Lichess4545 Season 34 Finish: Triumph and Heartbreak

You can register for the upcoming season here: https://www.lichess4545.com/team4545/register/

Teams will be formed on 1 May and the first round starts on 8 May. Register as soon as possible to maximize your chances of getting a regular playing spot on a team (as opposed to being an alternate, although we love them too).

Anyone who needs to get rid of their non-provisional classical rating is advised to join the Season 35 Kick Off Arena this Saturday: https://lichess.org/tournament/4545se35.

Now, let's rewind and relive the thrilling finale of Season 34!

All to play for in the top match-up

Coming into the final round, all eyes were on the top match-up between “increasing our activity through harmonious piece play in order to deliver mate against the opponent's king: the team” and “Erigaisi and the Arjunauts”. "The team" held first place with 12 match points, but the Arjunauts were just a point behind. Not only would this match decide the crown, but with six teams sitting at ten match points, there was a real possibility that the loser of this clash would miss out on the podium entirely!

@TBest and @Zyfaro got things off to a pleasantly even start on Tuesday. But then one side seized their chance and wrested control of the contest. First, @Reddevil906 secured the lead for the Arjunauts; then @Val1313 followed to give his team a two-point cushion. Desperate for a comeback, the teamsters pinned their hopes on @TSSCFTTSOS, who was up against @JustChillJoe, who was playing two boards up. Would the teamsters be able to exploit this opportunity and fight their way back into title contention?

But @JustChillJoe evidently had very different ideas, cooking up something special to establish a winning position before move 10. 7...Qxb2 may be the most popular move in the Lichess database, but it only appears 10 times in the Masters database (compared to 74 hits for 7...e6). A poisoned pawn indeed.

https://lichess.org/kFmABWkq

Buoyed by this stunning upset, the Arjunauts sealed the match win and the league crown in the next game, thanks to PatchyThePirate's final swashbuckling performance.

https://lichess.org/7f8VrMZJ

In the end, the Arjunauts triumphed with a 6-2 score, as visualized below by our own @izzie26. Check all the stories for round 8 here.

In fact, the Arjunauts have become the first team since Season 11 to win the league after scoring 1.5 match points or worse in their first three rounds; they won, drew and lost their first three matches. But they brought their A-game when it mattered most, and fittingly for a season marked by permanent change at the top of the standings, the Arjunauts claimed the top spot for the first time after Round 8. Kudos!

Melee for the medals

With "the team" frozen at 12 points, the door was wide open for the six teams with 10 points to duke it out for silver and bronze. Ultimately, "Ding! There it is" harnessed their tiebreak advantage and snagged second place with a 5 ½ - 2 ½ victory in their final match. After losing in Rounds 5 and 6, they recovered strongly to round off the season on a winning note - congratulations!

The bronze medal saga had a different flavor. After Round 5, "Chessmaster ate my hamster" were the only team with a perfect record. So naturally they lost their next two matches to end up down in 7th place with a 5-2 record, desperately needing a stellar performance in the final round – and some luck – for a shot at a medal.

And that's precisely what went down! The Hamsterless squad trounced "Avengers: Middlegame" 6-2 and hopped over their competition to claim the last podium spot. This leap even included "the team" whose loss to the champions sent them tumbling from first to fourth place. Chess giveth, and chess taketh away. Visualization of the title race below once again made by @izzie26.

Thanks to everyone who made this season so fun, here are the final standings. Season 34 was a wild ride and the Ledger crew enjoyed covering it from start to finish. We hope to see you all again for Season 35!

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Revenge is served in the best team name poll

They may have finished fourth in the other competition, but “increasing our activity through harmonious piece play in order to deliver mate against the opponent's king: the team” might just have had the last laugh...by winning the team name survey!

Yes, that’s right. 68 players cast their vote for best team name and selected theirs as the best. (Eds - we don’t understand either; people like the weirdest things, like metal and Chelsea).

Anyway, here are the results...

1) increasing our activity through harmonious piece play in order to deliver mate against the opponent's king: the team – 18%
2) Zwischen zwei Zwischenzügen zwitschern zwei Zugzwänge with 12%
3) Sack Everything Everywhere All At Once and Erigaisi and the Arjunauts both scored 11% of the votes

Congratulations to our winners. But for the love of all that is holy, let’s hope this doesn’t inspire a wave of super-long names for the next season.

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Lichess4545 is an online chess league for people who like playing long time control games online. Players are assigned to teams and play one game per week with a 45+45 time control. For more information visit our league home page.
LoneWolf is a side league of the Lichess4545 league. It is an 11-round Swiss tournament where players play one game per week with a 30+30 time control. For more information about the LoneWolf tournament visit the LoneWolf homepage.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA).
Contributions to the text by @Tranzoo, @izzie26
Match stories image by @izzie26

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