OREANDA-NEWS. November 12, 2008. This year 119 players made it to the second round of the Ninth Yandex Cup, by answering at least 12 questions in one of the games correctly.

In the first round 1,632 contestants, including 143 junior participants, scored at least one point.

As before, in the first round of the tournament players were to find online the right answers to a number of questions. The question with the highest number of correct answers (543) was: “How long in millimeters is the body of a Lilioceris merdigera male specimen, which Alexander Benedictov found in Troparevsky Park for his experimental work ‘Signaling of beetles of Russia’?”. The most difficult question that had no correct answers was: “What mushrooms were served for the engineering students who arrived in a car at night at an eatery in Krasnoyarsk Krai in the year when the first satellite was launched?”. Ihar Makhaniok, Twice Yandex Cup Champion, was the fastest taking only 15 seconds to come up with a correct answer to “What is the name of a classical literary work which has the first documented description of catfishing with a clonk?”. On average, players in the first round of the tournament spent 127 seconds out of the maximum of 180 to find the right answer.

The first round unveiled its winners in twelve regions of Russia and abroad. All of them, just as top-scoring junior players, won Yandex special prizes. They will compete for the title “The Person Who Found Everything” and for the only vacancy in the coming Cup Winners’ Cup in Moscow in early December.