AGM yourself101010's Journey Through the 2021 Antichess World Championships
An interesting, specific, and adventurous journey through one of the most emotional few months of antichess in my career!
Finding Antichess
If you have been around the antichess scene for at least a few months, hopefully you know me as a friendly opponent, streamer, and enthusiast of our great game: antichess. I came across this game in my first year of high school when I was first getting into chess. I very luckily came across lichess and immediately fell in love with all of the variants. However, one that particularly stuck out to me was antichess, and thus my journey begun. I was a quick learner, and fairly efficiently made my way into the 1800-1900 range. Watching the games of ODMWND, Ogul1, Raicosta, Rasil7, and PepsiNGaming, I felt like I was learning more and more every day. Never hitting 2000 however, I soon lost a bit of inspiration as well as got excited about other things in my life and slowly stopped playing for a bit...
Over a year in fact.
The Return
One day I picked it up again because I thought "Why not?" I played a few games and lost miserably, and was in that gamer stage of "I don't really care, it's just game." The losses low-key hurt though, and I was soon again on my journey to break 2000. And with an extra year of just general knowledge under my belt, it didn't take too long. I had reached 2000 and only after a month or two...so I kept pushing and to be honest, 2100 did not come far after (this was before I realized that rating does not really matter :P). In addition to this, the ACWC 2019 was coming up and so I thought that would be a fun thing to participate in.
ACWC 2019
Although not an incredible tournament, there was some really strong wins and learning experiences such as my round 2 vs tadcooper where I pulled off an impressive 6-1 against a very strong opponent. Link to the last game here:
However, I was not able to compete against other top level players such as RedbullNRevolution, but was still inspired to play though and after a short break, I kept grinding and got ready to expand my knowledge to the following year. It was mostly following this when I started my YouTube (and occasional streaming) aspect of my current antichess.
Covid Antichess
Although covid has definitely changed all of our lives in many ways for the worse, one thing it definitely helped was my inspiration, excitement, and connections in antichess. I started to view the game as a student, not as a player. Although I do admit to rating sitting after being too concerned over it, I was still definitely improving my opening knowledge as I had hoped, learning the top lines of the time, and following the gameplay of top players. This was also the time of the "Cheater Era" of antichess and the "Downfall of the Cheaters" as some people refer to it. In particular AntichessLore does a great video on it, and you can find the link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxkQYAJjVjk
Funny enough, these games made me much more aware of cheaters, much better at spotting them even before they were banned, and all in all made me more easily find "human" moves, but also some interesting tactics that their engines would use to find the best moves.
ACWC 2020
This I felt was my breakthrough tournament. I competed and beat extremely high level players and proved that I was not just the occasional person who breaks through for a bit and leaves. I had made my mark on the antichess scene and demonstrated that I could be someone to look out for in the future. It was during this tournament I was able to beat top 10 players and candidates players such as ODMWND and even the eventual world champion of this event, PepsiNGaming, all the while finishing 2nd overall after the Swiss stage. Link to my series with Pepsi here:
This year I had finished T5 placing third out of four in my candidates pool. This was a huge accomplishment for me, but I was still definitely hungry for more and was excited to learn more about the game. I wanted to have the knowledge and improve my wits so I could be someone threatening a world championship spot. I still lacked the opening knowledge and midgame/endgame strength that the best players had and so I kept working, kept making videos to better my thinking, and kept the grind going.
Before ACWC 2021
I must first give a shoutout here to both Shiaxou and ODMWND for their hard work and dedication over the years. They do a lot of things behind the scenes that people never really understand or realize, and what they do takes a lot more effort than one might expect. From going through entries to doing pairings to dealing with people who cause trouble or annoyances to just being good Samaritans and ambassadors to the game, they do more than the community has so far recognized them for. So I firstoff wanted to say that if you have the time, thanking and appreciating their efforts is something that could mean a lot. In addition to this, I almost did not even end up playing in ACWC 2021 because the account I wanted to use did not meet the requirements to enter. The reason I was a little timid to enter under my main account was due to my tight schedule: I did not want to miss games or have small schedules at the expense of my opponent, and so from this account if I could not make it one week, I would just take the loss. However, the tournament directors both stated that this would not be a problem and not something I should worry about, and soon enough I entered into the tournament. I was unsure about what expectations I should have had going into the tournament, but I figured with my tight schedule just being competitive with top players was something I wanted to do meanwhile learning a few things here and there that could help me in future years and tournaments (and life). In the back of my head, I obviously had the candidates round as a target mark, but I did not want to get too ahead of myself with new entries this year from incredibly strong players...as an example, of the 12 people who made it to the candidates this year, only 4 (including myself) also made the candidates last year (which is CRAZY).
