Asset managers to square off at global chess championship

This weekend, big brains from some of the biggest asset managers and banking giants are converging in New York in a battle for supremacy – and it’s not about beating the market or taking market share.

At the FIDE World Corporate Chess Championship, teams from Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Google, and Deutsche Bank, among others, will compete to be recognized by the chess governing body as the "smartest company in the world," according to the Wall Street Journal. A total of 12 teams are taking part in the tournament, with players coming in from across the world.

The post-pandemic resurgence in chess’s popularity, fueled in part by easy-to-use chess apps, has resonated with quant specialists at Silicon Valley firms and financial services titans, where the level of play serves as an emphatic reminder that the game is, in fact, also a sport.

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

According to the Journal, the tournament rules allow each team only one player rated above 2400, the threshold for FIDE international masters. Goldman Sachs has been uniquely handicapped by that: the firm employs two players rated above 2400, which means one of its aces has to stay in the hole.

Len Ioffe, a portfolio manager at Goldman’s quantitative strategy group who’s been in the industry for 26 years, has been a mainstay since 2000. One memorable moment for Ioffe was when Susan Polgar, the former Women’s World Chess Champion, visited in 2005 to play simultaneous games against 23 Goldman employees. Polgar won 20, drew two, and lost one—to Ioffe.

High-speed trading firm Susquehanna International Group, another contender, has a pool of nearly 100 players to choose from. When it qualified for the tournament, the team included American grandmaster Andrew Tang, who was an intern at the time.

“Chess is a big part of the culture at SIG,” team captain Ella Papanek said to the Journal. “At least 10 percent of the firm plays chess in some capacity.”

Adding to the excitement, teams are allowed one nonemployee player. This year, Susquehanna has enlisted American grandmaster Sam Shankland, a former US national champion who’s published a number of books on chess strategy.

“Honestly, I don’t know what Sam Shankland is doing in this tournament,” Adeyemi remarked. “But great for him…it’s amazing to be in the same space as some of those guys.”