Losing in a rapid game, it doesn’t feel so good

Yale-Bound Robert Hess Loses in U.S. Chess Championship Semifinals Playoff

By Eben Novy-Williams - Apr 25, 2011 9:01 PM PT

Robert Hess, a chess grandmaster who interned at a hedge fund in 2008 and will attend Yale University in August, lost in a semifinal playoff at the 2011 U.S. Championship in St. Louis.

Hess, 19, drew the first semifinal playoff game yesterday and lost the second to 2008 champion Yuri Shulman, who will play Gata Kamsky in the final. The best-of-two-games playoff was forced when Hess and Shulman drew a pair of games on April 23 and April 24.

Hess’s loss came in a time-shortened, or rapid, game, and was his first defeat in 11 games during the tournament. A Manhattan native, Hess will play fellow 19-year-old grandmaster Samuel Shankland in the third-place match.

“They say losing in the last round is heartbreaking, but not even losing in a classical game, but losing in a rapid game, it doesn’t feel so good,” Hess said in an interview on the tournament’s website.

Hess, who deferred a year from Yale after winning the $42,000 Samford Chess Scholarship, had a 2008 summer internship at Fortress Investment Group LLC, a New York hedge fund. While at Fortress, Hess developed an interest in finance, which he intends to pursue in college.

More here.

Prodigy Alert

PRODIGY ALERT: This 19-Year Old Chess Star And Linebacker Interned At Fortress As A Junior In Highschool

Courtney Comstock | Apr. 21, 2011, 9:21 AM

Robert Hess is probably one of the most amazing 19-year olds out there.

He's a chess prodigy with a 2565 ELO ranking, which is even better than Patrick Wolff's, the former Clarium fund manager who started a hedge fund based on his chess abilities (called Grand Master Capital).

Wolff's ELO, his "batting average," is 2564, one point lower than Hess'. Both are top scores. There's technically no "best" ELO rating, but if you're in the 2700s, you're among the best in the world. (Hess's ranking is #358 in the world.)

And more to the youngster's credit, Hess won the U.S. Junior Championship in 2006 at age 14. As NYDailyNews points out, Bobby Fischer, the ultimate yardstick for American chess brilliance, accomplished the same feat at a comparable age of 13.

Topping it all off, he's a linebacker at Stuyvesant High School, the Brooklyn-based charter school for gifted kids (he attacks the field like he attacks the chess board: "You're looking through the offensive line, the pawns, the line of defense," he says).

And he's already got a good internship under his belt: he interned at Fortress last year, as just a junior in high school.

More here: http://www.businessinsider.com/robert-hess-2011-4

Heading to Yale

Chess whiz heads to Yale
By James Lu

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Yale is getting its own Bobby Fischer. Nineteen-year old chess grandmaster Robert Hess, who is heading to Yale come August, was the subject of a Bloomberg profile Thursday.

Hess’ plans to join the class of 2014 were put on hold when he won the $42,000 Samford Chess Fellowship, which paid for him to travel and compete in Russia, Greece, Spain and Ireland.

“Technically, chess is a job for this year,” Hess told Bloomberg. “If it becomes a chore, then it’s no longer fun, but I still love every game I play.”

Still, this is not the first serious job Hess has had — he worked at New York hedge fund Fortress Investment Group LLC in the summer of 2008, analyzing the entertainment industry in a way he said was analogous to predicting future moves in chess.

Following in the footsteps of chess grandmasters Kenneth Rogoff ’75 MA ’75 and Patrick Wolff, who was a member of the class of 1991 before transferring to Harvard, Hess said he hoped to study finance at Yale.

Hess is currently in the semi-finals of US Chess Championships, which conclude Apr. 28. Camp Yale will kick off for the class of 2015 on Aug. 26.

Source: http://www.yaledailynews.com