The 2022 Holiday Puzzler: Answers and Tips

The Chess.com Holiday Puzzler is an annual tradition where players compete in a quiz and see who can get the most correct.

The 2022 Puzzler has ended.

Refer to this article for the details of this competition with 10 full perfect scorers. This blog is an interview on how they complete the puzzler, as well as my personal experience.
There are 20 questions in total. I managed to get 16/20 in this quiz.

In this blog I cover an interview with the winner, as well as some of what I did to get answers. 

Interesting Questions

Which ingredient of traditional Christmas fruitcake did Magnus Carlsen claim in 2014 made him the strongest man in the world?

I searched through his reddit.

15. Which fish did Garry Kasparov say he ate regularly for breakfast in his "younger years"?

The hardest was Qn 12, which turned out to be Stockfish, the Number 1 chess engine. Now I know why they wrote this...how did I not think of it!

"Use capital letters for proper nouns. For human chess players, use only first and last names in that order using plain letters only (no accent marks or titles). For engines, do not use version numbers. For moves, use short algebraic notation (e.g. Qe4)."
How did I not think it could be an engine and I just wrote Hikaru Nakamura because i did not know the answer...

12. Who played White in this 2022 chess game with a rapid time control?

Answer found here. The correct answer was the best chess engine, @Stockfish, in the Chess.com Computer Chess Championship (CCCC).

Here is an interview with @GMHunter9, one of the winners in the game.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How did you feel about the game, and what was the most challenging question to you?
"it was interesting... and it took me 10 hours to find all the answers except number 12. I looked for it for 7 days each day about 20 min to find it."

How did you know Qn 12 was a computer game and not a human, that made you search it up?
"bcz it should be resignable before the last move"

What do you use to search?
secret stuff

How I found other answers

For the handshake and image questions such as Qn 11 and 17, you just need to look close at the details.

Basically its Magnus Carlsen because the sponsor is NES Fircraft which sponsors Norway Chess, if you google nes fircroft magnus carlsen.

For Question 11, I searched through google for images related to the Woman Candidates Tournament, and I managed to find it.

19. Which chess grandmaster scored a victory for humanity in a historic game against an early computer engine by using a beautiful windmill tactic in the middlegame, after the computer accepted the King's Gambit in the opening, leading to a checkmate on move 23?

   I wrote David Levy because of Chat GPT

"If you'd find the game you'd know master (Levy indeed played computers a lot, and even made a bet, but that wasn't him) and that computer was M20, veeery old happy.png. But game was supposed to be after working transistors inventing grin.png, cause I don't think machine would be made using old electron lamps. EDIT: I was curious, so checked and THERE WAS old electron lamps (or as they named it - electronic tubes) despite it was constructed when transistors was avaiable already." - @B00mbeer

I feel that this quiz is very challenging and the winners should be proud of this victory and deserve their prize of a year of Chess.com membership. They really spent a lot of effort in the quiz, I thought I tried enough to get 16/20, but there are more hardworking people out there to be the best of the best. I enjoyed this year's quiz, and looking forward to next year! Thank you so much @Pete for doing this too. Looking forward to next year as always!

How did you do for this quiz? Let me know in comments! If you want to join a small group to do the next year Puzzler in discord, dm me! But if you really can do this on your own then...nvm.

See if next year I can do better. Hope you enjoyed this blog .As always, cheers, and good luck for the new year.