Round 2 recap! Plus chess960 heating up and people fantasize about Eric Rosen

Value of Perfection

To kick things off, here's a little trivia question: how many league-winning teams have started their journey to victory by winning their first two matches? The answer is 24, which means about 75% of championship-winning teams kicked some serious butt right off the bat!

Therefore the 16 teams who crushed it in Round 1 had good reason to be motivated for Round 2. So which teams managed to win back-to-back matches? Well, Round 2 concluded on Sunday and now there are only eight perfect teams remaining. Let's meet some of our candidates and look at the highlights from the last wild week of action.

The Comeback

Our story chef @izzie26 has once again delivered stories of all the matchups from Round 2 for your pleasure. This week, we want to share a tale of two comebacks. First, let's take a closer look at our old friends, Accidental Brilliancy. Remember them from the last ledger? This time, they attempted to follow up on their first-round victory with perfection, facing another Round 1 winner, Chessmaster Ate My Hamster.

Things were looking rosy for Accidental Brilliancy after four games, as they led 3.5-1.5. They probably felt like everything was going to plan, but the chess gods had other ideas. First, @UN1137 cut the lead in half. Then, @Turmersatz managed to tie the match, leaving everything up to the Board 5 players.

https://lichess.org/cjZ97BGU

In the match-deciding game, @Paulinesernine (as White for AB) faced off against the cunning @sharepointme. And in just 26 moves, the comeback was complete. This time, it was Accidental Brilliancy who were left licking their wounds from a wild match-up. Ah, how the tides can turn from week to week! But let's give a shoutout to Chessmaster Ate My Hamster for their impressive resilience. It's always nice to witness a comeback!

The Comeback Not To Be

Sometimes in life, you're blessed with a beautiful comeback. Other times, that comeback can turn into a cruel mirage faster than you can say "checkmate!"

In this match-up, “Check, please!” found themselves trailing 1 ½ - 3 ½, so you might think they were already resigned to their fate. Well, my friends, fate obviously had other plans for them - the team rallied with two points in the next two games, with wins for both @greenbork and @chess131969. Then it all came down to the final game between everyone’s favourite ageless yellow puppet mod @glbert and @LouisBuckland.

Was the comeback on? @glbert (as White) took control of the game early, carving out a comfortable two-pawn advantage. Victory was within grasp... or so they thought. Then tragedy struck in time trouble, as is often the case in the unforgiving world of chess.

https://lichess.org/wxD4qwn1#83

42.Nf4?? threw away the advantage, and then 43. Rcc7?? came one move too late, allowing Black to finish the robbery in style. Indeed, what would have been a devastating mating threat just one move ago had turned into a game-losing blunder. Black probably couldn’t believe their luck to have mate in four on the board! But @LouisBuckland didn’t blink and duly delivered the coup de grâce. It was an amazing ending that showed us how cruel and thrilling chess can be.

Thus “increasing our activity through harmonious piece play in order to deliver mate against the opponent's king: the team” escaped with victory to a perfect 2-0 record.

MrScribbles has (yet another) insane adventure

If you're looking for wild times in the league, you can always count on the infamous @MrScribbles to deliver with their crazy if somewhat dubious gambits...and boy, did they deliver against @thepaul1 last week! Their game rapidly went off-piste (or “nuts”, as our annotator described it). But that's just how MrScribbles rolls. In the end, they proved once again that there must be some method to their madness, and silenced all doubters (once again) by winning one of the most thrilling games of the round...after being eight pawns down at one point! (Eds. - we’re going to call that a league record without even checking)

Furthermore, MrScribbles' Lost Pawns Collection went on to defeat Mellon Colle System and the Infinite Sadness 4 ½ - 3 ½ to retain a flawless 2-0 record.

Where are we?

After all the twists and turns of Round 2, the following teams managed to stay perfect:

Firouzja’s Fashionistas
The Cambridge Springs Breakers
MrScribbles' Lost Pawns Collection
Fork Over Knives
increasing our activity through harmonious piece play in order to deliver mate against the opponent's king: the team
b8 and switch
Chessmaster Ate My Hamster
Nobody Expects The Spanish Lucenaposition

Those are the teams that will try to get a hat-trick of victories in Round 3. Surely one of these teams will win the league...well, wait a second!

Do you remember that dull statistic we threw at you earlier about perfect teams? Well, with statistics, it's all about how you spin it. Here's a different factoid for you: out of all the rounds, the most losses recorded by previous league champions happened in...you guess it....Round 2! In fact six previous champions took a big ol' L in their second match. No other round saw more than four of our 33 previous champions losing.
So if you’re going to lose, you should have already lost! Just ask Season 33 champions Londoners against the system. They know firsthand that losing in round two isn't the end of the world – it's just a bump on the road to greatness.

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Chess960 league update

The Chess960 league is an eight-round individual Swiss tournament with a cool time control of 20+20. Last week was the penultimate round of Season 24, and it was intense! There were some seriously important games with podium implications.

