Rapid finishes

Of late we've had a couple of posts that have touched on the subject of the number of quick draws in Mexico 07 (see here and here).

While doing some practice number crunching for some stats homework, I was quite surprised to discover the following:-

Number of games played ................. 56
Total number of moves played ......... 2209
Average number of moves per game .... 39.45

Which doesn't sound too bad does it?

I wondered whether the 100 move draw that was Leko-Gelfand from round 3 affected the figures unduly. As it turns out, though, the median* is 40 and even if we ignore Leko-Gelfand altogether the average still comes out at 38.35. Perhaps there weren't so many short games afterall?



Now let's move on to another kind of quick finish.

Had the World Championship tournament finished in a tie then this time a week ago, the title would have been settled with a series of rapid play games.

Perhaps it's just as well it wasn't ... it might have degenerated into something like this:-







* For those of you rusty on the maths (a group that included me until a couple of days ago) the median is the number of moves of the game that falls at the midpoint when you order them shortest to longest