Olympiad Quiz!

Last week’s poll question was: ‘Is 3 points for a win a good system for chess?’ The vote was strongly ‘no’, but with some support in comments for ‘yes, but only occasionally and at the elite level’.

Poll-3points

This week’s poll will be a Quiz! Our quiz topic is the Baku Olympiad.

The prize is the same as always: ten Quality Chess books of your own choice and ten Quality Chess books of our choice (see our typical freebie list of books where we published too many copies compared to the audience; or undiscovered masterpieces, if you like). We will send it with FedEx or UPS to your home address.

Deadline: one hour before the start of play on September 2nd,Β 15.00 Baku time.

Quality Chess will be the final and only arbiter of what the correct answers are!Β In this event of a tie, the tiebreaker will be how close to correct you are on Question 3.

The entryΒ HAS to follow the following layout (see example below). If they do not, we will ignore your entry. The layout is based on making it easy to copy and paste it into an excel sheet. Here are the requirements:

Send an email to OlympiadQuiz2016@qualitychess.co.uk. Write whatever you want in the topic line; we will ignore it anyway…

NICKNAME
Answer 1
Answer 2

And so on. Each on a new line. Just the answer: number or one word.

Full name and address where you would like the books sent to. Please make sure that this is a place where someone can sign for the parcel. Updated with bold and underlining. No address, no entry!

If your entry does not follow this setup, sorry, you will not participate this time around. I do not want to spend time restructuring your entry in a competition where I donate the prizes :-).

The Questions:

Q1 Will Russia win the Women’s Olympiad?
Q2 Will any women player score a 2750 or higher performance?
Q3 Which place will Scotland finish?
Q4 Which place will China finish?
Q5 Which place will Russia finish?
Q6 How many games will Giri draw?
Q7 How many games will Carlsen play?
Q8 Will Scotland end above their seeding?
Q9 Will John, Colin and Andrew combined achieve their expected score?
Q10 Will Mihail Marin get a performance rating over 2600?
Q11 How many games will Sam Shankland play for the US?
Q12 Will any player score a 2850 or higher performance?
Q13 How many norms will the Iranian team score?
Q14 How many individual games will the winning team lose?
Q15 Will any player be caught cheating?

Note that Questions 3-15 refer only to the Open section.

Example of entry:

JohntheBoss
Yes
Yes
50
3
2
7
9
Yes
Yes
Yes
8
Yes
2
2
Yes

John Shaw
Quality Chess UK Ltd
Suite 247
11 Bothwell Street
Glasgow
G2 6LY
United Kingdom
+44 141 204 2073

Good luck!

33 thoughts on “Olympiad Quiz!”

  1. “Q9 Will John, Colin and Andrew combined meet their expected score?”

    There is an “expected score” in FIDE ratings: it’s what you are expected to score based on your rating and the rating of your opponents. e.g. If I play one game against an opponent who is rated exactly the same as me, then my expected score is 0.5.

    Q9: Will John, Colin and Andrew score more than our combined expected score? If we will do this (or exactly equal our expected score) then “Yes”. If you think we will score less than our expected score then “no”.

    Q9 Rough version: “Do you think John, Colin and Andrew will play better than usual?” Yes or No.

    I will maybe change “meet” to “achieve”: same meaning, but perhaps more widely understood.

  2. “Will any player be caught cheating? ”

    At least one Olympiad cheater got caught only months and months later…

    Also, some players are also delegates at the FIDE congress. Does this not automatically qualify as cheating??

    πŸ˜‰

  3. @Claude
    You are not corrupt because you vote in the US election, so no on the second count. And no, we do not revisit the results if something like Feller’s case comes up. We will find the winner once everyone is back and we get around to it. Anything that happens thereafter is irrelevant.

  4. Jesse Gersenson

    Here’s hoping noone ties with me; my answer to Q3 was “Finnegans, a pub on “ƏlizadΙ™ kΓΌΓ§” (street) beer from AZN5″!

  5. Q13 How many norms will the Iranian team score?

    If a GM scores an IM/GM norm, does that count?
    Likewise, if an IM scores an IM norm, does that count? (What about a GM norm then, does it count 2?)

    If the answer to the questions above is “no”:
    If Maghsoodloo (2576 Elo, no title) scores a norm, even an IM one, does that count?

  6. So far three people have been asked to refill their entry and one been told off and accepted. Everyone else, 31, have been accepted so far.

    Please spread the link for this competition on social media and to your friends…

  7. Actually the case with Maghsoodloo is a bit more complicated because he will become IM during the Olympiad (the application is already there and shall be accepted at the Congress which is being held during the Olympiad).

  8. Ivan Maxmillian

    Jacob, John, and all of Quality Chess Team, you should do this quiz frequently, so i can get free books πŸ˜›

  9. Ivan Maxmillian

    I’m sorry before, about the prizes :P, i found this sentence

    “The prize is the same as always: ten Quality Chess books of your own choice and ten Quality Chess books of our choice (see our typical freebie list of books where we published too many copies compared to the audience; or undiscovered masterpieces, if you like).”

    The word “typical freebie list”,what is the meaning? only free books or…? i’m sorry, my english not so good. and second, for the winner outside europe, the shipping tax is free?

    Thanks before!

  10. @Ivan Maxmillian

    The winner will get 20 books in total: 10 books chosen by the winner, and 10 books chosen by Quality Chess. The suggestion with “freebie list” is that the 10 books chosen by Quality Chess will probably involve mainly books from the list we offer free, if you buy 3 other books at the same time. See the following blog post: http://www.qualitychess.co.uk/blog/4626

    “second, for the winner outside europe, the shipping tax is free?”

    The winner does not pay any shipping cost or any other cost.

  11. It is interesting that about 20% have not managed to follow the instructions. Most got it the second time round though πŸ™‚

  12. The best scoring system is:
    2 points for a win.
    0 points for a draw.
    -1 point for a loss.

    This is the most effective way to encourage and reward winning, while providing no room to draw your way to victory. The current scoring method deficiency is allowing a point earned for a draw while a loss does not have any negative impact (currently at 0 its neutral); a big difference. This scoring was first introduced in pro golf for a special yearly golf event. I think it was called the skins event.

  13. 2/0/-1 is exactly the same as 3/1/0 except for getting penalized one point for playing a game.

    Skins is something else, where you have a pot per hole that is awarded only if there is a single winner, otherwise it’s rolled over and added to the pot for the next hole.

  14. Q13 is very tricky, since two of the Iranian players will compete without titles, but will have their IM titles confirmed during the Olympiad at the Congress.

    Will IM Norms by them be scored as norms?

  15. “Q15 Will any player be caught cheating?”

    Please define cheating: is it

    a) usage of any sort of electronic device which can suggest moves (“electronic doping”) ?
    b) a positive doping/drug test (in case players are tested on this) ?
    c) any other kind of over-the-board-cheating (e.g. deliberatly displacing pieces, or denying having touched a piece although he/she did) ?

    Thanks for your fast answer.

    Btw, really cool quiz πŸ˜‰

  16. Jacob Aagaard :
    It is interesting that about 20% have not managed to follow the instructions. Most got it the second time round though

    Do you say to them that they send it in a badly manner?

  17. Well done the Scottish boys and good try from the women…. Teach the Open team to do so well but bring on the US! Try replacing Hikaru’s Red Bull with Buckfast perhaps?Any time to send any killer novelties to give Naka,Fabi etc food for thought?

  18. Re q15. If this Japanese guy was merely “cautioned” (as per Tarjei on Twitter) the answer is surely still “no”. πŸ™‚

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