Can Women Chess? Ft. Black Pigeon Speaks

hello everyone today's video is going to be about chess okay so for the five of you who are still here welcome let's get on with it so chess chess is a strategy game and one of the oldest games in existence historians have determined that the first game of chess was played sometime in the early okay I'm just kidding of course so why do I want to talk about chess today well I was watching black pigeon speaks do you remember him he's the little fascist bird that hates women you know the guy by allowing women to [ __ ] freely the West has de facto entered a matriarchy yeah him oh I'm sorry is this what they call poisoning the well poisoning the well by directly quoting things he said well no I'm not doing that because it is in fact completely relevant to the topic of today's video which is about women chess players now I'm sorry that this is necessary but we do ask to watch a short clip from this video although this is the only clip of his I'm going to show today so just muddle through as best you can and moving down to Canada southern neighbor which has so many stories every week it's hard to narrow them down but these are the ones that I found most interesting and here they are as of publication of this video the US men's Chess Championship is currently underway with grandmaster Wesley so who's 23 of Minnetonka Minnesota in a tie for first place with Daniel Nara disky but wait something's not right here men's chess why are there no women competing in this tournament which is a game solely reliant upon one's faculty not body strength why are chess tournaments separated by gender women should play chess alongside men Jess's and football are boxing I've been told since childhood that women are every bit as smart as men and chess shouldn't be segregated like this but upon further investigation it's not that women aren't allowed in the men's tournament but they don't have the skill to get into high-level competitions and if it wasn't separate no woman would ever win like in sports women aren't actually segregated by the rulz it's just that women cannot compete against men and win in the mental game of chess when it is the best of both genders facing off so that clip there was from the black pigeon speaks video Merkel ink mayhem / women do chess and Sweden yes sort of a random collection of letters there and that video is a bit like a poor man's version of a sargon of akkad this week in stupid type thing where black pigeon speaks features a bunch of seemingly random news stories and then say something horrible about them so what's the relevance of this particular news story about grandmaster wesley so having to play a tiebreaking match at the end of the US chess championship well nothing really black pigeon speaks is just using the story to go off on a tangent about the fact that the US Chess Championship has a women's division and he uses that as proof that women can't compete with men at chess and are therefore less intelligent analogic goes that if women could compete with men there will be no need to divide men and women into separate leagues so is black pigeon speaks onto something here is it true that women can't compete with men at chess well I'd like to skip ahead at this point and share a news story from the 17th of this month or from chess comm hole Yi fan I think I'm saying that right pressures Carlson maintains lead a cranky that's China's ho Yi fan a woman pressuring Magnus Carlsen who in addition to being a man is the world number one the world chess champion and the highest rated player in history into a drawer to maintain her lead at the Greenwich s classic now she was leading because she had previously defeated in the first round of that tournament Saviano Cara Juana who is the third highest rated player in history behind only Magnus Carlsen and Gary Kasparov and the interesting thing about Cara wanna hear is that he was born in Miami which means he's American if you follow so he's eligible to play in the US Chess Championship very tournament that whack pidgin speaks was talking about which he did coming in joint second behind Wesley so now then the incredibly sharp Ida monkey will have noticed something interesting here and this is just a minor points but black pidgin speaks said that Wesley so was tied for first place with Daniel narrowed its key yes he did I can prove it Minnesota in a tie for first place with Daniel Nara disky Siebel in this results table we see that Daniel narrowed its key is in fact way down the table in joint force so what happened there well the Star Tribune article that black tagine speaks of the headline from has a photograph of Wesley so which was taken during his game against narrowed its key so black pigeon speak saw that picture and incorrectly came to the conclusion that narrowed its key was so playoff opponent when if you actually read the article it's clear that it's a fellow called Alexander anishka so what does this error has to do with women chess players well nothing really I just thought it was a funny coincidence that while attempting to prove that women can't play chess properly black pigeon speaks revealed but he can't read properly anyway back to wholly fan at the Greinke chess classic now then according to black pigeon speaks as logic this situation should be impossible he says why are chess tournaments separated by gender if it wasn't separate no woman would ever win a but here we have a chess tournament that is not separated by gender clearly because it's got a woman in it and she's a woman who does have the skill to win clearly because she just beat the third highest rated player in history and drew against the world chess champion so something funny's going on is now now could it be that black pigeon speaks doesn't actually know the first thing about chess and is just bullshitting his audience into hating women well who knows but let's give him the benefit of the doubt for now his video was published on the 11th of April of this year and the grand coach s classic didn't start until the 15th four days later so if Ho Yi fan is the first female chess player in history to ever play competitively against men at the top tournament level we can let black pitch and speaks off here so is she so who is this person well she's Hungarian chess grandmaster Judit Polgar she was ranked in the top 100 players in the world by the time she was 12 she achieved grandmaster status in 1991 at the age of 15 and was at the time the youngest grandmaster in history she's defeated eleven world champions including Carlson Karpov Kramnik Spassky topalov Anand and Garry Kasparov and at her peak rating she was the world number 8 now naturally being one of the best players in the world she won her fair share of tournaments tournaments that had male players in them for example she won the Hastings International Chess Congress in 1993 she won the US Open chess championship in 1998 one of her games at the Russia versus rest of the world tournament in 2002 is an interesting one and that tournament is as it sounds you know a bunch of Russians played a bunch of non Russians so Judit Polgar found herself matched against Garry Kasparov who is pictured here being accosted at a news conference by a remote-control dildo helicopter now he was at the time the world chess champion and also had a record of saying very disparaging things about female chess players and in fact that once described polgár by saying she is after all a woman it all comes down to the imperfections of the feminine psyche no woman can sustain a prolonged battle and then