Meta and PWC Surging in NACCL: Week 3 Recap!
We have reached the halfway point of the North American Corporate Chess League's regular season! Competition is fierce, as the league's 38 teams compete for eight spots in the one-day knockout tournament scheduled for November 13.
The North American Corporate Chess League is an online recreational chess league for members of NA-based companies, with teams ranging from four to an absolute maximum of thirty players. Over the course of the regular season, players compete in a large open section and try to score as many points as possible for their teams, with a team's score consisting of the combined total of its top four boards. Each player plays three rounds per week, with games taking place on Thursday evenings right here on chess.com. Tiebreaks, which may become important as the playoff race heats up, are calculated using the scores of a team's next few boards, so even the players not among the top four on a given team can contribute! For more detailed information about the league's rules, see the format page on the NACCL website.
Midway through the regular season, Meta and PWC have vaulted to a tie atop the team standings with 28.5 points each. At this point last week, the top two teams were Databricks and Capital One, but both had mild down weeks and fell to third and fifth respectively, still very much in the playoff race.
As you might expect, the top teams in the NACCL feature many of the league's best players, with GM Andrey Baryshpolets of PWC currently sporting the league's best individual score. He entered this week as one of three players with a perfect 6/6, the others being FM Richard Chen and GM Parimarjan Negi, both representing Databricks. Baryshpolets wasn't able to maintain his perfect score this week, as we'll see in a moment, but his 2.5/3 score this week keeps him atop the individual standings. This included games against both Chen and Negi, making this perhaps the most compelling week of the season in terms of marquee matchups.
Here's his win against Chen from Thursday's first round, where white won a piece quickly due to an opening tactic:
This actually left Baryshpolets as the lone perfect scorer in the league, because during that same round, GM Negi drew against Jane Street's Jacob Furfine. Still, the next round saw perhaps the top game of the entire regular season, as the battle of the GMs came down to a tricky rook-and-knight endgame. With as many as three extra pawns at a few points, Baryshpolets very nearly kept his perfect score, but had to settle for a draw when Negi found a resource in mutual time pressure.
While Baryshpolets headlines the PWC lineup, he's not the only contributor, as teammates Michael Giampa and Mark Morrison have posted seven points each. Meanwhile, Meta (also on 28.5 points) boasts NMs Warren Wang and Praveen Sanjay, as well as Mika Laitinen, whose 7.5 points put him in fourth place individually. Laitinen is the only untitled player in the top ten of the individual standings! Here's his third-round win from last week.
Laitinen's teammate, the aforementioned NM Warren Wang, also scored a big win when he took down NM Quentin Moore of AFS. The key moment of the game was on move fifteen, when white had a difficult choice between several potential in-between moves. As it happened, the knight on e7 never escaped, and black was able to convert his extra material into a win:
After Meta and PWC, Databricks is currently third in the team standings, with Anduril in fourth with 27 points. Capital One ranks fifth, with better tiebreaks than Jane Street or Lyft, also on 26 points and currently ranked sixth and seventh respectively. Lyft has benefited from the great performance of Philip Gerstoft (7/9) and of course IM Kyron Griffith, who climbed to second in the individual leaderboard.
Griffith actually took down GM Negi in the final round due to the latter flagging in a complex position, but I'd also like to highlight his game against FINRA's Danyul Lawrence, where the IM achieved lots of activity out of a Vienna QGD:
Be sure to check here every week for updates on the NACCL season, as the races heat up for the league's eight playoff spots!
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NM Dennis Norman
Chess Coach - Club Journalist
