Ultimate Sensei - 2nd Power Rankings

by Mitch Fabian and AlexaMorningstar

Summary of Tactics Challenge:
The first challenge of Ultimate Sensei Season 2 took place 2 weeks ago, when the student contestants faced off in the Tactics Challenge. Each student was given the same set of 10 puzzles and an hour to solve them. Points were awarded for the correct first move, correct full solution, correct branches of analysis, brilliant moves, good defenses, etc. Some puzzles had no tactical solution, so “no solution” was the proper answer for those. Points were deducted for incorrect answers. A few “impossible” puzzles were littered in as cheat detection, and thankfully no student answered those in full (aka nobody cheated). The top 4 of the first round advanced to a set of 12 harder puzzles for another hour. AkaBlueJae completely dominated the field, scoring far above anyone else. ChessNumbers also pulled away from the pack. 3rd place was achieved by Seth, and Lula scored 4th. Unfortunately, due to an emergency, Drittman was unable to compete. You can watch an edited VOD on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PaVxsN10Es&t=520s

The next challenge will be the Endgame Challenge! It will take place at 1pm Pacific time Saturday, December 18th. Tune in at https://www.twitch.tv/chessdojolive

Mitch’s Power Rankings
We had a very interesting and difficult puzzle challenge for the contestants as their first competition since the draft tournament. One player stood out far above the rest during this event - AkaBlueJae. Jae stood out as an amazing tactician, getting nearly every puzzle correct in a set of puzzles some titled players even called difficult. In my previous rankings, I had Jae at first, but said that the top 3 were about the same level. I think this cements him as first for my rankings. Other than that, I find it hard to have too many shakeups in my rankings, since the rankings are meant to predict the final rapid event, and puzzles aren’t 100% predictive of that. I had one other move in my rankings, and that is that I moved ChessNumbers up to 2nd from 5th. This is for 2 reasons: 1) Tai did extremely well on the puzzles as well, also separating himself from the pack 2) One assumption I put into his rankings last time was that he wouldn’t have a ton of time to commit to practicing. I’ve since found out more about Tai from a podcast episode on Perpetual Chess and realize that my assumptions about him weren’t accurate. So, combining his puzzle performance with his 3.0/4 in the draft tournament, and taking away my wrong assumption, I feel comfortable moving him up. 
AkaBlueJae – As stated above, Jae has separated himself from the pack and looks like a clear first at this point. Let’s see if he can maintain that trajectory, or if the rest of the students improve faster!
ChessNumbers – Most of my reasoning was stated above. After placing him 5th in my first power rankings, he called that motivation. Hopefully, he remains motivated despite his increase in the rankings.
Falk – Falk had an impressive initial tournament and unfortunately didn’t do too well in the tactics challenge. I still believe he is a strong player, and the final tournament is a rapid tournament, which he excels at.
Morphyfan (Nargaef) – Similar to Falk, Morphyfan didn’t have a great showing on these puzzles, but I can’t reasonably put him in the bottom half when he went 4-0 in the first rapid tournament.
Seth – Seth was 4th in my first set of power rankings, and his 3rd place finish in the tactics challenge was very impressive. I want to move him up due to it, but can’t say that his great tactics challenge results outweigh Falk and Morphyfan’s rapid performance. I want to stress that while he moved down in the rankings, he moved up in my assessment of him. If he continues to perform well in these challenges, he may be able to move up in the power rankings.
Lula – Last rankings, I said that most at the bottom of my list were fluid. However, after getting 4th in the tactics challenge, I can separate the field a little better, and would say Lula has moved above the other participants below her. Similar to Seth, I wish I could move her up in the rankings, but don’t think that the tactics challenge can fully outweigh the rapid portion, making it hard to move Seth or Lula above Morphyfan, who won the draft tournament.
VelcroDot – Katrina scored above Falk in the tactics challenge, but was not able to move on to the second round. She’s been training a lot on stream recently, so it will be great to see how much she has improved before this next challenge.
Drittman – Unfortunately, Drittman was unable to participate in the tactics challenge, so no more information can be added to his assessment to warrant moving him out of 8th.

AlexaMorningstar's Rankings

First and foremost would like to try to revindicate David for his test. Because I think David's heart was completely in the right place. He wanted to show us a tactics challenge that was not based on speed of solution and instead it was about quality about analysis. And also he wanted to introduce us to a type of tactic where there is no actual tactic surprised Pikachu face
Unfortunately some of those No Tactic puzzles were too tricky for the contestants and as a result that the whole test ended up being too hard. Not to mention some of the puzzles were too hard, but that I can explain easily: David is a prodigy and as such is hard for him to grasp exactly how far 1400-1600 people are able to calculate (I know this from personal experience of David commentating on my games, he would always overestimate my abilities). In any case hopefully David's intention can be helpful to all of us and we try to do more of these No Tactic Puzzles. I certainly hope that David does one of this tests for me, seeing as I got many of them wrong while casually watching.

1. Bluejae: after the tactics challenge there is no other objective choice. He showed that he has great intuition and good tactical skills with only a clear weakness in positional play. I will say however that I believe there is more than one player capable of doing better in the finals.

2. Falk: Despite his disappointing performance on the tactics challenge I still believe that he is one of the hardest workers and also I believe he is the most well-rounded player in the competition: good positional play, good tactics and good vision. Perhaps what he is missing is to excel at one of these.

3. Chessnumbers: I was very impressed by his tactical abilities in one of the training sessions he had, he also did great in the draft and passed the first test by David, Unfortunately I haven't had a chance to watch him closely and form a clear picture of him as a player but I hope to do that in the next few weeks
4. Morphyfan He showed great dynamic play in the draft, my feeling is he underperformed in the tactics challenge (which was not hard to do...sorry David <3). Another player which I hope to see more of in the future

5. Seth, as I have mentioned before, Seth reminds me of my younger self, we struggle a lot with visualization and sometimes we rely too much on logic to play the position. We compensate this with good positional understanding. And in spite of the fact that tactics is one of Seth's weakest points he still managed to pass David's first test. I put him at 5th but I think he is one of the player with most potential and we could see him do well on the finals.

6. Velcrodot She is the player that impresses me the most, she has been playing for like a year I believe and she is already 1400, also I have seen her thought process and tactical vision and they are beyond her level, so I think she is really talented and if she keeps putting in the work she could be also one of the ones that we see improving the most in this competition

7. Lularobs. I feel like I haven't seen enough of her, but so far she has been doing well in the competitions, I hope that I can give a better opinion of her play in the future, the fact she ended up in 7th is more or less random, but this speaks to the closenesss of the competition.

8. Drittman. I believe he clearly underperformed in the draft, probably due to nervousness but my recollection of him as a player is that he was a very good tactical player, however, maybe he hasn't done his tactics lately.

David's Power Rankings
1. AkaBlueJae
2. ChessNumbers
3. Nargaef
4. Falk
5. Drittman
6. Seth
7. Lula
8. VelcroDot
Weighted Power Rankings