to the content more extremely than in other jobs, because you are the company and the product. The work is to notice that a bad stretch is a trend changing, not proof that you are bad.

They lived a full roller coaster. Early in the pandemic, with everyone home playing chess, viewership went up about ten times, then dropped about seventy percent. You see the number, you are already trying your best, and you keep going. Lex calls this the twenty-first-century problem of being an artist in front of an algorithm. He left a salaried MIT role and moved to Texas in part so his bank account could go to zero; he does his best with his back against the wall. He does not want the podcast to be popular or to make money. He would not recommend the method.

YouTube, he says, is a fickle mistress, a weird drug with addictive feedback loops. The world introduces you as the person with a video that has X views, because it has no other signal for whether you did a good job. A better signal is people close to you saying a thing moved them. He would rather be a Stanley Kubrick than a numbers maximizer; Mr. Beast is aligned with epic scale, and most people are not. Alexandra is afraid of becoming someone who makes junk-food content: you cannot stop watching, and when you are done it added nothing to your life. The algorithm still rewards that.

The messages that satisfy Andrea are specific. A fourteen-year-old writes that a year ago they played her at 1400, they are 1900 now, and they want a rematch. Lex says it is not only chess: two young women making a living by being themselves, having fun, and growing in public is its own kind of empowerment. Then he presses the harder point. In public you are becoming a person and a set of ideas. Private life lets you try things; the internet punishes experiments. You can put up a wall, which he dislikes because he wants to stay fragile to the world, or you can get more serious about what you believe. That is annoying, and it is also what you should have been doing anyway.

Early Twitch growth, Andrea says, was six hours a day, six or seven days a week, chess the whole time, talking the whole time. The old playbook is presence, not quality: make people feel they are hanging out with you. She burned out. It is hard to be your best self on camera that long, and you get scared of going somewhere you want to learn but are not yet good. Alexandra puts it plainly: they are better at chess than 99 percent of their viewers, which is much less scary than playing a game they are bad at or discussing a new interest. The internet punishes a beginner's mind. Andrea also learned not to turn every hobby into content. Piano, reading, fitness: she tried to livestream all of it. Some things are better kept as time off. "You can be yourself, but only specific parts of yourself online."

When they started playing less chess, subscribers said they had come for chess. Lex's show is already generalist, so being fully himself on a podcast is easier. They are expanding slowly, including a chess travel series so they spend less time in front of a computer. Next stop, they say, is Romania on September 9, the country their grandmother is from, where she taught their father, who taught them. Romanian pride, Andrea says, is special because famous Romanians who accomplish something are rare. She talks about how her father still talks about Nadia Comăneci: after the Olympic gold, every kid on the street was doing gymnastics. Meeting other Romanians through chess feels like belonging you cannot get anywhere else.

Lex asks a concrete question. Andrew Tate is, at that moment, one of the most famous Romanians, exceptionally good at gathering attention, and from many angles a misogynist. Should Lex have him on? Andrea calls it a double-edged sword. She disagrees with Tate's beliefs and thinks he has said hurtful things that shape other people's views. A hard conversation that got to the root, and showed how much was social-media tactic, might move some of his young audience toward more understanding of women. Platforming him also gives him attention and signals to other platforms that this is allowed. The minuses and pluses are not clean, and the internet makes you pay for the wrong call.

Alexandra is blunter. His rise looks like a growth hack: say the dumbest, most controversial things for a quick path to fame. She does not really listen because she finds it dumb. She would still watch a conversation that broke those beliefs down to the core, because kids who look up to him might need to hear them challenged. The PR risk is that strangers never hear the interview; they see a name and assume the worst reason. Then she says the heavier thing. She is afraid of a society that cannot talk to people it disagrees with. Even though she dislikes Tate, his bans across platforms are "kind of scary" because they set a precedent. You have to ask whether it would still feel ethical if you were on the other side.

Lex's own hesitation is practical and personal. Brilliant women tell him they are inspired when a female guest is on. A Tate episode, even a hard-hitting one, would make some of those women less likely to come on, and society would label him the man who platforms misogynists. He stood with Joe Rogan during an n-word controversy and, in some communities, became an apologist for racists. He gets hate mail over single words about Putin or Zelensky, from both directions, while having family and firsthand knowledge of the suffering. Alexandra's test is long-term: if you made the decision for the right reasons, will it be better or worse for listeners to have that conversation, and can you sleep? If yes, take the risk. Lex adds the astrophysicist's consolation: the universe is huge, we are tiny, and modern outrage often blows over in three days.

Who is the greatest chess player of all time? Alexandra defines the question as peak versus peak, not talent or influence. Humans are becoming cyborgs, she says, and the computer is the strongest tool chess has ever had. Emanuel Lasker was champion for 27 years; she does not think he would stand up to Magnus Carlsen. Because Magnus has lived more fully in the computer era, she takes him as the greatest so far. Andrea disagrees. She wants the title relative to the era. Magnus is technically the strongest in history because he had engines. Kasparov, without them, beat more players of his own level, lost less often, and held the title about twenty years longer. Lex adds Magnus's range: blitz, bullet, drunk, every condition, which means we see his blunders because he puts himself out there. Kasparov was built around World Championship matches. The variety of genius, Lex thinks, has to count, and Magnus may not even be at his peak.

Walking away from the World Championship still feels wild. The sisters are disappointed as fans and understand it as people. Defending against weaker players, Alexandra says, and winning without joy, is a poor use of a life. Aiming at 2900 might be more likely if he follows what actually motivates him. It will still warp how the next champion is judged: if Nepo or Ding wins, the titleholder is no longer the best player in the world. Lex hears Magnus as bored of a process that cannot identify the best player, anxious about a small sample size against weaker opposition, and hungry for twenty or forty games and faster time controls. Lex still romanticizes the Olympics and the rare, small-sample night when everything is on the line. He hopes Magnus comes back, because a world championship is a special thing in any sport, and the magic is that nobody knows who will win.

Advice for young people, Alexandra says, is calculated risk. When you are younger you can take more of them, but there has to be a reason: something you have already spent time on and love, not something trendy because you lack a better option. Andrea had planned on college since she was twelve. The pandemic put classes online, and she ran the numbers. A gap year streaming with her more experienced sister could be reversed; a year of Zoom school could be done anytime. Lex says life is like chess. Andrea says maybe someday. She has been boxing, and chess boxing is a real sport: a round of chess, a round of boxing, at a club they visited in London. Fatigue makes you blunder. Alexandra does not want to watch her sister get hit. Their roommate trained at 6 a.m. six days a week, fought, won, and the commitment itself felt like the reward.

Lex likes people who push to a limit. Physical pain is an easy way to find one; most growth, he thinks, happens in voluntary suffering, while involuntary struggle is where trauma comes from. If you do not know how you will get out, you have to find something profound in yourself. Why are we here? Andrea does not know, but giving her life a meaning she chooses makes each day more motivating, even if she knows it is self-imposed. She also likes the Stoic idea that meaninglessness is something you live to revolt against. Love, for her, is why you want to share experiences, good and bad, with particular people. Alexandra says part of being human is feeling things, and love is among the most intense, including for parents, friends, and partners, and strangely specific to our species. Lex leaves them with Bobby Fischer: chess is life.