Q&A with Kyle Kramer, Senior Insights and Research Manager, Anzu.io

Editor’s note: Nancy Cox is the founder of Research Story Consulting and former CPG corporate researcher. Her work and play include words, sketchpads, cooking (not baking) and the occasional sock puppet.

Passions, hobbies, healthy distractions and even guilty pleasures – discover how the research community plays and how that plays out in their work life. In the Venn diagram of work and play, what happens when work and play overlap? Research colleagues share their work and play stories in this interview series by Nancy Cox. 

Hello to Kyle Kramer, senior insights and research manager, Anzu.io

What is the “play” in your life?

My play is chess. It’s a game with a simple goal and straightforward rules yet you can spend your whole life getting better. It’s also a game you can enjoy, set aside and then return to again. That’s my story. I discovered chess from a library book as a child, hounded my dad into playing games with me and then didn’t play again until the pandemic. The pandemic, not surprisingly, helped create an overall surge of interest in chess especially due to the TV series, “The Queen’s Gambit.”

Chess is an easy game to fit into life. I’m lucky to live in New York where many bars have chess sets and there are also dedicated chess clubs. But I also play online or do a hybrid – a daily game where I am playing an online competitor but also have my physical board, my glass set from childhood, set up where I can study the board before making my move.

Over 25 years ago, a computer beat a human – Deep Blue vs. Garry Kasparov – in chess. Chess became a “solved” game with known best moves and today your smartphone or even your watch can beat you every time. Yet, computers didn’t kill chess for humans. Instead, computers opened us up to knowledge sharing. That might be a comforting example for researchers who feel that AI and other technologies are a threat vs. a benefit.

When I play online, I get a data smorgasbord about my individual play. I get data on what time of day or day of the week I play best. Not only do I get this aggregate data across over a thousand games, but I can also get an analysis of each game, move by move. Best of all, I can track my progress.

The best human players also share their knowledge. Players like Magnus Carlsen have YouTube channels. By comparison, if I wanted to learn from tennis champion Rafael Nadal, I’d need to go to his academy in Spain. 

How has your play influenced your research work?

I tell people that I’m lucky that I’ve been able to turn the way my brain works into a career – analyzing data, spreadsheets and finding the interesting nugget. Chess offers that same data satisfaction, or distraction, as there’s a lot of data.

Beyond the data, playing chess and doing good research requires understanding human behavior. Chess reveals that we all have biases, cognitive blind spots, such as when a player focuses on the piece the opponent just moved. That focus blocks the player from seeing what becomes the dreaded “discovered attack” from a more dangerous piece lurking behind the moved piece. 

Making that type of mistake in chess reminds me that it’s not enough to have all the great in-game data, NPS data, in my work as a researcher. To understand the human aspect, I must also do one-on-one interviews with our gamers, our audience at Anzu.io. What are the human factors that go with the data nuggets?

And yes, my chess-playing did work well for me when I was switching jobs last year. Not so much because it’s a gaming company but on a personal level as the interviewers were also chess players. Again, a human component.

What would you tell readers who want to know more about your area of play?

Playing chess online is easy – there are three dominant sites, and I happen to prefer Chess.com and it has a freemium model so you can preview the play. Sites match you with players at your skill level, so you won’t get crushed.

Playing in person is also an option as most areas have local chess clubs that offer meet-ups. This adds the social side of chess. Remember that most in-person chess games are not tournaments although that is also an option as you progress in your skills. And speaking of tournaments, I would say that the old joke about the worst person to play against in a chess tournament is a 12-year-old is true. They will beat you and make you feel bad!