NACCL Season 12 Kicks Off: Week 1 Recap!
Season number twelve of the North American Corporate Chess League is now underway! A total of 38 teams participated in Thursday evening's opening rounds, playing three games of rapid chess right here on chess.com.
The North American Corporate Chess League is an online recreational chess league for employees of NA-based companies. NACCL's regular season format is best-described as a "blended individual/team competition" as players compete in three rounds of g/10+2 online chess each week. During the regular season, teams don't face each other directly, but players are paired within a big open section based on their scores and ratings, with the opportunity to accumulate points for their respective teams. The top four individual performances on any given team are added up to form a team's overall score. At the end of the regular season, the top eight teams will qualify for a team-vs-team knockout tournament to crown the ultimate NACCL champion (find the NACCL's schedule here).
Many titled players participated in week one, including two GMs, three IMs, five FMs, and numerous NMs and experts! Out of hundreds of total competitors, thirty-four scored 3/3 last Thursday, with several very familiar names atop the individual standings. That includes IM Craig Hilby of Capital One, who created a dangerous passed pawn and took down FM Igor Tsyganov in the second round.
Not only did IM Hilby score a perfect 3/3 on Thursday, but so did six(!) of his teammates: Quinn Leventhal, Alex Cook, Marco Flores, Neha Pattanaik, and Jared Gorton. Since NACCL's scoring system takes the combined total of a team's top four players, that gives Capital One twelve points out of a possible twelve through the first week of play, tied with Meta for first place.
Meta, one of last season's top teams, also boasts six perfect scorers: NM Praveen Sanjay, Mihir Salunke, Davi Macedo, Yash Shah, Michael Hong, and Madhav Goyal. In the game included here, Salunke punished his opponent for keeping his king in the center, exploiting the devastating pin against black's e7-knight:
Just behind Meta and Capital One in the standings is perennial contender Jane Street, headlined by usual suspects FM Jacob Furfine and NM Matias Shundi, each perfect through Thursday. The two titled players also got a boost from unrated Alexander Schrader, who won all his games as well, including one in which he got to draw his opponent's king all the way out to f5!
Another playoff team from last season, Anduril, also started off strong in week one, scoring 10.5 points and currently ranking in fifth place. Two players on the Anduril team are currently on 3/3, both familiar names: FM Roland Feng and NM Francisco Guadalupe, the latter winning a chaotic and entertaining game as black in a Max Lange Attack:
IBM currently sits in fourth place, with perfect scores from Shaktiprasad Shimpi and Sukhminder Bal, followed by the aforementioned Anduril, Lyft, and Databricks. FM Richard Chen has been Databricks' top performer in seasons past, but he shared the spotlight last Thursday with teammate (and GM!) Parimarjan Negi, whose flashy second round game included multiple piece sacrifices.
Full team standings of the new NACCL season can be found at this link, with regular season rounds taking place every Thursday evening until the regular season finale on November 6th, followed by the one-day knockout tournament on November 13th to crown a champion.
Keep an eye out for the weekly recaps right here on the CCC blog every Monday, and good luck to all teams and players in the North American Corporate Chess League!
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NM Dennis Norman
Chess Coach - Club Journalist
