We know you’ve been aching to find out the final results of our first Hand and Brain + Chess Who? quiz night.
Finally, here they are.
The event was held on Tuesday at the club and featured eight rounds of Hand and Brain – where players compete in pairs with the “brain” choosing a piece and the “hand” deciding where to move it – interspersed with Chess Who? quiz questions.
The quiz took the form of 55 drawings of famous chess personalities shown on the big screen which participants had to guess.
Unsurprisingly as they were top seeds, Ali Hill and Ryan Benguelo ran out clear winners despite losing their last error-strewn final game.
At 133, Ryan is massively under-rated having beaten every opponent that he faced in the Battersea Team Rapids event and Ali is one of our top players.
Two teams shared second place, two points behind Ali and Ryan. They were the Battersea chess twins Bill Drennan and Duncan Kerr and FM Adam Taylor and Leon Watson.
Your correspondent must admit he had something of an advantage in the Chess Who? quiz having met many of the famous faces who are still alive, but both Adam and his fine partner struggled with some of the older players.
As brothers, the Stoyanovs, Viktor and Boris, should have been the most in-sync over the board and finished third. In the quiz, they excelled at identifying the more modern players and social media chess faces that showed up.
The Force should have been strong with master and pupil pair of Obi Wan Chris Beckett and Denis Dupuis Skywalker and they weren’t in a galaxy far, far away at all finishing a creditable fifth.
The two chums Midhun Unnikrishnan and Gregg Hutchence also know each others’ games very well and were exceptional in the Chess Who? quiz, but only got 50% in the Hand and Brain to finish 6th overall.
Emil Todorow and Richard Murphy were the lowest rated pair with a combined grade of 251 ECF and, at least in theory, the bottom seeds. Emil knew his chess legends but struggled with the more modern faces.
Joel Morales came in last-minute to team up with Tim Wells and the pair – one of the more evenly matched in the competition – got a good bunch of wins to their names.
Blair Connell and newboy Tom Craven, the lowest rated player in the field, started badly but managed to pull a very impressive three wins out of their last four games. A great achievement considering this was only Tom’s second visit to the club.
Someone had to finish bottom of the quiz. And it was Paul Stokes and Tim Valentine. They weren’t slouching in the Hand and Brain though and picked up three victories.
The AA batteries Arnold Hunt and Alan Palmer seemed to run out of juice and struggled a bit on the quiz section with some of the past champions which left them propping up the field.
Apologies if the final table below is a little small…
Hand and brain results
Chess Who? results
Final combined results
