A chess quiz: five formats with questions that work

A tournament measures playing strength. A quiz measures everything else: memory, how much chess you have watched, a good guess, the ability to argue a point at your own table. That is why a rated player and someone who last played at school end up on the same team without it feeling like charity.

The practical consequences are the reason people pick the format:

• Nobody is knocked out. Questions go to everyone at once. Get five wrong in a row and you are still in the game.
• Teams, not individuals. Four to six people per table, and arguing out loud becomes part of the fun rather than cheating.
• The clock is predictable. Ten questions take fifteen minutes, so an evening can be planned to the minute - which never works with a tournament.
• No board per person. Fifty players means fifty answer sheets and one screen, not twenty-five sets of pieces.

The honest downside: a quiz is not chess. Nobody plays a game all evening, so if the room wants to sit at a board, you need a final round for that - or a different format entirely.

The opening round of the evening. Ten questions, answers written on a sheet, one sheet per table. Difficulty climbs: the first three should be gettable by any team, the last two only by people who actually read about chess.

Here is what a working ten looks like.

Length: fifteen minutes for ten questions including marking. What you need: sheets, pens and somebody to read aloud.

The most chess-like round of the night. A position goes up on the screen, teams get a minute, and the answer is written in notation - or, if the room is mostly beginners, in words: «the knight takes the bishop on f7».

The key to stopping this becoming a duel between the two strongest players: use positions with one obvious-once-you-see-it answer, not studies. A good quiz position is mate in one, a knight fork, or a pin that is visible the moment you know to look for it.

Five positions that work almost every time:

• Scholar's mate. After 1.e4 e5 2.Bc4 Nc6 3.Qh5 Nf6??, the team has to find 4.Q:f7#. Everyone who once fell for it gets this one.
• A knight fork. One move attacks king and queen at once. Half the room hunts for a capture first and only then sees it.
• A pin. A bishop pins a knight against the king: the answer is not a capture but a second attacker.
• Rook and king mate. Mate is available in one, and teams spend the minute looking for a check instead.
• The greed trap. There is a free pawn and there is a way to win the exchange; only the second scores.

Positions are easiest to prepare in the chess board editor - set the pieces up and take the picture for the screen from there.

A round for people who watch chess rather than only play it. The host reads three moves from a famous game, or shows the final position, and the team names the players or the event. Score it in parts: a point for the players, another for the event, a third for the year.

Three questions that land even with an unprepared room:

Length: ten minutes for three questions, because every answer invites a story. Put this round in the middle of the evening - it is the talkative one.

The one round that needs no host and no answer sheets: everyone opens the app and solves puzzles against the clock. This is a ready-made quiz inside Vibe Chess - twenty puzzles, easy ones first. You start with five minutes; a correct solution adds ten seconds, a mistake takes five away. The run ends when the time or the puzzles do.

Results go up on the shared screen. The table updates while people are still solving: who has how many, and whose result has just pushed a colleague down. The room starts watching the screen and commenting - which turns solitary puzzle-solving into a shared event.

Besides points, every run earns a title: «sniper» for no mistakes, «marathoner» for reaching the furthest puzzle, «iceman» for thinking longest and getting it first time. The point is that the screen credits more than the winner.

One practical detail: the run happens on the phone and does not need a connection. Puzzles are loaded in advance and results upload when the network returns - so venue wi-fi collapsing under fifty simultaneous starts stops being a risk to the evening.

Length: a run is about five minutes; the whole round with rules and a debrief runs from twenty. It scales: a hundred people solve as easily as ten.

The last round, for when the evening should end with actual chess. One player from each team comes forward, games are three-minute blitz, and results feed the team score. Everyone else stands around and shouts - the loudest moment of the night.

A gentler variant for a room with no strong players: the relay. The team sits at one board and each person plays a single move before giving up the seat. The result is a game nobody controls from end to end, and it is funny even to people who cannot play.

You do not have to buy clocks for the blitz: a chess clock in the browser works on any two phones, with nothing to install and a fullscreen mode.

A two-hour programme, ordered by what each round asks of the room rather than by length: first everyone answers, then everyone thinks, and only then some people play.

1. 0:00-0:15. Trivia. Warm-up, tables get to know each other, everyone scores.
2. 0:15-0:35. Find the best move. Five positions, a minute each, explained straight after the answer.
3. 0:35-0:50. Name the game. The talkative round - schedule it before the break.
4. 0:50-1:05. Break. Not optional: without it the second hour sags.
5. 1:05-1:30. Puzzle sprint. Phones, screen, live table.
6. 1:30-1:55. Blitz or relay. A finale with spectators.
7. 1:55-2:00. Results. Totals across rounds, plus the titles from the sprint.

Scoring: one point per trivia question, two per position (there are fewer and they are harder), sprint places converted into descending points, and the game result for the blitz. That way no single round decides the evening on its own.

• Questions and answers on paper. Not on a phone: phones die at the least convenient moment.
• A screen or projector. For positions and the sprint table. Without a screen the position round does not work - you cannot describe a position out loud.
• Sheets and pens per table. Marking one sheet per team is far quicker than one answer per person.
• One set of pieces for the finale. Two or three if you have more than six teams.
• Somebody on scoring. The host cannot read questions and add up points at the same time - those are two jobs.

What you do not need: a hired tournament hall, a qualified arbiter, or a clock per table. A quiz runs in an ordinary cafe or a meeting room.

The Vibe Chess app takes over the part that usually puts organizers off: who is taking part, what the scores are, and getting them onto the screen.

• The puzzle sprint is a ready-made quiz. Twenty puzzles, the clock, penalties and bonuses, a live table and titles at the end. You can run it as a round tomorrow.
• Sign-ups. People add themselves through a link, so by the evening you know how many are coming and how many tables you need.
• A screen for the room. The results table goes to the projector as its own page - fullscreen, no interface around it.

More quizzes are coming to the app beyond the puzzle sprint. The formats in this article are what they are being built from: multiple-choice trivia, find-the-best-move with a position on screen, and naming famous games. The app itself is the easiest place to watch for them.

The app is free, runs in a browser and inside Telegram, and needs no club or arbiter status to host anything - here is how it works.