In one of the most exciting moments of the season, sole tournament leader @Sesquipedalism had White against @MoistvonLipwig, who was trailing them in the table by only half a point. Were @Sesquipedalism to win, they would become the new Chess960 league champion, finally snagging that coveted trophy after 17 seasons, as a win would put them beyond the reach of anyone else. On the other hand, a win for MVL would put them in the lead and in a prime position to take home their third league trophy, placing them in the company of only a few other legends.

The game lived up to its top billing, as White established a promising position. Would @Sesquipedalism break through and clinch the championship? Flash forward to move 18. In the position below, White chose to build up the attack with Qe4 instead of an immediate recapture. That, as it turns out, was a blunder.

(Our) MVL capitalised on this mistake and never looked back, managing to completely turn the tide of the complicated game and bring home a crucial full point.

Meanwhile, in another game that was super-important for the podium, the fourth and fifth-placed contenders @AlexGaul and @tommeketoch faced off with simple stakes - win and stay in the championship hunt, or lose and go home empty-handed. In the end it was @AlexGaul who emerged victorious, keeping their hopes of winning the league trophy alive and kicking. You can check the game stream by tommeketoch here. In the meantime, third-placed @Scrooge took care of business as the favourite against @Sincraxis.

So after Round 7, MVL sits atop the table with six points, @Sesquipedalism just behind them on 5 ½ points, and @Scrooge and @AlexGaul next with 5 points.

The stage is set for a grand final round. MVL has one final task: to take care of business as the favourite against @AActrl. Elsewhere, there is a battle that might leave one person off the podium, as @Sesquipedalism takes on @AlexGaul, and @Scrooge will try to secure a podium finish against @Merkava777.

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Lichess4545 Fantasy League Season 33 Updates and ChatGPT Challenge for S34!

@Adande1 joins the ledger team this week to tell you all about the Lichess4545 Fantasy League. What is it, exactly? Over to you, @Adande1:

Similar to fantasy leagues in other sports (such as soccer/football etc.) you get to create your own team of eight players (one per board) from the season's roster of players playing in the Lichess4545 league. The objective is to get the highest score from your chosen players across the eight rounds of the season. Each player on the roster has a price that depends on their Lichess classical rating, and participants are free to choose any player as long as the total cost of their team doesn’t exceed $20,000. Then the fantasy team with the highest team score at the end of the season wins!

Below are the final results for Fantasy League S33:

1. Silkthewanderer: "What's Eating glbert Grape?" won clear first defeating even the “Highest Cost Team” and clinching back to back gold medals in Fantasy after winning S32 (to add to their three silvers from S23, S28 and S30).
2. Underkkover: "Dyrrs" clinched the silver medal. Not bad for their first ever entry!
3. adande1 (yours truly): "no more 0-0 please!" won back to back bronze medals.
   This was the least amount of time I’ve spent selecting a team ever - using purely random picks (except for picking myself on Board 4) - and I’ve have only had a podium finish three times before (out of 19 consecutive seasons)...which tells me I might have wasted too much time on my picks in prior seasons :). I’ve used the same strategy in Season 34 and it seems to be working fairly well with a respectable 7th place through Round 2. I didn’t even force pick myself as sadly I didn’t make the roster as a full-time player this season :(!

In Season 33, we had 29 human participants and 5 bot teams registered for the Fantasy League. Bot “popularity” (a team created by picking the most popular players across all participants) had an impressive performance throughout the season but was overtaken by “profligate” (Highest Cost Team - 2nd place overall) to end at a respectable 5th place. The random bots “On the dot” (a random team created to max out the $20k price cap) and “abritrary” (a random team) had average performance ending in the middle of the pack and “cheapskate” (one of the lowest cost team selected randomly), fared the worst of the five bots as is often the case.

Favorite Fantasy Team Name: Shrekmated “Praggmatic Picks” was voted as the favorite fantasy team name!

Fantasy League for Season 34 is already under way.

This season, in addition to the regular bot teams, some players have tried to generate a team using ChatGPT, with decidedly mixed results. Well, more like “illegal”. So far ChatGPT has tried to pick a team of only titled players (including Wesley So on Board 1), a team of only Board 1 players, a team with a fake Board 1 player and MrScribbles - proving there’s such a thing as too much fantasy - and a team with Eric Rosen (since, to quote the machine, “he has a high rating and is within the price range”).

If you think you can get a valid team selection by ChatGPT (or any other AI bot for that matter), feel free to DM @adande1 with your picks - including screenshots and we may just add it to the existing entries! Join the #fantasy channel in the Lichess4545 Slack for more details.

If you’d like to know how the above ChatGPT teams (and all other entries for S34) fare over the season, the live standings can be found here.

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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, @adande1
Title image by Omotayo Kofoworola on Unsplash
Match stories image by @izzie26