Friday 7 August 2015

GM Ian Rogers loses to Kristine Quek


At first I thought the above you tube video was an interesting documentary on the effects of dehydration on your thinking skills. In the clip it shows GM Ian Rogers playing Kristine Quek, and in it he comes off second best, in part because he is trapped in a sauna. As a scientific experiment it seemed plausible, until I realised two things.
Firstly, it isn't a documentary, but an ad for Zip Water.  I must say it is a clever ad, but given it is an add I am a little sceptical about the accuracy of the claims. And secondly, I'm not convinced that a loss of 10% of thinking skills (as the add claims is the effect of dehydration) is enough of a handicap for Rogers to lose the way he did. As there did not seem to be a scale attached to the 10% figure I am reminded of the "we only use 10% of our brains" claim that I hear repeated quite often.
But the point of advertising is to draw attention to the product, and it certainly does that. I particularly like the scene at the end where Kristine is rewarded with a nice glass of cold water while Ian can only look on helplessly.

2 comments:

Jonathan Sarfati, Ph.D. said...

It's "Kristine" as the video said, not "Katherine". But I agree; hardly likely that a mere 10% loss would allow a <1900-rated player to beat a GM.

Shaun Press said...

Thanks for the correction, and apologies to Kristine.