Round 4 recap: Show of Dominance

With Round 4 in the books, we're officially halfway through the season, so every player in the 4545 league should know where their team stands. Are you in the hunt for the championship, hungry for a top 10 finish, or desperate for your first victory of the season?

In addition to last week’s highlights, we have another interview with a new member of the league’s "100 Club"! As always, all the visual match stories in the blog are brought to you by @izzie26. They are available here.

The Cambridge Springs Breakers hot streak comes to a screeching halt

Last week’s premier contest featured two teams with perfect 3-0 starts to the season. So you would think this keenly anticipated contest would be fought right to the wire, as both teams desperately tried to maintain their unblemished tilts at glory...but that’s not what happened at all.

Instead, the much-hyped lucha between The Cambridge Springs Breakers and Ding! There It is was wrapped up like a burrito by Wednesday. Los Breakers may have strutted into the match as league leaders and they did manage to score the first points with a Board 1 win on Monday, but their fiesta was rather short-lived as the fearsome Dingers scored five straight wins by Wednesday to put the tie out of sight and free up everyone’s weekend. Ruthless, effective and thoughtful. Positive signs perhaps for the Ding camp ahead of their title bout next month?

The crucial fifth point was secured by @wachini with a surgically precise performance against @sideshow_bob.

https://lichess.org/lqHcsAEH

The final result was 6-2 in the Dingers’ favour, and they now perch atop the table with a still-perfect 4-0 record.

A photo finish for MrScribbles' Lost Pawns Collection

In last week’s other showdown between perfect teams, “increasing our activity through harmonious piece play in order to deliver mate against the opponent's king: the team“ (how fast can you say that three times?!) took on “MrScribbles' Lost Pawns Collection”...and this one was a real doozy, as it went down to the final two games, which started at the same time and concluded almost simultaneously.

Ultimately, "MrScribbles' Lost Pawns Collection" edged out the photo finish by securing 4 ½ points through the final game, in which Chewbacca_Defense outfoxed sebb7y in a tricky endgame with the aid of a massive time advantage. In the end it took 69 moves (nice!) for sebb7y to wave the white flag. The Lost Pawns march on, and the Active But Unnecessarily Wordy Ones suffer the novel taste of defeat. Will this sap their desire for the fight? Or will we have to type all those letters again? One can only hope.
https://lichess.org/iNEnWfhl

pulsar512b joins the exclusive "100 Games Club"

This week, we’re rolling out the red carpet for the newest member of our elite "100 Games Club” - @pulsar512b!

She’s been involved in the 4545 community since Season 20, and in addition to reaching the 100 mark in the 4545 league, she’s played around 80 LoneWolf league games and 20 Chess960 league games - so she’s definitely one of our more experienced members.

Her finest hour in 4545 was undoubtedly Season 33 - last season! - when her team "My pawns are sweaty, knights weak, rooks are heavy, I've blundered my bishop already" ended up placing fifth overall after going winless in the first three rounds.

What initially drew you to playing in the Lichess4545 league?
I’ve forgotten but probably I just heard about it from some friends and thought it’d be some fun

How has your approach to playing chess evolved since you started playing in the league?
It hasn’t changed, maybe I play a bit better in the opening and use more time but that’s it.

Choose three words that describe your approach to the game.
Slow, swindle, and positional. I’m very much willing to slowly grind out equal or slightly better positions (endgames especially) for ages to get a win. I strongly believe that swindling is a key part of chess and that most losing positions can be swindled and you have to try for it. If you keep posing problems and take the path of most resistance you can save a lot of points. As far as positional goes, I generally prefer (again) slower and more maneuvering games.

Tell us about your most memorable league game.
https://lichess.org/R9LkZxGS
big swindle into a nice endgame grind.

What’s your favourite chess opening?
QGD Exchange as white, the minority attack is my favorite plan and fits perfectly into how I want to play the game, with long term pressure on the queenside.

Do you have any pre-game habits or routines? Any special prep (other than on openings)?
No and no - I only bother to prep half the time. Rather often, I wake up 5 min before the game (or even after the scheduled time, just a few min away from losing by forfeit) and have to quickly get on and start.

Favourite chess player?
Anand, fantastic games, very universal and seems like just a nice guy.

Tell us about some of your non-chess hobbies and interests.
Music, competitive Pokemon (smogon singles, mostly gen 7/8 OU as of late), MTG.

In the middle of a game, your opponent suddenly turns into a pumpkin. How would you react?
They’d time out, so I’d ask if they have some IRL issue in chat. Due to them being a pumpkin, I’d get no response and carry on. They’d lose on time and I’d carry on with my life.

Then there were three

After four weeks of action, only three teams retain perfect records, and two of them will duke it out in Round 5. Undoubtedly most eyeballs will swivel towards the match between “Ding! There it is” and “Chessmaster Ate My Hamster”, but don’t sleep on the intriguing contest between “The Cambridge Spring Breakers” (regrouping after their first loss) and the inexplicably still perfect “MrScribbles' Lost Pawns Collection”.

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Infinite Quest - weeks 110 and 111

This week, we also have an update from @Silkthewanderer, the creator and overlord of the popular Infinite Quest rapid tournament, which is a unique kind of community league that never stops running. Find out more in this summary page.

Rock, Scissors, Paper Meta in Shambles: Among some of Quest’s top performers, there had been a quirky situation where Chesstrix01 had a flawless record against shallowjr, who had a flawless record against lelouch_vi_brittania, who had a flawless record against Chesstrix01. But in the last six weeks this meta has been shattered with each of the three taking their first ever loss against each of their respective “victims”.

The Largest Ever Price Pots: In the last of these matches, lelouch_vi_brittania defeated shallowjr 2.5 - 1.5. This happened to be the match with the largest ever pool of Bonus XP awarded to the winner, so LVB claims the spoils and pads their Bonus XP stat even further, which means that their next match against moistvonlipwig is now for the second largest ever pool of Bonus XP. Incidentally, all the Bonus XP are provided by LVB because moistvonlipwig rather conveniently levelled up to Level 10 just before the round and cashed in all of their bonus XP.

I’m About To End This Man’s Whole Career: Another big milestone was achieved by tommeketoch who finished the last few games with a 5-1 record and propelled himself to Level 9. What’s more, the two strongest players that they defeated en route to Level 9 have since paused their Quest careers and haven’t returned yet. Whose career will our avenging hero end next? Jokes aside, let’s hope that the vanquished foes choose to resume their Quests at some point in the future....revenge rematches are always fun.

Big Game Hunt: NLance holds the third rank in the leaderboard ahead of several higher rated competitors through their persistence (having missed just one game in the last 12 months!) and also their ability to score upset wins against anyone. Over the last four weeks, they’ve dropped matches against two lower-rated players while holding two 2300s until the tiebreak and even managing to win one of them.

Other laudates: Besides these major highlights, we also celebrate new Levels attained by Ivory12 (7), b_elyay (6), Chiefjab (5), ekopp2000 (5), forhavu (5), omertil (5).

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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, @pulsar512b, @silkthewanderer
Title image by Omotayo Kofoworola on Unsplash
Match stories image by @izzie26