Jane Street and Capital One Lead NACCL: Week 2 Recap!
Through two weeks of the North American Corporate Chess League's new season, Capital One and Jane Street Capital are tied for first with 19.5 points, with JPMorgan Chase just behind at 19. While the top teams are beginning to separate themselves, there's still a lot of room for movement in the standings, with every team in the top twenty on 15 points or more. Only the top eight will qualify for the knockout playoff at the end of the regular season, scheduled for May 28.
The North American Corporate Chess League is an online recreational chess league run right here on chess.com. Players representing NA-based companies compete in three rounds of rapid chess every Thursday evening, trying to score as many points as possible for their teams in a massive open section. Pairings are based on rating and score, meaning that, until the knockout tournament, there's no direct team-vs-team component, at least not in any given round. Instead, teams rise and fall in the standings according to the cumulative scores of their top four players, with any additional players' scores contributing as tiebreakers. For more detail about the league's rules and structure, see the format page on the NACCL's website.
It's no surprise that Jane Street and Capital One are currently atop the standings. These are two of the three most recent champions, with Capital One having emerged victorious in the last edition. Jane Street's lineup is imposing, with three titled players (each on 5/6 points), but Capital One's IM Craig Hilby got the best of Jane Street's highest-rated player, FM David Peng, in their matchup on Thursday evening:
Due in part to his heroics in last year's knockout tournament, it's easy to view IM Hilby as the undisputed star of Capital One's team. Yet he's getting lots of help from his teammates lately, including NM Abhishek Handigol, currently on 5/6 individually. Handigol has experience in team tournaments, as he was a member of the winning squad in the US Amateur Team West tournament, which then went on win the knockout tournament against champions from the other three regions!
In the game below, NM Handigol took down Ashwin Agnihotri of Jump Trading. After achieving an opening advantage, white slowly infiltrated and created threats until black ran out of defensive resources.
Just behind the two teams tied for first is JPMorgan Chase, half a point out of first place with 19 points. This is yet another team with multiple titled players, as IM Edward Song, FM Alex Bian, and NM Asuka Nakamura are all in JPMorgan Chase's top four, while FM Maggie Feng is just outside. IM Song, the highest-rated of the bunch, won a tremendous game against Airbnb's Colin Diamond:
Rounding out the top five in the team standings are Meta and DRW Holdings, each with 18.5 points (out of a possible 24). The latter is led by NMs Nicholas Desmarais and Andrew Lu, while Meta's titled players are NMs Praveen Sanjay and Warren Wang.
Sanjay had black against Christopher Fashek (KPMG) on Thursday, giving his queen for a collection of pieces which he then used to generate a crushing attack:
In the individual standings, only one player remains perfect. A seasoned NACCL veteran, FM Richard Chen of Databricks would have been among the preseason favorites to finish atop the NACCL's individual standings, and he may well do so at this rate. He's already taken down several other strong players, including the aforementioned NM Desmarais in a chaotic endgame:
For Databricks collectively, it hasn't been the hottest of starts, but there will be plenty of time to ascend the standings with most of the season still to come. At the moment, Databricks is among the five teams tied at 17.5 points, alongside Google (currently tops on tiebreaks), IBM, Susquehanna, and Anduril. That threshold would represent the playoff line if the bracket championship took place today, with Goldman Sachs and Plante Moran just above it at 18 points each.
This is all to say that it's still very early, and there's lots left to be determined! Be sure to check this blog again next week for a midseason update on the North American Corporate Chess League.
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NM Dennis Norman
Chess Coach - Club Journalist
