Season 36 Week 1 Ledger – Fresh Beginnings

But, first let’s celebrate the winners of Season 35 – The Lord of the Dings, and the winning team of Wilfj, BernardLunder, wdhorton, Darktigr, Matt365, Pughie, ShadowedSpace, and vejen.

The Lord of the Dings had a smooth season, winning 15 match points by winning every round with one draw. It wasn’t close matches either – they won 4 weeks with a match score of six or greater. A Sac a Day Keeps the Wins Away took second with 12 points, and won the tiebreaker with 41 game points, ahead of The Secret Bongcloud Society which ended the season with 38.5 game points. Congrats to the winners and all the players who made it a great season!

Highlights from Week 1 Action

Lopsided affairs – The Pawns Are Back In Town proved that they are indeed back and ready for action, defeating Chess Club 7 by the score of 6½ to 1½, the largest margin of victory of the week. But they weren’t alone in the lopsided victories category. Hikaru's Groomsmen proved that their wedding party is far from over, beating Tal's Dark Forest by a similar score of 6½ to 1½.

Forfeits win matches? – Now I am become Chess, the Destroyer of Egos and insufficient captain material were tied at 3½ points apiece as the last match was scheduled to begin. D0wnh0me (1772) secured a win by default as their opponent was not able to join the match and forfeited.

Rating upsets on the board – We had 19 matches where someone rated 50 points lower beat their opponent, with Board 8 having six upsets; Board 7 having three upsets; Boards 4, 5, and 6 having two upsets each, and Board 1 having three upsets.

Game of the Week

Three candidate games were nominated, and each were worthy of the title. Please drop by the #game-of-the-week channel in Slack to nominate games throughout the week and leave your emoji reactions to vote so we know which ones are worthy of the title!

Our winner for this week was ybw601 (2118) vs Antaniserse (2162), who played Board 1 for Opawnheimer and Gone with the Pinned respectively. This was a rollercoaster of a fight where ybw601 had a solid advantage out of the opening after a key mistake by Antaniserse on move 12 (12 ... f6?).

ybw601 took advantage of the mistake to win an exchange and send the black king running. By move 26, both players were under 10 minutes, and their lack of time began to change the flow of the game. Black blundered by turning down a queen trade with 36 ... Ka8?!, but White was not able to convert this error into an advantage. One move later, with only 1:10 left on their clock, they took a queen trade with 38. Qxg7? Instead of pursuing the aggressive (and winning) line 38. Qxa5.

Antaniserse kept fighting on, chipping away at White’s advantage until a well timed check (47 ... Nf2+) turned a simple exchange of rooks into Antaniserse giving a rook for two minor pieces – and the advantage. With both players under 5 minutes, the next 30 moves went by in a hurry as the players engaged in some speedy endgame shuffling until – under great time pressure – Black misplaced their knight twice in three moves (75 ... and 77 ... Nf6??) allowing White to push their passed pawn, forcing Black to enter the wrong side of a rook vs. bishop endgame. White proceeded to trade the rook for two pawns, and Black resigned after 92. Kg5 started the process of shouldering the black king out of the way. An incredible game to start this season.

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).
Text written by @rdfreeman
Editing suggestions by @izzie26, @Tranzoo
Title image by Clemens van Lay on Unsplash