Can Mark Rober Beat A Blindfolded Chess Master?

We made some for you in honor of the chess bot. Okay, let's see. And everything, we're gonna unveil it in the best unboxing way we can here, but it's a... Oh, custom Crunchlabs. There I am. Are we gonna play a game? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. You have to be blindfolded. You're up 2,500. I can do that. Really? Yeah, I'm gonna sit right here and play Mark blindfolded. All right. No way. And you know what? I'm gonna turn around. Just kidding. All right, E4. Best by test. I was hoping you'd do that. I went E5. Do I have to announce my moves? So you have to announce your moves, and I just keep tracking the game in my head. So I'm gonna play Knight F3. You know, maybe I think I need to do something really weird, because that's gonna make it harder for him to remember, right? Okay, he's never gonna see this coming. A6. All right, Knight takes E5. Oh, shoot. Gotta look at his moves too. Okay, I'm abandoning that trick. You think that was a mistake on my part, but I'm hustling you. Bishop to C4. No, you're not giving me the Scholar's Mate. I even know the name of that. So there. Now it's gonna get fun. I'm gonna play. I'm gonna calculate. And I'm gonna play Knight takes F7. I think I only have one move here. King takes back. Now you bring your queen out. I'm gonna go Queen F3. Check. I'm gonna do that. King to E6. Knight to C3. I'm saying pawn to C6. All right, I'm gonna castle king side. Oh, chicken. Coward's way out. You better not move your king over and cover Mark Rober on H1. I'll be very offended. I feel like my king is exposed. I'm not gonna lie. Knight to D7. Knight takes D5. Yeah, dang it. I shouldn't have blocked that. Let's try Knight to F6. I wonder how many times in this game I've gotten the double red question mark. Knight takes F6 with check. Now I'm gonna play rook to E1 check. I knew it. It's not. It's what? That's how you use all your pieces, kids. That's what I was gonna say. But are you gonna say that's checkmate? No, it's not checkmate. Okay. Not yet. It's not quite checkmate on the next move. King to D6. Queen to F4 check. My only move. King to C5. Which is king to C5. I'll say it, thank you very much. I'm gonna play B4 check. Oh, really? Well, guess what you just did? A little thing called a hanging pawn. Big mistake, pal. King takes it. I love it. That's called a free pawn. I am gonna play rook to B1 check. Exactly what I was hoping for. I'll play king to A5. Queen to E5 check. Pawn to B5. Yeah. Rook takes B5. What? Interesting. Oh, I forgot you played A6. Pawn takes. Okay. Which pawn takes on B5? Oh, good point. The A file pawn. Okay. That was what I forgot. Okay. See, that's what happens in Blindfold Chess. Yeah, let's go, Mark Rober! We got a game here. Okay. I forgot that the move that put us on this whole path was the move A6 on move two. And it came back to haunt me, the hustle. You think that was a mistake on my part, but I'm hustling you. Because how and why would there be a pawn on A6 in this position? Yes! It actually worked! You got it. Oh, my gosh. Everything's gonna be okay. That is so interesting. That does show how, like, the heuristics just, like... It is, like, it is a pattern recognition. Like, there's no world that I was thinking the pawn was there. So now I have to think about it. Hold on. That's hilarious. I feel like, I'm sure someone else would have explained it this way, but, like, for me, I look at, like, a page of text. Like, they look at a sentence, and you can remember a sentence, like, the brown fox bunch over the blue fence, like a chess master sees it, where I'm like, okay, there's a T. And next, there's an H. And I have to memorize there's an E, and it's random. They could immediately look at that sentence and memorize the whole thing, right? Chess, at a high level, is actually much more, like, language than it is, like, a complex math problem. Right. Like, you're, when you're a speed reader, you know the language, you're almost looking, you're reading the words in, like, large groups versus people who are sounding out the letters, right? 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a really, that's a really good analogy that, and again, when there's, like, a random, you know, landmine there on A6 that is, like, I forgot. It's like a comma appeared in a weird place, or a weird spelling of a word. Yep. All right, knight on F6, which now you're gonna take if I don't move it to safety, and I lost my mating net. So I'm gonna play knight on F6 to E8. Hilarious, because I was like, I thought it was moments away from the king hunt being over with rook takes B5. I forgot the pawn was on A6. I was like, he's mated, like, LOL. Here we are, Crunch Labs. The content continues. Rook captures on A2. Because it's unprotected. Pawn to C4. It's explosive. Rook A5. That would be two blue exclamation marks on your lovely app. Queen to B8, check. What have you done? I, uh, I'm back on the grind here. I'm back on the hunt. Yeah, you're back on the hunt. Oh no, that escalated very quickly. I had such a nice reprieve. Maybe we'll just do three move repetition. You're gonna take the draw because you're so nervous. King to A6. Oh, crap. Knight to C7, check. I saw that right after I moved. It hurt me as much as it hurt you to win your queen. I'm just kidding. It actually felt really good. You gotta give up the lady. Queen to C7. Queen, my queen takes C7. Queen takes C7. I just want to say, Mark Rovers lasted pretty long in this game. He has, actually. Bishop to C5. C takes B5, check. I take back with my rook, B5. Queen takes C6, check. Oh no, I block with my bishop on B6. Bishop takes B5, check. Rook to E7, check. If you make a wrong move, I win, right? That's right. I thought I had you there. I move my king to B8. Queen takes B6, check. I'm not going without a fight. I move my king to A8. And queen to A7 is... You jerk! Okay, but look how far I made it. You made it super far. That was actually... I love where your king ended up on checkmate. Oh yeah, right on Crunch Labs. There it is. And look at that. Mark looks good over here. After he tricked me with A6, I didn't feel like this was a cheeky game anymore. I'm like, okay, I can't afford the moment I played rook takes B5 and then remembered. I was like, uh-oh. It literally fit perfect into what you were saying earlier. The pattern recognition? The pattern recognition. It's very real. In fact, there's been famous cases where the best players in the world have missed basic checkmates purely because it was just a unique pattern that you wouldn't even see in a puzzle book. Things where a knight moves backwards from a corner to checkmate a king in the middle where it never happens. It's like, how could a world champion missmate one? That's how it happens. It always throws me off when Hikaru or someone's playing and he's like, like they could tell they're playing it's computer. Yeah, yeah. Because it's just weird positions and moves and that's it. It's like reading a text. It's like, wait, I've never seen that word before. A human being doesn't talk like that. Yeah, a human being doesn't talk like that. Or like watching dialogue at a bad movie where they're saying things and you're like, that's not how we speak. All right, man. Okay, well, thank you. Thanks for having us. Lovely having you out here. Lovechess.com. Keep up the good work. Thank you. Okay, exits that way. There we go. Yeah, if you beat me at chess, you got to let yourself out. Get out of here.