NACCL Playoff Field Set: Week 6 Recap & Knockout Preview!
The North American Corporate Chess League's twelfth regular season has come to a conclusion, giving us eight teams for Thursday evening's knockout tournament! Margins were slim, as the eighth and final playoff spot came down to tiebreaks, while only 5.5 points separated the top team from the first team out of the tournament.
The NACCL is an online recreational chess league for members of NA-based companies, with games taking place on chess.com at a rapid time control. With the regular season over, the top eight teams in the league standings have now advanced to a knockout playoff tournament to crown this season's champion. This post will recap the events of Week 6 in the NACCL, preview the upcoming knockout tournament, and highlight prizewinning players and teams from the regular season.
Week 6 Recap:
In last week's recap, I highlighted four teams as near-locks to make the tournament: Jane Street, Anduril, PWC, and Meta. All four of them made it with some room to spare, with Anduril finishing as the top seed with 50.5 points, while the other three all rank within the top five. With a solid performance on Thursday despite GM Parimarjan Negi taking byes, Databricks advanced to the fourth spot at 47.5 points and is now set to face Meta in the first round of the bracket tournament (more on that below!).
The race for the last few spots in the bracket was very tight, as Capital One (previously below the playoff line) jumped to the sixth seed due to the entire starting lineup posting at least an even score. Maury Ahram and Michael Salinas each notched two points, while IM Craig Hilby scored 2.5. His last-round win against NM Warren Wang came down to a tactical find in the endgame:
IBM was ranked fifth entering this past week's slate, and the team's alliterative duo of Shaktiprasad Shimpi and Sathvik Singireddy did enough to keep the team above the playoff line. The latter played a tremendous game against Christopher Fashek of KMPG, slowly grinding out an advantage in a Rossolimo Sicilian, finding the fun 29. Rxf6!, and then converting a material plus into a win.
The tightest race was for the eighth and final playoff seed. Heading into last week, that spot was occupied by Lyft, but as GM Kayden Troff pointed out on his commentary stream, that team faced an unusual challenge this week. Most of the league's elite players had already played each other by this point in the season, but Lyft's IM Kyron Griffith had still yet to face several of them due to missing multiple previous weeks. As a result, he had to run the gauntlet, facing the top two players in the entire field (GM Baryshpolets and FM Feng) back-to-back in his first two games on Thursday. Griffith had good positions in each game but ultimately lost both. Teammate Diego Gomez had a strong showing on Thursday, but Lyft's third and fourth board combined for 1.5/6 as the team fell out of playoff contention.
This left the door open for a handful of teams, including Jump Trading, FINRA, and AFS, but it was ultimately Susquehanna who rose all the way into the eighth and final spot in the NACCL's upcoming knockout tournament. This was perhaps Thursday's biggest surprise, as the team doesn't have any titled players and has never been ranked any higher than its current eighth-place positioning all season!
Susquehanna jumped into the playoffs due in part to the excellent performances of Andrew Peterson and Yury Ustinovskiy (3/3 and 2.5/3 on Thursday respectively), and in part to a deep bench. NACCL standings are decided by the top four performing players on a given team, but player scores outside of a team's top four are used in the event of a tiebreak, which was needed after Susquehanna and Jump Trading each finished on 45 points. Each team's fifth board scored 10 points this season (Susquehanna's Leo Wang and Jump Trading's Adam Muhs), but Susquehanna's next two players (Eugene Strulyov and Evan Lee) outscored their Jump Trading counterparts.
None of this would have been relevant if not for Ustinovskiy's crazy final game against Ozzy Bommannan, where he was dead lost for many moves but pulled off a miracle in his opponent's time pressure:
Another storyline heading into the final week of regular season action was whether GM Andrey Baryshpolets would be able to fend off FM Roland Feng for the top spot in the individual standings. Both players ended up winning all three games this week, meaning that they remain in first and second place with 16.5 and 15.5 points respectively. In addition to wins against the aforementioned IM Griffith and NM Andrew Lu of DRW, Baryshpolets' smooth win against Mihir Salunke helped seal his place atop the leaderboard.
Rounding out the top five in the individual standings are IM Craig Hilby of Capital One, FM Richard Chen of Databricks, and NM Quentin Moore of AFS, beating out FM Jacob Furfine on tiebreaks. Moore's team narrowly missed the playoffs but that wasn't his fault, as he posted a perfect score on Thursday. That included this astonishing turnaround against FM Chen, covered live on GM Troff's stream, where white was completely winning until 55. Qc4+ Ne4!
Knockout Playoff Preview!
Pending the results of the league's fair play check, the quarterfinal matchups this coming Thursday will be as follows: #1 Anduril vs #8 Susquehanna, #2 PWC vs #7 IBM, #3 Jane Street vs #6 Capital One, and #4 Databricks vs #5 Meta.
Anduril is the tournament's top seed for a reason. The duo of FM Roland Feng and NM Francisco Guadalupe combined for more points than any other two players on any other team, and Anduril also received contributions from Stuart Abrams and Gene Cherkansky at 11.5 and 11 points respectively. Still, if Anduril gets past Susquehanna, the winner of the Databricks/Meta matchup will have a very real chance of pulling an upset due to their strong depth. Another team with a shot to go very far is third-seeded Jane Street, whose top four is rock-solid, making them the favorites to advance past against Capital One.
One thing to keep in mind is that teams may choose any five players for their lineups this week, as long as all five players have participated in at least twelve rounds this year. This could result in some teams fielding very different lineups from the ones we see in their "top fours" every week in the regular season. As always, the battle will be fought primarily on the top four boards, but each team's fifth-ranked players will also face off in a tiebreaker Armageddon-style game. Full details about the format of the NACCL bracket playoff can be found here.
Prizewinners!
Finally, I'd like to highlight all the prizewinners from the NACCL's regular season! The following players won plaques for their individual performances:
Top Ten Overall: GM Andrey Baryshpolets, FM Roland Feng, IM Craig Hilby, FM Richard Chen, NM Quentin Moore, FM Jacob Furfine, NM Francisco Guadalupe, Yury Ostinovskiy, NM Matias Shundi, and NM Praveen Sanjay
Top Experts: NM Danyul Lawrence, Jonas Zeutzius, and Gilad Drillich
Top Class A: Yury Ostinovskiy, Sundar Swaminathan, and Ozzy Bommannan
Top Class B: Shaktiprasad Shimpi, Nicholas Konovalenko, and Karthik Palaniappan
Top Class C: Stuart Abrams, Srinivasa Srikakolapu, and Yaswanth Manoharan
Top Class D: Neil Edwards, Eugene Strulyov, and Paul Scaggs
Top Class E: Alexander Williams, Fezaan Jameel, and John Luburic
Top Under 1000: Abishek Kumarasubramanian, Michael Salinas, and Madhav Goyal
The following teams received plaques for their regular season performances (in addition to each of the knockout-qualifying teams winning a plaque for finishing top eight overall):
Top Small Companies: Bedoukian and Neuroastronomy
Top Insurance Company: Symetra
Top HR Firm: PWC
Top Non-Profit: FINRA
Prize standings are still tentative and subject to a fair play check. Congratulations to all prizewinners and best of luck to the eight teams still remaining, as they prepare for Thursday's knockout tournament to decide the new North American Corporate Chess League champion!
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NM Dennis Norman
Chess Coach - Club Journalist
