2023 Daily Chess Championship Final

 2023 Daily Chess Championship - Final 

Good Morning Chess Players!

I never expected to win such a big tournament.

Especially since, according to the information on the website announcing the event, it was "The world's largest tournament".
Of course, such numbers are impressive:

• Players: 35000
• Completed Games: 424652

The only slightly irritating thing is the relatively large number of timeouts.

The World Record. 

Interestingly, the Guinness Book of Records has the following category:

"Largest online chess tournament".

Which of course perfectly meet our tournament.
Currently, no tournament is listed, but the current largest number of participants is set in this Guinness Book to 20,000:

This must be quite old data (maybe 2021), because last year's edition had over 33,000 (exactly 33633).

After contacting with chess.com I made an attempt to report this tournament as the biggest one.

But we don't live in the '50s, so of course you have to pay for the pleasure of being included in the Book.

So, reporting this tournament as a World Record, starts some procedures.

According to the information I received from Business Solutions Guinness World Records it cost at least ten thousands of pounds. .

Of course, it is understandable that each record must be thoroughly verified, and this requires the establishment of a special team and, therefore, the payment of these people. For this reason, I withdrew from the project of entering this tournament into the Guinness Book.

I think that in the coming years, when organizing a tournament for e.g 100,000 players, chess.com will try to report such an event itself. So it is worth to play in such an event in future.

A few days ago, while browsing the news on chess.com, I read a nice summary of the championships I won . 

https://www.chess.com/news/view/szymanski-wins-chesscom-daily-championship-2023

More than a month has passed since the end, but encouraged by the above article, I decided to publish on my blog all the games I played in the final round.

So let me back to the chess and present the final standings with me on the first place.

As befits a high-quality round-robin tournament, most of the games ended in a draw. Personally, out of the 6 games played, I won 2, while the rest were a draw. The final result (4 points) was enough to take first place on its own.
I will, of course, start the presentation of the games with the winning ones. The entire analysis will be done without the use of a computer, so if you find any mistakes/ better moves / ideas, feel free to write in the comments. Both games I won are fully and detailed presented while I made a lot of notes during the final round.

So let's focus on the chessboard:

Game #1: My Best Win 

It was the last game of 2023 Daily Chess Championship. I had to win this game to take first place on my own.

if you had time you can analyse the endgame. It seams to be quite interesting. Maybe you will find the way to save this game for black.

Game #2: Second Win

I think that objectively this game should end with draw. The move before the game was finished it was nearly equal.  

The rest my games ended with draw and therefore I am not going to analyse them do detailed. But of course I share with you briefly the best moments.

What is interesting all games I played black was French Defense. 

But generally if you play against me and you started with 1.e4, you can be 100% sure that I will reply with 1...e6

Game #3: First French Draw

Game #4: Second French Draw

Game #5: Third French Draw

Game #6: Last Draw

These are all the games I played. Two victories turned out to be enough to win the last round and the entire tournament. The next edition starts on January 1, 2024. This time the organizer did not introduce any restrictions on the number of participants. So the attendance will definitely be record-breaking again. Please also note that entries to the 2024 event are now open:

https://www.chess.com/tournament/2024-chess-com-daily-chess-championship