Demanding a jet-set lifestyle (Which already pays far _too much_!) for playing a _game_ is utterly ridiculous. Same with soccer or anything else.
Not to mention the catastrophic environmental impact. Everyone keeps virtue-signaling about saving energy at home, but that's at best a logical failure, at worst deliberately misleading. One such event wastes more resources than a normal human being will waste in his entire life!
Germany, a country labelled 'rich' and '1st world' etc., has _millions_ of starving people, and _more than a whole million_ of homeless, according to already prettified official government numbers in 2019, way before these disastrous three last years. Nobody cares, none, nothing is done to help actual human beings. Pretty propaganda, incl. artificially hyped up media events, 'sports' distracting from the truth. Not chess, soccer is bigger. Same nature. Squeeze the last few pennies out of people and hide reality until there is another 1933. Full circle.
But sure, demand luxury for playing a game. What a joke. Chess, like every other hobby, is a _privilege_ in the first place. Few people get to pursue their hobbies more than occasionally, or practice any hobby at all. Chess can at least be a nice pastime for common people, as digital games are available for free, and even a makeshift paper board will do for games with friends in real life.
No such thing as a 'professional'. Can't laugh enough. I've met WW2 survivors who happened to like playing chess, and did so with random kids in the park, for fun. Turned out, many were GM level. They never once asked for money or fame. One guy didn't even know he was at that arbitrary cutoff - he had never touched a computer or played a tournament, so he never saw his ELO. He merely played with his father for fun and kept on.
Is everything monetized these days? No limit to post-industrial selfishness. The most useless 'jobs' are paid well, while real people suffer. Ask yourself if your 'job' constitutes a naturally beneficial task, and you may find out you're nothing, but a leech, after all. No modern jobs are, the vast majority being sales related one way or another, not actual production of necessities. But demanding being paid for a _game_ is truly peak ego. Especially a game you already have to be born privileged for to even get up to rank in the first place. No normal person can just sit and play a game, day in, day out, before he is retired. And even that is not so much a thing anymore, with many German pensioners digging in the trash for food. (Which is even illegal, so they can lose what little they have in fines, to add injury to insult!)
Replying to my previous poster: ChatGPT and 'AI' are extremely overrated, that's just a hype pushed for profit. All they are is large scale brute force, aka throwing money at the problem. Nothing remotely intelligent to it. If you can read, and don't mind boring lego, then you can replicate every single fancy headline yourself. If you have a programming background, make it a weekend project to destroy that illusion. You're not going to have the funds needed to train a good set in the end, though, but you'll know how it works.
Hand-written chess engines are much more impressive, hand-written algorithms in general. There are tiny, ultra-fast engines that still beat every human. Stockfish only recently got a NN, it was already excellent before. Dozens of 'amateur' engines still beat 99% of humans on earth, even with low computing power. Remember the first digital chessboards? Your phone would inhale that chip, yet e.g. this one from 1994 already had a 2405 ELO.
www.schach-computer.info/wiki/index.php?title=Tasc_R40Coming from a tech background, I do not fear 'AI', I fear what clueless bureaucrats do with it, such as taking peoples' livelihoods based on profiling. Several countries let algorithms decide if you get 'benefits' needed to eat, or not. Conveniently implicitly blaming the computer, instead of the guy who clearly ordered the outcome. All the 'AI' advocates do is dehumanize us, pretend mere brute force can constitute a human being. I've played with just about any fancy tech, built stuff myself, it quickly loses its magic, when you see it. Related to typical behaviour like Zuckerberg taping over his own cam, or FANG trillionaires in general not allowing their own kids the tech time they push on consumers.
Before anyone comments on my 'rating': Sometimes I like casually playing while working on something else in another window. No time to learn all day. Playing 'live' still gives me a rush that kills me. That's kind of the fun of it.
Cheers