Answers to ‘The Chess Pit’ Quiz
1a) Iceland (13 GMs from a population of 364,000)
1b) Cuba (28 GMs from a population of 11.48 million)
2) Sean Ingle. He was the guest on Episode 4 of The Chess Pit.
3) David Howell at the age of 8 – he beat GM John Nunn in a blitz game at the 1998 Mindsports Olympiad
4) Brazil’s Enrique Mecking – he lost in the Candidates Quarter-Finals to Lev Polugaevsky in 1977.
5) The chariot (rukh in Arabic). It was a piece in the ancient game of shatranj.
6) GM Alexander Khalifman (Russia). He won the 1999 FIDE Knockout World Championship in Las Vegas.
7) It leaps to any square (including the one it is already on).
8) The Chancellor of the Exchequer, which was a term imported from France to England after the Norman conquest. It comes from a counting table for taxes, which resembled a chess table (échiquier in French).
9) Artur Yusupov.
10) Half Man Half Biscuit. The single was on the 2008 album ‘CSI: Ambleside’.