Kiss Marry Kill: Candidates 2022

Chess is a game of the mind. Many people believe that to be good at chess, you have to be a nerd, geek, or dork. Although the recent chess boom has attracted many female players, the sport is still largely a man's game, which means that female interest in chess or chess players is much lower compared to other physical sports such as football, basketball, or tennis.

To this end, we conducted a social experiment using the popular pub game Kiss Marry Kill to examine whether ladies find leading chess players interesting, and if so, who will they pick when they are given the hypothetical chance to marry or date them. As we continue this article, we intend to give you all the details of this social experiment as well as the remarkable results we obtained.

Candidate Selection

The first challenge was to select a group of top-level chess players for the experiment. Initially, we considered selecting the top ten players from the FIDE world rankings. However, we decided to choose the participants of the FIDE Candidates Tournament 2022, as well as Magnus Carlsen, the current world chess champion. They are arguably the leading chess players on the planet at the moment and will compete to challenge the current world chess champion next year. Let us quickly introduce the nine chess players we used in our social experiment.

Participants and Process

We invited 20 females between the ages of 22 to 35 with different ethnic and racial backgrounds to participate in this experiment. They did not, actively follow chess or know the chess players we have selected as the candidates.

Then we prepared one high-quality photo showing each candidate's face from the front. Participants were then shown just the prepared photograph of each candidate without any further information about them, such as their age, height, nationality, wealth, or chess ranking.

Furthermore, instead of asking the participants, “Who is your favourite?”, to make the experiment more interesting and engaging, we decided to use the format of the popular pub game “Kiss Marry Kill”. Simply put, each female participant had to choose which candidate she would kiss, which one she would marry, and which one she would kill. Additionally, she had the option to skip or not respond to the question altogether.

Results

The first question we asked of our female participants was that “From the following 9 options, select one person you would choose to Kiss”. GM Jan-Krzysztof Duda and Magnus Carlsen were the clear winners in this section, each tied with 20% of the votes.

Our second question was: “From the following 9 options, select one person you would choose to marry”. Here interestingly, although participants were allowed to choose the same person they chose in the first question, the results were significantly different. It was GM Ding Liren who took first place with 25% of the votes, while GM Fabiano Caruana took second place with 20%.

The final question asked in jest was, “From the following 9 options, select one person you would choose to Kill”. Even though there was a definite winner in this section with 35% of the votes, we will not reveal their name out of respect to that candidate.

The results of this experiment were very interesting to us, including the fact that all participants selected at least one option without skipping any of the questions. This means that even with limited information, they developed opinions about all candidates and selected one as their favourite. We will let the readers draw their own conclusions as to why our female participants selected certain options over others in each section.

Disclaimer: We tried our best to minimize bias and to conduct a fair experiment, but we cannot claim a scientific process was followed. Please note that the results of the experiments are highly subjective and are dependent on the materials we used and the preferences of each participant. The purpose of this experiment was not to insult anyone; if we did, we apologize sincerely.