Lichess4545 Season 35 Lifts Off!

After a topsy-turvy and exciting season 34, the 35th edition has some big shoes to fill! Thanks to a surge of interest due, we think, to the recent World Championship match, plenty of old hands and greenhorns alike have signed up for the season. This season will feature 46 teams - the biggest roster since the grand old days of Season 30 (April-June 2022).

A bumper season also means we have lots of team names with terrible puns. No fewer than 11 team names feature “Ding” (but Rapport only gets five). As usual the quality is variable; some names are frankly awful, but there are some decent gems too. There’s also a team called “The Hnefatafl Varangians from Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch”, who evidently hate publicity and don’t want to be mentioned here again. Fine by us.

Four champions form a secret society

We knew we had to keep an eye on “Secret Bongcloud Society” in Week 1, because they have four players from “Erigaisi and the Arjunauts” the Cinderella team that stormed to win the league last season: @gercondon, @anmrose, @PatchyThePirate and @reddevil906. Half the team are defending their crown!

In the first round, SBS were paired against 46..Rg6 (the team, not the move), and the ex-Arjunauts showed their championship pedigree by mercilessly dispatching their opponents. @anmrose clinched the match victory with a strong performance against @samuelglats.

On move 20, Black (@samuelglats) played the seemingly perfectly natural ...Nc6, hoping to improve the placement of their knight. But this specific piece should have stayed on the rim for the time being, because as the game continued White secured a very pleasant advantage, leading to eventual victory.

This game made the match score 4 1/2 – 1/2, turning the remainder of the games into dead rubbers for match purposes (but certainly not for the league, because as we learned last season, every single game point matters!).

Below is the full story of the game, once again brought to you by @izzie26. All stories for the round are to be found here.

The streak lives!

One of the big storylines this season will be whether anyone can stop the ascent of @ragnarokgame? They won all eight of their games on Board 8 last season (while admittedly being the rating favourite in all eight), and they start Season 35 on a nine-game league win streak.

Well, that’s now ten! Taking on @z0x in their season opener, the win streak was threatened more than once in a tough battle on the board. That is, until move 34, when z0x as Black thought they had a tactic...but it didn't actually work (ouch!).

After 34. Bxf2 Rxf2, Black thought Rb2 would bring the pain, exploiting the pin on the rook. But they missed the refutation Be2, which White saw and played, going on to secure their tenth league win in a row, and contributing to a dominant 7-1 victory for their team “A Sac a Day Keeps the Wins Away”.

Season 34 awards handed out

Before we hand over the microphone to other leagues, we would be doing you a disservice if we did not tell you about the beautiful job @izzie26 did with the stats and awards for the recently concluded Season 34. Go check out the results.

You will find out, among other things, which player faced the toughest schedule, who had the longest think, which game was the longest, who had the most comebacks...and that is really just barely scratching the surface.

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Chess960 league has a new king

Season 25 of the Chess960 league came and went very quickly. Eight rounds are behind us and the winner is a Chess960 league newcomer @Uczen-369. They already have a LoneWolf silver medal twinkling in their trophy cabinet - and clearly they landed in Chess960 land, took one look around, said, "Yep, I think I'll conquer this too!"...and proceeded to do exactly that with a final result of 6.5/8. They did benefit from two forfeit wins against some of the top-rated competition - including previous champion MoistvonLipwig - but more than anything, they found the right moves at the right time, and we salute our new champion! A key highlight of their season was their victory in Round 5 against @sahkal, another Chess960 debutant. Just as they did all season long, they navigated the complications in the game well.

@Tellerwasher nabbed the silver medal, while defending champion @MoistvonLipwig scooped up bronze. Both ended the season with a respectable 6/8, separated by nothing more than tiebreaks. This is the tenth Chess960 league medal for our MVL, and the third podium finish for @Tellerwasher. In the U1600 trophy decider, @Timvier edged out @ztraynor in the last round to grab the (arguably) coveted blue ribbon.

Congratulations to all winners and a big thank you to all players. Final standings are here.

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Tales from Infinite Quest by @SilktheWanderer

Our ledger updates may have taken a break, but make no mistake, Quest has been in full swing over the last few weeks. So much has happened that this update can only cover a small part of the action in Weeks 115-118.

The most important quality of all is perseverance: If there is anything to be learned from World Champion Ding Liren, then it is how many setbacks one can (and often must) endure to reach the top. This is even more important in Infinite Quest where everyone at all strengths will eventually face some kind of horrible loss - and the top ranked players tend to be the ones who are extremely good at just taking the L and continue fighting the next week. This mentality brought NLance significant success: After a 0-3 loss in Week 112, they posted 5 straight wins and propelled themselves to Lvl 12 - becoming only the 4th ever player at that Level.

OTOH you sometimes just need a break: With full flexibility to pause and resume, there is a frequently occurring pattern where the leaderboard shows many strong players with a decent record ended by a string of losses. At some point it is easier to recognize when one’s form is off, take a break, and come back in full strength. Which is exactly what @jwwells42 did after an unexpected losing streak: disappear for 10 weeks, then return with back-to-back victories. Word is still out whether a Rocky training montage had happened in the meantime.

or... you take a break as a ‘mic drop’ statement: @bennelis3 had been around in Quest for a while, although a bit sparingly, accumulating a 3-5 record over their first year with us. Then they started to get a hot hand and built a four-match winning streak that ended with two successive records in terms of strongest player defeated, the last one in Armageddon. They are also taking a break now and leaving us to wonder how much farther that streak will be taken eventually.

What is the consistency of ambrosia anyway? My sense of humor is tickled when a player by the stellarly fantastical name of @LunarAmbrosia displays an almost astounding clockwork-like consistency in their climb towards the top. They are celebrating their 50th match this week (for a 26-24 record), the last eight of which being alternating wins and losses. At the same time they have a relatively low number of tiebreaks, big upset wins or big upset losses. Steadfast persistence has its rewards, though, after this week they are within one win’s margin of the Top 10.

Life is tough when you are at the top: Okay, one more learning from the World Championship that in some way may also apply to Quest: we welcome players of all playing strengths and have very active players from the 1500s to the 2400s - but in the last few weeks there was a curious trend of our player base at the lower rating bands expanding (yay!) while many of the strongest players have recently entered breaks (huh...). In face, moistvonlipwig (currently just two more ways from Lvl11) is the only 2400+ AND only 2300+ player and the rating average of active players is the lowest since February 2021. Let’s see who comes flocking back once the WC distraction is over.

Other laudates: Besides these major highlights, we also celebrate new Levels attained by @Zubenelgenubi (10), @Chiefjab (6), @nairwolf (5) and @Rolihlala (5) while @adande1 completed the 100th match and collected the 50th win.

Infinite Quest is a perpetually ongoing 4 x 15+10 rapid side league of the Lichess4545 league where everyone collects XP and gains Levels at their pace. Players can join, pause and resume anytime, a new round starts every Wednesday with pairings for everyone checked in for that week. More information is available from the league Slack.

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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).
Title image by Omotayo Kofoworola on Unsplash
Contributions to the text by @Tranzoo, @izzie26, @SilktheWanderer
Match stories image by @izzie26