Our World Cup Quiz would have run more smoothly if we had hired a lawyer to draft unambiguous questions. Two of our three hurdle questions eliminated nobody. Only Grünfeld fans were killed off early on.
Below are what I believe to be the correct answers to all the questions. Before we assess your efforts, and then declare a winner, it seems wisely paranoid to check with our eagle-eyed blog readers that all the answers below are true. Any disagreements or ambiguities?
Hurdle Questions
A: What will the most common opening move be in Round 1 (excluding playoffs): 1.e4 or 1.d4 or neither? A 50-50 draw between 1.e4 and 1.d4, so you could make a case for all 3 answers being right, so we ignore this question.
B: Which English player will go further: Gawain Jones or David Howell? (if knocked out at same stage then which one has played more moves is the tiebreak) Both knocked out in Round 1. Gawain played more moves, but David survived one more day, so is that going further? No ideal answer, so we also ignore this question.
C: Which opening will be more common in Round 3 (excluding playoffs)? Grunfeld or Caro-Kann or tie? CARO-KANN. Eliminated if you said Grunfeld or tie.
Main Competition Questions:
1. Who will win the World Cup (3 points)? ARONIAN
2. How many top seeds (1-64) will be knocked out in Round 1? 11
3. How many Round 2 matches will end in Armageddon Blitz? 0
4. Predict the four semi-finalists. (2 points per correct answer) ARONIAN, DING LIREN, SO, VACHIER-LAGRAVE (also accepting MVL)
5. Which round will Levon Aronian reach? FINAL
6. How many 1-1 draws will Anish Giri have? 2
7. How many Black wins will there be in Round 4 (excluding playoffs)? 2
8. Predict the score: Dreev – Bachmann (excluding playoffs) 2-0
9. Predict the score: Motylev – Xiong (excluding playoffs) 1.5-0.5
10. Predict the score: Hou Yifan – Piorun (excluding playoffs) 1.5-0.5
11. How many Russians will there be in Round 3? 9
12. Who will be the youngest quarter finalist? RAPPORT
13. How many non-European players will make it to the 4th round? 4 (3 Chinese and 1 American; note Israel counts as European for our quiz)
14. Which home player (Georgian) will go furthest? JOBAVA
Tiebreaker: How many moves will there be in the longest game? 130
### off-topic: New in Chess reivew of Pert’s “Playing the Ragozin” ###
GM Sadler – 4 out of 5 stars:
– is a more standard opening
book and reaches the customary high
standard of Quality Chess opening
manuals, which probably says enough
already
– does his utmost to draw
up a repertoire that is more than an
equalizing tool
– In the good old pre-computer
days, this would be a repertory that
could easily have kept you going for
10 years!
–
I never investigated the three hurdle questions or the final tiebreaker question, so I have no opinion on those. I agree with all 14 answers to the main competition questions.
The World Cup was quite unpredictable to me 🙂 I didn’t go through ‘hurdle questions’ as I put on Grunfeld… and from the ‘main competition questions’ I scored only 5 points.
The easy question was maybe 14 but all the other were really tough.
@Randy
Hi Randy, Thanks for checking. We will get counting and declare a winner in the next day or two.
I won’t win this for sure, I’m not even sure I got anything right but the two ambiguous hurdle-questions!
What I should have bet on instead was that “Playing 1.e4 Vol. II” wouldn’t appear this year – I would have bet money on that month ago, but never sought actively for someone who wants to bet against me. I could have made real money out of that… Jacob would have bet against me more sure!
Since it’s too late to make money on that bet any longer, I want the book by Christmas after all. Which means: John, BACK TO THE DUNGEON, and turn off WiFi down there, database updates can be provided to you by Morse code!