Judit Polgar beats him becoming the first woman to ever defeat the current world number one in competitive play and the rest of the world team went on to narrowly beat the Russia team in that tournament a similar story here is that in 2015 British Grandmaster Nigel short was taken to task for saying that women were naturally hardwired to be worse at chests and Men and critics of this sentiment were quick to point out that a couple of years previously Nigel Shaw had been beaten by do that polgár in chess calms deathmatch tournament so supposes superior brain wiring must have been short-circuiting that day or something so then to black pidgin speaks the question is not can women compete at the highest levels of chess because players like Judit Polgar and ho yi fan have already settled that question they can no the question is why don't more women compete at that level because that's the thing only a relatively small amount of the world's current grandmasters are women so if women can do it what's stopping more of them from doing it and that is an interesting question it's easy to say women can't pass a certain barrier in chess because of some biological factor but if you make a declaration about the limits of any one group of people based on biology time will eventually make a fool of you you know there were people who said there will never be a female Grandmaster and there were people who said a female chess player will never break the top-100 and they'll never win a chess tournament against me they'll never break the top-10 they'll never defeat the world number 1 etc and eventually of course all of those things happened and today there are people will say they'll never be a female world number 1 and there will obviously eventually a woman will take the number 1 spot and then what will the goal post Movers say you know there's only been one female number one so far the truth is that these biological arguments don't hold water once any one woman proves it is biologically physically possible for women to compete at that level that's the biology argument debunked so if we're asking why there aren't more female grandmasters we have to look beyond biology to possible social and psychological reasons and this is the exciting part where I get to talk about a fun study I read once checkmate the role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate intellectual sport now this study set out to test whether or not gender stereotypes affect chess ability and how did they do that well they took 42 female chess players and matched them with 42 male players of equivalent ability they then have them play a series of chess matches online however the researchers did something very sneaky they mislead the female group about the gender of their opponent such that some of the time they thought they were playing against men and some of the time they thought they were playing against women when actually they were only ever playing men sometimes the exact same man and the results are very interesting when women falsely believed to be playing against another woman they won about one game out of two however these same women performed below chance when they knew they were playing against a male opponent indeed they performed more poorly against the same opponent when they knew they were playing against the male and when they thought they were playing against a female in the experimental condition performance was reduced by about 50% when women were reminded of the stereotype and when they were aware of the fact they were playing against a male opponent in this case they won only one-fourth of the games yet these same women were able to win half of the games when they were misled into believing that the opponent was a female the difference in performance is particularly impressive if one considers that the opponent was exactly the same and the study then goes into two particular ways in which the women's games differed depending on what gender they thought their opponent was you can see why I like this one right it's very fun isn't it although I like all studies where the researchers mislead the subjects so anyway maybe it's not that women aren't as smart as men I mean number of chess grandmasters is only one metric isn't it I mean women now outnumber men among college graduates in many places in the West so by that metric things look different but instead maybe it's more to do with gender roles and gender expectations and I'd like to briefly introduce two new characters here you see Grandmaster Judit Polgar has two sisters fellow Grandmaster Susan Polgar and International Master Sophia polgár now you might think well isn't that odd three chess masters all women from the same family what's going on there well they're the daughters of a teacher and educational psychologist called lászló polgár who chews it all free in chess from a very early age and like any one man or woman if you spend several hours a day practicing it something for a very long time and eventually you get to be very good at it and if we're going to put in that environment where they practice chess every day then they clearly turn out no differently the men do as chess masters and the fact that not as many get into the chess to start with or stick with it long enough to compete at the top level seemingly has little to do with biology and much more to do with gender expectations so then to the initial question why are there women's chess leagues well it's actually a fairly divisive issue among women chess players I believe some people argue that these leagues are important for getting more women into the game to begin with on the other hand some female players Judit Polgar included I believe argue that at the top level these leagues can actually hold women back and they should instead aim to challenge the men in tournaments that aren't divided by gender black pigeon speaks ignored all of this of course just like he ignored the existence of players like Judit Polgar and wholly fan because why bother you know if you're speaking to a completely ignorant audience and your intent is to mislead them even further you know why not lie it's not like they're going to go and check is it anyway I'll leave black pigeon speaks here with the challenge and if better at chess equals more intelligence bound how about I play you a chess to determine who's right in this argument if you apparently know so much about chess you know it shouldn't be too hard just to beat me should it so let's play and I'll play white in the first game just to get us started and I'm going to open with one d4 and al await your response over on Twitter the links in the description there come and have a go if you think you're hard enough thanks a lot for watching everyone it's a relatively short one today a well a change is as good as a rest so they say thanks as always to all my supporters over on patreon there's quite a few more of them recently which is rather exciting we're slowly building a little army over there and we're also rapidly closing in on our next patreon goal where our plans for world domination will finally enter phase two so come along and join us it might be the only thing that saves you I'm kidding of course nor am i you know it's better to be safe than sorry isn't it

Channel: Shaun

Views: 574,195

Rating: 4.7673283 out of 5

Keywords: women chess, black pigeon speaks, chess, shaun jen, judit polgar

Id: ZHFZOXiM9SM

Length: 15min 52sec (952 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Why the f*ck are those type of channels (Black Pigeon speaks) even allowed on youtube?