Who Will Win PRO Chess League Week 3?
Are you a better predictor of PRO Chess League winners than Chess.com's panel of experts? More specifically, are you better than Tarjei Svensen?
Through two weeks of the regular season, Norway's "fastest chess Tweeter" has won both weeks, and thus leads the overall standings. He again scored 66 percent and is on 32/48 for the year.
How'd he do it? He swept the Atlantic Division matches and even got four scores exactly right, which also led the way, along with NM Alex King's four exactitudes.
How many "You Can Go Your Own Ways" (a.k.a. "Fleetwood Macs") were turned in? Again, not many.
IM Robert Ris showed his class by correctly being the only panelist to see Dallas beating its south Texas rival Rio Grande. But Shaun McCoy one-upped him by asserting correctly that Seattleites brew better craft beer than Portland's hipsters, and that Mumbai is indeed India's largest city, not Delhi.
For the first time, no pundit correctly predicted a (non-tied) match when the college kids from Webster took out their cross-town rival St. Louis.
A few 5-0 perfect predictions were turned in. Perhaps the entire panel heard GM Jon Ludwig Hammer's interview on The Perpetual Chess Podcast about needing a big rebound in week two?
McCoy also gets special mention for his "outlandish" 16-0 pick for the Towers over the Lions. He was derided for predicting a shutout, but he actually was pretty close. The final 12.5-3.5 score was tied for the second-largest team win of the night; McCoy's prognostication was actually closer to the final score than any other pundit!
In case you need a refresher of who's in the lineup for Wednesday's week 3, here are the new easy-to-read team makeups.
On to the picks!
Tarjei Svensen's picks are here, where he's too busy focusing on Tata Steel to elaborate, but he learned from McCoy and also predicted a massive score for the Towers, but an even bigger one for Toronto.
NM Alex King's picks are here, where he also gets in on the act and predicts one match to finish 15-1. Why not go 16-0 at that point -- The Real McCoy! He also thinks the Atlanta Falcons making the Super Bowl is quite enough sporting achievement for one city.
IM Robert Ris's picks are here, where he gives one Nigerian team a real chance, and the other not much love at all.
Shaun McCoy's picks are here, where his shorthand of "ChessBrahs" feminizes them by conspicuously missing a key letter, and he also admits to getting snakebit and suffering from Californication.
NM Pete Karagianis's picks coming soon!
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Mike Klein began playing chess at the age of four in Charlotte, NC. In 1986, he lost to Josh Waitzkin at the National Championship featured in the movie "Searching for Bobby Fischer." A year later, Mike became the youngest member of the very first All-America Chess Team, and was on the team a total of eight times. In 1988, he won the K-3 National Championship, and eventually became North Carolina's youngest-ever master. In 1996, he won clear first for under-2250 players in the top section of the World Open. Mike has taught chess full-time for a dozen years in New York City and Charlotte, with his students and teams winning many national championships. He now works at Chess.com as a Senior Journalist and at ChessKid.com as the Chief Chess Officer. In 2012, 2015, and 2018, he was awarded Chess Journalist of the Year by the Chess Journalists of America. He has also previously won other awards from the CJA such as Best Tournament Report, and also several writing awards for mainstream newspapers. His chess writing and personal travels have now brought him to more than 85 countries.
