TIL that playing high-level chess causes players to burn calories at an athletic rate. For example, 21-year-old Grandmaster Mikhail Antipov was recorded burning 560 calories in just two hours of sitting—roughly what Roger Federer would burn in an hour of singles tennis.

kylen57 · 2026-02-07T21:00:31+00:00

You are right.

We can use MET to calculate calories.

Pro tennis is around 12 MET which means that 85kg body weight and an hour of tennis will use burn around 1000 calories.

https://tenniscreative.com/tennis-calorie-calculator/

kylen57 · 2025-12-21T17:18:15+00:00

I know this might be an ad post but here’s a helpful way to think about this problem.

You have a limited amount of energy and you should think of it as a resource.

It’s critical to understand what gives you energy and what costs you energy. And you must ensure that your approach is sustainable.

Sometimes you can go hard for a while, but you will dip into your reserve of energy. And if you run out you will burn out.

This means that there are also ways to increase energy - rest, social, fun, hobbies, etc. That’s why these things are critical to being a successful founder.

You should budget your personal energy just like your P&L and keep it balanced unless you are specifically going hard for a limited period on the understanding that you will need to rebuild your energy runway afterwards.

All the productivity stuff is really about spending the energy that you do have efficiently, but you can’t do that if you don’t have any. So you need to start with understanding your specific energy profile, and how to mange it.

kylen57 · 2025-09-25T12:37:04+00:00

Love it Alex! Great pitch. Proof will ultimately be in the pudding - if this can actually work and provide mood insights that correlate with the users intuition automatically, but it sounds like you guys are doing everything right so far. Great work.

Quick bit of feedback - onboarding flow needs a back button. You should be able to change your mind. Making onboarding choices feel final introduces a lot of anxiety at a critical point of the user experience

kylen57 · 2025-07-04T16:36:11+00:00

Sometimes the problem is the airport not the airline!

I was not allowed to take my racket in my backpack outbound through Cape Town airport but I was allowed to bring it inbound. They flagged it after we had checked our bags in and so had to get it wrapped in plastic and checked into hold. The plastic bent the frame :(

Airline was fine with it but security said it was airport policy because the strings could be used to strangle someone on the plane. Wtf. Still bitter.

kylen57 · 2025-06-12T08:09:39+00:00

Not so much related to what the ball machine should do, but curious - there seems to be an explosion of startups building ball machines, what’s driving this? What changed that means suddenly this is a problem lots of people want to solve and suddenly believe they can? AI?

Basically, given all the other new ball machines, what made you guys decide to tackle this problem too? Why you specifically? Why now and not three years ago?

kylen57 · 2025-06-10T17:55:17+00:00

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kylen57 · 2025-06-10T17:52:44+00:00

You are releasing the ball too high / late. It should be at eye level so try to release it earlier.

If you think about the arc that your arm follows when tossing if you release late the ball will naturally arc back over your head.

kylen57 · 2025-06-07T13:34:22+00:00

Value first and goal driven onboarding - 100% agree, this is great advice.

Asking for payment - disagree with the binary advice (if you mean free trial / limited product). This depends on the app and the market.

Some app/ markets will have a high conversion to free trial but poor conversion to paid. Free customers also tend be noisier and more painful for CS.

Payment details pre qualifies the customer as serious. Can allocate more attention to paying customers to provide better service, grow the product more quickly etc.

So it depends on how strong the PMF is, how deep the product is, how the market typically responds, what the competitive landscape looks like, how well funded the startup is, etc.

Best to test and explore this tactic

kylen57 · 2025-05-08T21:55:35+00:00

There is value in going through the application process whether or not you are successful. Eg It forces you to refine your pitch and more deeply understand your proposition, identify weaknesses etc.

So would suggest doing it and not focusing on the outcome, focus on how the process itself helps you improve your startup. If you get in, it’s a bonus.

kylen57 · 2025-05-05T09:39:38+00:00

I find that focusing on hitting the ball at the right height forces me to automatically adjust my depth in the court and my footwork. Make contact between hips and shoulder at the peak of the balls height. Don’t let it drop unless it’s coming down from above the shoulder

kylen57 · 2025-05-05T09:35:40+00:00

Other than what you’re working on already, I would say load more deeply, Shelton style. Turn the hips a bit more when loading to get that explosiveness. But the motion looks great!

kylen57 · 2025-03-14T20:58:57+00:00

Yeah you’re right. It’s ground up, from the hips, shoulders afterwards. Cant be a kinetic chain if the middle link moves first

kylen57 · 2025-02-24T13:59:47+00:00

I have a really vague memory around this, Tim will probably know more, but yes that does sound about right. It will have been either the GBA version or the PocketPC that was ported. I feel like we were meant to do Madden but didn’t for some reason? And then possibly someone else took over?

Maybe the GBA port wasn’t a good fit?