ACWC 2021 Swiss
My first few matches started off well, and thanks to strong players and friends firebatprime and ddxaidan , I was able to make it out of the first 3 matches without too much trouble. The fourth match would indeed to prove trouble however, as I was playing TheUnknownGuyReborn, and although I was able to do minimal prep during the week, I proved to be rusty (as well as big kudos to TUGR), as I was crushed. I realized that making the candidates wouldn't be so easy after all. Link to our final game is here:
My next two matches were against very difficult opponents, with one being someone I had never beaten in a 2+5 match, but I was persistent and applied strong tactics (which I will maybe outline in a future video if possible) to win these two matches. I then proceeded to play two time world champion Arimakat, in which I was returning back to school after being home for the first time in months, and so I had zero preparation at all and sort of just played as randomly as possible. Although I squeaked out a few wins, I was obviously crushed with my lower caliber performance. This was also tough because it pretty much meant I had to win the next and final match to move on to the candidates. I was playing Kotov_Syndrome, and managed to win pushing me on to the candidates tournament where I would play against opponents RealNP, devansh2008, TheUnknownGuyReborn, lllAlll, and Ogul1.
ACWC 2021 Candidates
I originally assumed this would be the end of the road for me. At this point although my school was finished, I was on vacation for the holidays with my family in Hawaii, so I figured there would be little time to prep for my first few games, and thus it would be near impossible to move past this round.
I did not give up however, and woke up at 6:00 local time in Hawaii to play my first match vs RealNP. If I were to pick a few points in my antichess career where I had a "click" where I immediately felt like I understood the game better and just overall felt like a much stronger player than I was before, I would say once I started playing again to hit 2000/2100, once at the end of ACWC 2019, once during the beginning of covid, once in the 2020 candidates, and in this match I had another moment: and what a perfect time for this to occur. I felt like I could see the board so much clearer, I felt like I understood exactly how each piece worked with one another, and although I felt before like I had a good understanding of the game as a whole, I think I began to understand it to an even greater extent at this point. I was able to win this match 10-0, which was the first time in candidates history that this score was reached. And this was against a very strong, competent player as well, which proved to me that I was capable of doing something special. Link to our final game is here:
My next match would also prove to be a difficult one. I was scheduled to play the second place player from the candidates: devansh2008. To my luck however, I managed to have a continuation of my antichess breakthrough, and once again with nothing but a 25 minute period before the match, my prep was pretty non-existent. I ended up winning the match 5.5-4.5, which even could have been won 6-4 as I had seen a draw in the last game before mate, and not concerned about possible tiebreakers, I was mainly focused on winning this specific match, and that did the job. Quoting myself here "If I lose by half a point in tiebreakers because of this, well then that would suck." Link to our final game is here:
I then moved on to perhaps my toughest match of the tournament: TheUnknownGuyReborn. He had already beaten me this tournament, but I was very inspired, and felt like I had a few advantages in the match that I could really use and thrive off of. The match started off brilliantly: 4.5-0.5...I only needed one more point. And to my horror, I lost the rest of the games, and therefore the match. I was legitimately heartbroken. How could the game I love so much betray me like this? I had many thoughts of giving up or simply just not prepping for my final two matches because this one just hurt too much.
I moved on to my next match where I applied the same strategy to lllAlll as I did to my first match, which ended up giving me and strong win. I had one more match. Ogul1. My previous idol, famous player, and two time runner up at the world championships. However, my prep worked out perfectly, my plans to avoid his likely prep worked well, and I was able to pull off a final win vs Ogul1.
Final Four
I knew my job was not over though, a in the final four, my semi-final match was against an opponent who hadn't lost since the Swiss, and had beaten world champions alike: Arimakat, ChangeOpening, and GrohochetGrom. This was Kex09, an up incoming strong player, who managed to see mate in 20+ that no one else could: a likely favourite to win it all. However, I was not going down without a fight. At the beginning of our match (and quite honestly throughout), my prep worked perfectly. We were back and forth, neck and neck. After 10 games, we had 5-5: Armageddon. I really wanted white and so I put in an offer for white of 2:15 (where my opponent would have 3 minutes), and I won the bid! However, as I found out after, my opponent put in a bid ABOVE 3 minutes, so I could have had white for 3 minutes or even higher. However at the time I did not know this and played the game. We entered a queen race and I had a winning position with #5....but blundered :(. A tragic end to my ACWC 2021, and I officially was moved into the 3rd place match. Link to the Armageddon game here:
Conclusions
So what does this mean for me now? Where will this take me? Will I continue to play and will I continue to stay around the antichess community? The answer to this is an overwhelming YES! Or at least as much as I can. I have met so many people through this great game and learned so many amazing life lessons: things I would not trade in for money. I love this game, the people around are great, and I still definitely have so much more to learn. Although I am happy with my result, I am not satisfied, as there are so many things I still have not done: won a ACWC, reached 2300 (which by the way low-key am I the greatest never 2300 LOL?), and I am yet to have the opening repertoire I wish I had. My endgames and middlegames are strong but far from perfect, I'm still slow as a turtle, and obviously I am not unbeatable. I hope in the future I will continue to play this great game, promote it, and provide more awareness for it throughout communities. If this game benefited and helped someone even half as much as it has helped me, then it could really change someone's life. Thanks for reading, and have an excellent rest of your day.