The Aaronson-Ambainis conjecture (Theory of Computing '14) says that every low-degree bounded polynomial on the Boolean hypercube has an influential variable. This conjecture, if true, would imply that the acceptance probability of every $d$-query quantum algorithm can be well-approximated almost everywhere (i.e., on almost all inputs) by a $\mathrm{poly}(d)$-query classical algorithm. We prove a special case of the conjecture: in every completely bounded degree-$d$ block-multilinear form with constant variance, there always exists a variable with influence at least $1/\mathrm{poly}(d)$. In a certain sense, such polynomials characterize the acceptance probability of quantum query algorithms, as shown by Arunachalam, Briët and Palazuelos (SICOMP '19). As a corollary we obtain efficient classical almost-everywhere simulation for a particular class of quantum algorithms that includes for instance $k$-fold Forrelation. Our main technical result relies on connections to free probability theory.

Entangled quantum systems can exhibit correlations that cannot be simulated classically. For historical reasons such correlations are called "Bell inequality violations." We give two new two-player games with Bell inequality violations that are stronger, fully explicit, and arguably simpler than earlier work. The first game is based on the Hidden Matching problem of quantum communication complexity, introduced by Bar-Yossef, Jayram, and Kerenidis. This game can be won with probability 1 by a strategy using a maximally entangled state with local dimension $n$ (e.g., $\log n$ EPR-pairs), while we show that the winning probability of any classical strategy differs from ${1}/{2}$ by at most $O((\log n)/\sqrt{n})$. The second game is based on the integrality gap for Unique Games by Khot and Vishnoi and the quantum rounding procedure of Kempe, Regev, and Toner. Here $n$-dimensional entanglement allows the game to be won with probability $1/(\log n)^2$, while the best winning probability without entanglement is $1/n$. This near-linear ratio is almost optimal, both in terms of the local dimension of the entangled state, and in terms of the number of possible outputs of the two players.