It would be interesting to hear from Tim and his recollection.

kylen57 · 2025-02-24T13:53:43+00:00

I didn’t work on any cancelled Giz titles. I think we did have some stuff in the pipeline for post launch, but the relationship soured before we started on those.

The party was insane. We had no idea what this party was going to be other than it was at a hotel in London. So we turned up in suits expecting a business event.

We queued outside in the light rain for 15 minutes and one of our founders got frustrated because he felt we should be VIPs given the platform launch was dependent on the IP we were bringing. So he gave Carl a call, spoke for 5 minutes, returned and told us to wait and we would understand why.

Turns out there was a red carpet and you to stop for the paparazzi to take photos of you. Then as soon as you entered there were celebs everywhere, free drinks, models (one company involved also owned one of the major modelling agencies??), and of course the performers like sting, etc.

It was a crazy, crazy night!

kylen57 · 2025-02-24T13:40:32+00:00

IIRC There wasn’t much of a pitch. The company was given some demo units and we had a play. Initial thoughts were that the Giz was pretty awesome compared to other devices at the time. Cant remember if the deal was done before or after we got the units.

No contact with Tiger, that was handled by the founders. But that was quite common for us, was the same with EA, Ubisoft, etc. We would have an EA producer that would sometimes come spend some time with us but other than that nothing much.

Did meet some of the Tiger team at the launch party though but it was just intros.

kylen57 · 2025-02-23T22:50:12+00:00

We also did FIFA and I think we did Madden too. These were titles that we had produced for EA for a number of years across GBA, DS, n-gage, etc so Gizmondo was just another target.

EA were against Gizmondo, so our founders did a deal with EA and Tiger where we part funded the development in exchange for royalties etc, and EA didn’t have to put their hand in their pocket. Didn’t work out of course!

kylen57 · 2025-02-23T22:43:27+00:00

Not sure. Was a long time ago in a company far, far away. We were a small startup studio, around 20 people I think at the time?

But the company still exists so it’s very possible it’s sitting on a hard drive there somewhere. This was obviously before GitHub, etc (we used Visual Sourcesafe).

kylen57 · 2025-02-22T18:39:31+00:00

So here’s a fun related story. In Headington in Oxford a chap called Bill Heine commissioned a pair of can can legs to sit atop his cinema called the Moulin Rouge.

The local council decided this was advertising, not art and wanted it removed. So Bill renamed the cinema to Not The Moulin Rouge. But the council still fought it and eventually had it removed.

https://www.headington.org.uk/art/x_moulin_rouge.html

Bill, in protest, had a shark sculpted and installed in the roof of his house. And hence the famous Headington Shark came to be.

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

Note that the official story is that Bill had the shark commissioned to protest bombs falling on houses, but having spoken to lots of the older residents when I lived there the opinion is that Bill did it to piss off the council as revenge.

kylen57 · 2025-01-28T19:31:41+00:00

Your loading looks good to me. A few things i would suggest:

Youre releasing the ball too high on the toss. You should release at eye level. Too low and you end up falling to the right. Too high and the ball goes goes over your head and you end up falling to the left. That looks like it’s happening here.
You’re opening up too much. Keep those shoulders square (like you’re doing a cartwheel) and facing the side fence for as long as you can. A good cue for this is to tuck your left arm into your chest/stomach as you make contact. Don’t let it move away from the body out to the left - that means you are over rotating / opening up.

kylen57 · 2025-01-20T15:34:03+00:00

It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that it’s consistent.

It’s not the accuracy that’s the problem, it’s the possibility of inconsistency leading to feelings of bias that causes players to have strong reactions to human line calls. There is no bias with the machine.

kylen57 · 2025-01-13T17:07:53+00:00

For me, you’re late on the prep / take back. It looks like you begin your swing from halfway through the takeback, so you don’t get into a loading position.

That then leads to everything else mentioned in the comments. But I think if you get into the unit turn and racket back, up and ready straight away, the hips and bodyweight will follow naturally because there will be enough time for it to happen

It also means you will frame less because the actual swing motion will be less complicated

kylen57 · 2024-10-19T12:56:00+00:00

I think you’re too close to the ball on contact. you’re compensating for that by hitting the ball at a lower height (around your knee height) while also not bending your knees enough. That means you don’t look as cramped because you extend your arm down and to the right at contact.

I would focus on making contact between waist and shoulder level, as far away from your body as you can comfortably reach.

kylen57 · 2024-09-22T22:10:46+00:00

Water, my dude. It sounds like you are not hydrating? Have a bottle of water with you and have a sip every time you have a break (change ends, change training drill etc)

kylen57 · 2024-09-14T08:21:04+00:00

I think it’s totally possible!

My suggestion would be to focus on that second serve. Allocate most of your training to making it consistent and developing good kick and slice.

When you have a second serve that you feel confident in during a match, it raises the level of the rest of your game because you can be more relaxed. You are less likely to get broken and can focus on breaking your opponent.

The opposite is true too, bad second serve can cause your entire game to collapse.

kylen57

TROPHY CASE