2019 Christmas Quiz - the Answers!

I think everyone has suffered enough, and its time to put you all out of your misery with the answers. Or at least some answers, since it turns out that the level of incompetence displayed by the quiz setter was actually off the scale. We owe this knowledge to the one and only Joshua Pink, who - not content with attempting to solve the quiz in the normal manner - devoted his Christmas holidays to writing a computer program to interrogate my short story and check it against the FIDE rating list of titled players! I bet he's a fun person to play Charades or Monopoly with.

Anyway, the distressing outcome of this hi-tech exercise was that Mr Pink found somewhere close to 600 hidden names compared to my last assessment of 328. Which was itself more than double my initial estimate when I set the quiz! Luckily, the full 600 name solution remains solely in the possession of Mr Pink, where I hope it will stay, but it does fall to me to provide the "human" answers. So here is the list of the GMs, IMs and KCC members I challenged you to find, with the number of instances they appeared in the short story. How many did you find?!

41 live + 4 deceased GMs

Michael Adams 1

Zoltan Almasi 1

Bassem Amin 1

Vishy Anand 1

David Anton 1

Tal Baron 2

Benjamin Bok 1

Bu Xiangzhi 6

Emre Can 1

Jorge Cori 1

Ding Liren 3

Daniil Dubov 1

Jan Krzysztof Duda 1

Jon Ludwig Hammer 1

Vlastimil Hort 1

Hou Yifan 4

David Howell 1

James Howell 1

Ju Wenjun 2

Danny King 5

Erwin L’Ami 1

Le Quang Liem 17

Li Di 22

Li Chao B 22

Li Shilong 22

Lin Chen 5

Ma Qun 11

Ni Hua 7

Alexandr Predke 2

Markus Ragger 1

Richard Rapport 1

Ray Robson 1

Ivan Saric 1

Nigel Short 1

Wesley So 7

Tan Zhongyi 1

Wang Hao 1

Wang Yue 1

Chris Ward 1

Wei Yi 1

Yu Yangyi 1

Tony Miles 1

Gyula Sax 1

Leonid Stein 1

Mikhail Tal 2

168 GM references

14 IMs

Robert Bellin 1

Isik Can 1

Werner Hug 1

Ilya Kan 2

Li Bo 22

Li Ruofan 22

Li Wenliang 22

Li Yankai 22

Li Zunian 22

Lin Ta 5

Lin Weiguo 5

Lin Ye 5

Robert Ris 5

Simon Webb 1

136 IM references

13 KCC members

John Ambler 1

Mike Donnelly 1

Billy Fellowes 1

Ben Graff 1

Bruce Holland 1

Tony King 5

Paul Lam 8

William Morris 1

Mark Page 1

David Phillips 1

Joshua Pink 1

Andy Ward 1

Rod Webb 1

24 KCC references

Total 328 references

Theoretically I could post a copy of the original short story with all these hidden names highlighted (just to prove they are all there!), but as there are names within names, and names within names within names, I fear I would need so many colours that it would all look like one big mess, and I'm sure no-one wants to see the KCC website brought into such disrepute.

Right, that wraps up the third annual KCC Christmas Quiz, leaving me with about 11 months to come up with the 2020 version.  Whether that will be enough is anyone's guess, since at the moment I don't have a single idea!