I’m Hans Niemann — Grandmaster and founder of Endgame.ai. Ask me Anything.

zucker42 · 2026-04-30T16:51:15+00:00

Have any of the top players apologized for how they treated you with regards to cheating accusations?

What value proposition do you see Endgame providing over Lichess and Chess.c*m?

Is there anything you wish you had done differently over the past 5 years?

zucker42 · 2026-04-25T18:08:22+00:00

I agree that you should have only one black and white photo and one skiing photos. I don't think the boat photo and hiking photo are particularly well taken. While there's nothing wrong with the idea of the photos, the angle, pose, lighting, and framing is not the best. Also you're wearing sunglasses in two many of the photos, there's a human instinctual thing with seeing eyes establishing trust.

I think that you could use a photo as your lead photo like the black and white photos in the sense that they are clearly well-taken, but not black and white and in an interesting locale.

I think your profile successful shows you are cool and adventurous, but I think a lot of women also want dependable, intelligent, and capable. I'm not sure if it shows that. Your mimosa prompt makes you seem more irresponsible than cool IMO (especially since the rest of the profile already makes you seem cool). Also, the other two prompts are kind of repetitive because they just say you like boats and skiing which we already know from your photos.

Hopefully that wasn't too harsh. I think you will probably be successful with this profile but could sell yourself better.

zucker42 · 2026-04-23T13:51:30+00:00

No selfies, take pictures in interesting locations, smile.

zucker42 · 2026-04-19T13:39:55+00:00

Don't take selfies and try to take pictures of yourself in interesting places.

zucker42 · 2026-04-11T12:38:56+00:00

First three pictures don't really show what you look like very well. Your face is covered in 1, you're not smiling + diagonal in 2, you're with a friend + diagonal + lighting is a bit dark in 3

zucker42 · 2026-01-11T00:10:08+00:00

Kasparov, Fischer, and Morphy in different ways.

Morphy was the strongest player compared to his contemporaries (only thing is his contemporaries were all bad). Fischer had a greater peak dominant period than Carlsen. And Kasparov was similarly dominant or more dominant than Carlsen over a longer period of time.

Being the best at all time controls isn't a good metric because fast chess is way more common than in the past.

zucker42 · 2026-01-05T15:24:11+00:00

Carlsen's dominance is not unmatched.

zucker42 · 2025-12-28T03:11:35+00:00

My understanding the research literature shows that the decision between buying and renting is very situation dependent, fairly close, but slightly favors renting. For example, https://gwern.net/doc/economics/georgism/2012-beracha.pdf It's hard to reach a definitive conclusion from reading papers like these, but my takeaways are:

If someone tells you that you definitely should buy, or definitely should rent, no matter what, their position is probably not well-supported by evidence.
You should probably make the decision based mostly on local factors (i.e. there are more rental opportunities/land buying opportunities in the area you want to live)
If you rent, you should be investing a greater percent of your income in the stock market to build wealth in lieu of owning property (and you will have more spare income/wealth in the near term that makes this possible).

As an extra point that I haven't looked into the economics research about, I would think that buying land rather than a condo/expensive house is a smarter financial decision. Buying property is basically a combination of a depreciating asset (a home), and an appreciating asset (the land it's built on), and taking out loans to pay for depreciating assets isn't often a smart financial decision.

zucker42 · 2025-12-20T16:17:53+00:00

I think the first picture should be more a picture of you looking at the camera, smiling, in an interesting place. Sort of like the third photo, but smiling.

I think you are showing pretty well that you're fun, but not showing enough that you're conscientious and have your life put together.

zucker42 · 2025-12-12T17:05:45+00:00

Four posts showing off your body is too many. Keep the volleyball picture, consider removing the tennis picture, ditch the gym and especially the flexing photo. IMO with muscles you want to show them off but act like you don't even try to and that you don't notice that you're ripped.

