Siddharth is an elite chess player who recently won a major international tournament. He spent his entire youth studying chess theory, playing online matches, and participating in local clubs. Siddharth’s father is a grandmaster, and from a very young age, Siddharth’s coaches remarked on his extraordinary working memory capacity and visual-spatial processing speed.

Siddharth's classmate, Liam, has never enjoyed chess or strategy board games. He prefers writing fantasy novels on his typewriter and has done so for years. Liam's mother is a literature professor who writes historical fiction. During his childhood, Liam's school forced him to participate in an after-school chess club and provided him with professional coaching, but he showed no interest and routinely skipped the sessions.