Friday, 2 October 2020

Prediction competition

For anyone with a chess24 subscription, they are currently running a very interesting series on the top 50 chess players of all time (as picked by Jan Gustafsson and Peter Heine Nielson) - https://chess24.com/en/learn/advanced/video/hall-of-fame-the-50-greatest-chess-players-of-all-time/intro-50-great-players

They are releasing 2 new videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and as of yesterday the list stood at:

50. Niezowitsch    49. Karjakin    48. Portisch    47. Polugaevsky    46. Kamsky    45. Moroczy    44. Leko    43. Winawer    42. Najdorf    41. Timman    40. Chigorn    39. Gelfand    38. Geller    37. Pillsbury

As part of yesterday's Thursday night chess session, Mark and myself had a go at prediction who the remaining 36 choices are going to be. We independently came up with 27 names in common:

Fischer, Kasparov, Karpov, Capablacna, Alekhine, Morphy, Steinitz, Lasker, Euwe, Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrossian, Spassky, Kramnik, Anand, Carlsen, Topalov, Caruana, Bronstein, Rubinstein, Korchnoi, Keres, Larsen, Aronian, Polgar and Bogoljubov

That leaves 9 differences to see which of us has the greater chess knowledge.

Mark's remaining 9: Ding, Svidler, Fine, Short, Grischuk, Radjabov, Nakamura, Adams, So

My remaining 9: Tarrasch, Ivanchuk, Zukertort, Shirov, Staunton, Schlechter, Beliavsky, Taimanov, Morozevich

Other than showing I have a much better classical chess education than Mark, and I can remember peopel from more than 15 minutes ago, we shall see which one of us has done a better job. Others are welcome to join in the competition, but since I'm certain to get all 36 correct, I don't envy your chances of winning.

Update: Two more names got announced today - Schlechter and Ivanchuk. I haven't double checked the maths yet, but I believe that puts me 2-0 ahead already.

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