Hello everyone!
It has been over 2 months since the RKWC was completed, but this team forum has since been abandoned. I thought that, to break the silence, now would be a good moment to give an overview of useful links regarding the 2019 world championship and most importantly, set ourselves some goals for the future. I hope this post can serve both as a small archive of the 2019 RKWC as well as be a guideline to prevent the event from decaying after only one edition.
Let's first take a look at the statistics. The first edition of the RKWC was organised and moderated by Roy Schroor a.k.a. @RoyalManiac, supported by @mmo_mikhail and me. It featured 34 registered participants and 64 matches, 15 of which had to be forfeited due to one of the players not being able to play his match in time. Three matches went into tiebreaks, one taking 12 games whilst the other two both became a 14-game fight.
The final match was played on September 24, 18:00 UTC between second seed @RoyalManiac and third seed @sachmaty8, with @RoyalManiac winning 5.5 - 2.5 to claim the first ever Racing Kings world title. It must be noted that technically speaking this match was the losers bracket final, but because @Babosos (the sole remaining player in the winners bracket, who played the second half of the RKWC from his alt @MoscowNevaSleepWGirl) decided to retreat from the world cup and close all his lichess accounts before playing, the RoyalManiac - sachmaty8 match was renamed and promoted as the world cup final.
Some links related to the 2019 RKWC:
challonge.com/RKCW for the brackets with all the pairings and results
www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEijxlmmFvc for the live commentary by @ Natso
for a study that @RoyalManiac made, explaining his thought process during the final. He said he would also work on compiling studies including all the other world cup games, but either he's forgotten about them or he's too busy to complete them.
But what now? The 2019 RKWC was a late summer edition that started in July. Given that the lichess variant world championships are all being held on a yearly basis, it seems natural for the start of the 2020 RKWC edition to be scheduled for late June / early July. For the 2020 edition, we could try to get further promotion through a lichess blog post instead of having to spread word about the world cup by ourselves. Stricter rules and stricter match deadlines will be necessary to keep the tournament managable, as this years world cup saw quite some illegal match delays - the worst of which taking 2 whole extra weeks. Depending on whether @RoyalManiac will defend his title, changing the format of the world cup might also be a point of discussion. As both me and @RoyalManiac are becoming increasingly less active in Racing Kings, it is yet unclear who will take care of organising the next world cup. Hopefully these issues will be discussed and solved by early summer 2020. Thanks again to all the participants, helpers, spectators and fans, we hope to see you again next year!