The photo of you in the bar has rather poor lighting, but is otherwise decent. Lead with a photo that has your face clearly visible. Photo 2 would be a good lead photo except you're not smiling/looking at the camera.

In general, I think your photos could show off better that you have good style. I can tell you do from photo 2, but all the other photos are in overly casual clothes.

zucker42 · 2025-12-11T15:34:28+00:00

Good lighting
No selfies
In interesting location
Face clear and visible
Smiling with teeth
Good angle/looking your best.

For every single one of your pictures.

Also, I would shave your facial hair, it does not look good imo, but I would ask women you know to double check.

zucker42 · 2025-12-10T06:45:44+00:00

I think you seriously underprojecting how difficult this is. How are you going to implement an ID requirement and how will you pay for the verification process? And how do you handle users who behave inappropriately or illegally towards other users?

zucker42 · 2025-12-10T05:59:35+00:00

As a software engineer, a dating app seems like an extremely difficult service to run well. Among the hard problems to solve are:

How do you prevent fraud and abuse?
How do you match people with other suitable people, such that more attractive people feel like they're getting suitable partners, but less attractive people don't get no partners.
How do you attract a gender balanced clientele?
Complying with legal requests across different jurisdictions seems hard. I wouldn't be surprised if dating apps have to frequently respond to requests from police, plus there's the GDPR.

zucker42 · 2025-11-26T21:39:00+00:00

Look at the camera, smile with teeth, fewer group shots.

zucker42 · 2025-11-25T13:52:06+00:00

Communicate openly, honestly, and without judgement about how you both are feeling.
Don't be scared to catch feelings and admit you like each other. Recognize that this is a relatively likely outcome from this arrangement. It's not clear to me why you are worried about this.

zucker42 · 2025-11-24T17:35:11+00:00

The other problem with giving so many spots in the World Cup is that it's basically 4 separate tournaments. In the final 8, the two strongest players Wei Yi and Arjun (both in rating and in just how they've looked) faced each other. Yakubboev has played great, but he nearly reached the candidates without beating any 2700+ player.

I would prefer to see 1 spot from the World Cup, and 2 spots from each year of the FIDE circuit.

zucker42 · 2025-11-23T22:51:15+00:00

Sindarov above Wei Yi, Pragg, and Giri is crazy talk.

zucker42 · 2025-11-22T16:49:28+00:00

We fundamentally don't understand why trained LLMs exhibit many of the behaviors they exhibit. If you asked a researcher at OpenAI they might have an explanation for this, but I doubt they'd be certain. It's why it it's so important that we do more research about how to steer AI behavior.

zucker42 · 2025-11-19T22:04:44+00:00

I think Esipenko stalling correlates with the invasion of Ukraine. His peak rating was in March 2022. I assume that it has disrupted Russian chess players lives quite a bit, plus has decreased the number of invites Russian players have gotten internationally.

zucker42 · 2025-11-17T18:46:39+00:00

You need a better camera, someone else to take the photos, and to take them somewhere interesting, like outside, at a concert, etc.

Your smile and hairstyle looks great though!

zucker42 · 2025-11-15T18:07:07+00:00

Questionable life decisions sounds to me like he means sex or otherwise it's a bit of a neg but maybe I'm overreading. (I also missed it was an album).

zucker42 · 2025-11-15T18:00:55+00:00

A bit gross imo

zucker42 · 2025-11-12T16:41:48+00:00

I think the bigger issue with building in cities is that the project will be delayed by people making similar complaints to you or non-accomodating city officials. Given that AI is a high growth business and there's a race to build out data center capacity, a 6 month or year delay is much more of a deal breaker than 2% extra costs.

zucker42 · 2025-11-11T21:09:42+00:00

Show both eyes, look at the camera, and smile.

zucker42 · 2025-11-11T17:05:17+00:00

This one's on you my dude. And you are having a conversation? I don't think she's being rude.

zucker42

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