One of the relevant aspects of Artificial General Intelligence is the ability of machines to demonstrate abstract reasoning skills, for instance, through solving (human) IQ tests. This work presents a new approach to machine IQ tests solving formulated as Raven’s Progressive Matrices (RPMs), called Duel-IQ. The proposed solution incorporates the concept of a tournament in which the best answer is chosen based on a set of duels between candidate RPM answers. The three relevant aspects are: (1) low computational and design complexity, (2) proposition of two schemes of pairing up candidate answers for the duels and (3) evaluation of the system on a dataset of shapes other than those used for training. Depending on a particular variant, the system reaches up to 82.8% accuracy on average in RPM tasks with 5 candidate answers and is on par with human performance and superior to other literature approaches of comparable complexity when training and test sets are from the same distribution.