LCWL: Nicaragua knocks England out of Championship Pool!

All the divisions are having some remarkable contests in the ongoing season of Live Chess World League. In contrast, teams on Division 3 are having some unique struggles.

Match of the week: England vs Nicaragua!

Another virtual knockout! Both teams acknowledged the importance of this round and got their best squad of this season.

The blitz match was extremely close. Definitely England didn't give up on the Rapid match. They got 36(!) players but many of them didn't get paired. Unfortunately, unpaired players can't contribute to the team in any league. Having the most number of unpaired players in a losing match, Team France (Div.1) proposed some interesting idea recently.

Some Interesting Games

That was the busiest week as Div.3 got the maximum number of boards (143) across all formats!

Let's start with a nice mating sequence! Can you find it?

This game is a perfect example of throwaway!

Some endgame blunders went unpunished.

England could be well alive in the contest if this game went the other way!

New Rule is in Action!

In order to improve the quality of this league, some new rules were introduced at the beginning of this season. One of them was about forfeits -

"A team forfeiting 35% of its first stage matches will be removed from the tournament, and all results up to that date will be scratched from the season."

Considering the late withdrawal of Ecuador, Div.3 teams are supposed to play 12 matches in the first stage. Therefore, more than 4 forfeits will disqualify a team and they can't play the 2nd stage.

Div.3 got 21 forfeits already!!

Azerbaijan and Turkey got 72 boards in the last season which is still a record! Unfortunately, both of them have exceeded the limit by suffering 10 and 7 forfeits respectively.

Current Standings

Looks like, there will be no more Relegation pool in Div.3! Despite having such a good team, England might be out of the main event and will continue playing the U1600 event only.

Coming Next...

England vs Azerbaijan is just a formality. As Azerbaijan is already out of the event, these match scores aren't significant. Well, England got some theoretical chance only if Nicaragua

1. Suffers at least one forfeit loss against Uzbekistan or,
2. Fails to provide evidence to claim forfeit wins against Azerbaijan!!

Yeah, both teams can suffer forfeits together and that happened in a match of 3rd round! The Blitz scoreline suggests, there is another possibility!! Really weird calculations are going on

Thanks for reading. Hopefully you'll enjoy some exciting contests. Good luck!

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