For all you fellow chess fans out there, here is an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal about corporate chess, which I did not even know existed.

An excerpt.

“Len Ioffe remembers exactly how he celebrated his promotion to managing director at Goldman Sachs. He didn’t go out to a fancy dinner or pop open vintage champagne. 

“Instead, he sat down in a quiet room and hunched over a table and chose to compete in a match as a member of Goldman’s corporate chess squad. 

“The team offered me to skip and not play that night and to celebrate,” Ioffe says. “I said, ‘No, I will play.’” 

“Winning, it turned out, was celebration enough. But now, as Ioffe prepares to represent Goldman over the board once again, the stakes are about to get much higher than career milestones and sacrificing a night on the town. This weekend, Ioffe will compete alongside a handful of co-workers in the FIDE World Corporate Chess Championship, a competition that pits the cleverest pawn-pushers at some of the biggest blue-chip companies on earth against one another. 

“Teams from Goldman, Google, Deutsche Bank and BlackRock, among others, are vying not for prize money, but to be recognized by chess’s world governing body as the “smartest company in the world.” 

“A total of 12 teams will battle it out in New York this weekend, and unlike typical corporate chess leagues in the city, this one has a distinctly global flavor. It’s a big enough deal that Google’s top player, international master Ritvars Reimanis, is flying in from Lithuania. 

“Chess has undergone a worldwide boom since the pandemic and the proliferation of easy-to-use chess apps, and it’s no surprise that the ancient game is especially popular in high-achieving offices from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. There tends to be some overlap between quants with Ph.D.s and players who have mastered the Sveshnikov defense.

“There are multiple places in the offices that you can just go and get a good game,” says Kola Adeyemi, a product strategy and operations lead for Google Workspace. “There is a very strong community.” 

“At Google, an internal group of chess players is 2,500 people strong, Adeyemi says, and they compete several times a week in online tournaments. Other times they venture into highly competitive corporate events. When the popular chess streamer Levy Rozman, also known as “Gotham Chess,” recently stopped by Google’s New York headquarters to speak, the office was so packed that people couldn’t get in. 

“Adeyemi is so plugged in to the tech behemoth’s chess scene that it wasn’t hard for him to pick a squad for the championship, which begins on Friday. The rules state each team is only allowed one player rated above 2400, the level for FIDE international masters.

“Squads are also allowed to bring one nonemployee. So just like corporate softball, where it isn’t unusual for teams to show up with someone who arouses suspicion by mashing the ball like Aaron Judge, corporate chess has ringers. And the king of the ringers this year is an American named Sam Shankland.

“Not only is he a grandmaster, Shankland is also a former U.S. national champion. He has published books on passed pawns and training guides on the Berlin Defense. In other words, this isn’t a man who has time for a day job. Being a world-class chess player is his day job. And this weekend, he just happens to be doing it for Susquehanna International Group, a high-speed trading firm.   

“Chess is a big part of the culture at SIG,” said team captain Ella Papanek, who had previously skippered the chess team at Harvard. “At least 10% of the firm plays chess in some capacity.”

The World’s Biggest Companies Are Battling in Chess—And They Have Ringers – WSJ