I had never heard of this guy before today’s straight dope article. Since then I watched a dozen of his performances on youtube, and this guy is amazing!
If you haven’t heard of him, here’s a link to my favorite video so far. His chess game is self-admittedly “shit” but in this video he’s shown winning 5 out of 9 simultaneous games, with at least 2 of the wins against international grandmasters. At the end, he even explains how he does it!
I haven’t been this entertained in a long time.
One of the expert players is none other than esteemed Doper glee, too. There have been a couple of interesting threads about that and other Derren Brown tricks.
Wow! I was thinking that it might have been staged with cooperative players, but now maybe not. Do you know if the previous thread about this video is still open?
I have read the entire previous thread and am still confused about how he was “guranteed” to do no worse than 4-4 by mirroring the moves? And could someone re-explain how this works exactly?
As for the ninth game, is it possible many games of the 9th player were studied by a superior player, who in advance told Darren, “ok his first move is always this, when he does it you do this, then he’ll do this, you do this, etc”?
He played the equivalently ranked players against each other. The idea being (if I understand it right) that essentially he’s playing one person against a person who’s around the same skill level as them. That brings it more closely down to a 50-50 chance, though it isn’t guaranteed.
Instead of playing 8 different games, he’s actually playing 4 games, 2 versions of each game simultaneously.
Let’s look at just 2 of those games. He is playing Game 1. His opponent makes a move. He goes over to Game 2 and makes the same exact move. He waits until his opponent in Game 2 responds to that opening move, and then he goes back to Game 1 and makes that same exact response.
Game 1 Opponent makes move
He goes to Game 2 and also moves . He waits for Game 2 Opponent to respond, and G2O responds [Y].
He goes back to Game 1 and responds to G1O with [Y] (the same way the other guy responded to him). G1O then moves [A].
He goes to Game 2 and moves [A]. G2O moves **.
Taking G2O’s move, he goes back to Game 1 and also moves **.
So both games have the same exact moves: X, Y, A, B. They are the same exact game, he’s just playing opposite sides: In the first, he’s playing against G1O (using G2O’s moves), while in the second he’s playing in the place of G1O, using G1O’s moves against G2O.
Since they are the same game, but he is playing a different side in each, if he loses the first, he will win the second, and if he wins the first he will lose the second. Either way the score for those two games will be 1-1. Multiply that by 4 sets of two games (8 games total) and you’ll see why he can’t do worse than 4-4.
ETA: Put another way: Let’s say Darren isn’t playing for himself at all (which he really isn’) he’s just shuttling between two players in two different rooms who are playing each other. The first player makes a move; Darren goes to the next room and makes the move to let the opponent know what it is. The opponent responds, and Darren goes back to the first room and makes that move to let the first guy know what it is. He isn’t really playing; the two guys are playing each other and he is merely conveying the moves. Although there are two chess sets in two different rooms, they are the exact same game. If the player in the first room wins, the player in the second room loses. The score will always be 1 winner, 1 loser, because it’s not two games, it’s only one game.
For the trick, he’s doing just that, except the players don’t know he’s only conveying the moves instead of thinking them up himself, and he’s doing it for multiple games at once.
Actually, for the 8 games that are mirrored, 50/50 is guaranteed (if you ignore the possibility of draws). The trick isn’t that he’s matching players skills closely - the trick is that by mirroring the moves, he’s effectively turning 8 games in to four, played out twice each, identically. And since he’s playing both parts of all the games (on some table), it means that he’s guaranteed to both win and lose every game, giving him a 50/50 win ratio no matter how any of the individual matches play out. He could’ve played grandmasters against PE teachers and the outcome would’ve been the same.
No, there would be just too many possibilities, even if you knew that player’s game intimately. And the ninth player was just a university club player, so I doubt that there would have been much of a public record of his games.
I’ve watched all of his tricks that are on youtube. It’s brilliant. But it’s also sometimes too unlikely. I believe that he doesnt use stooges. But I have him suspected for having stuff happen off-cam, that we as viewers have no chance to figure out.How on earth does he guess what name people are thinking of, for instance? Or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTRuQbYDWkU?
I like him though, for his fighting for rationality. So I hope he is not too much of a cheat.