North American Corporate Chess League Playoff Field Set: Week 6 Recap!
The regular season of the North American Corporate Chess League is over, and we now know all eight teams that will participate in the knockout playoff on Thursday, as well as the winners of individual and team awards!
The North American Corporate Chess League is an online recreational chess league for employees of NA-based companies. Only the top four scorers on any given team will count towards that team's total, but players further down the list may still be important for tiebreaking. This was the case on Thursday, as PWC narrowly took the eighth and final playoff seed over IBM due to their seventh board (Michael Giampa) scoring half a point more than IBM's seventh (Yaswanth Manoharan) over the course of the entire regular season.
The playoff matchups for next week are as follows:
#1 Symetra vs #8 PWC
#2 Jane Street vs #7 Lyft
#3 Meta vs #6 Stripe A
#4 Ernst & Young vs #5 Anduril
There is a reason Symetra is the top seed. No other team can compete with the team's lineup of two GMs (Andrey Stukopin and Vladimir Belous) and two IMs (Irakli Beradze and Yannick Kambrath). Knowing that the top seed was all but assured, it even seemed that Symetra took this past week "off," as Stukopin took three half-point byes on Thursday, and Kambrath only played two of his three rounds.
The following teams won prizes for their performances in this year's NACCL regular season:
- Top insurance company: Symetra
- Top non-profit: FINRA
- Top small company: Bedoukian Research (second place: Neuroastronomy)
- Top HR firm: Segal
Symetra is the top insurance company by virtue of being the only one remaining in the top eight, but Jane Street and Ernst & Young are still competing for the banking/finance prize, and all five other teams remaining are in the running for the top tech company prize. Final team standings can be viewed at this link.
With GM Stukopin taking three half-point byes this week, there was an avenue available for a few players to chase him down atop the individual standings. Two players managed to do so: FM Roland Feng (first place on tiebreaks) and IM Kyron Griffith, representing Anduril and Lyft respectively. Along the way, Feng took down last season's individual champion with the black pieces:
Tying for first and finishing second overall was IM Griffith, who won in miniature fashion against IM Yannick Kambrath of first-place Symetra. Remembering that these players are all representing playoff teams, it's very possible we'll see some of these matchups again on Thursday!
If we had a brilliancy prize for the NACCL, this game would surely be in contention:
Behind Feng, Griffith, and Stukopin tied for first, the remaining top ten finishers this season were FM David Peng, GM Vladimir Belous, GM Andrey Baryshpolets, IM Irakli Beradze, NM Matias Shundi, Jason Cao, and FM Richard Chen.
Additionally, the NACCL awards plaques to the top three finishers at each class level. Congratulations to the following prizewinners:
Experts: Warren Wang, Kent Lui, Javier Hernandez
Class A: Stan Hwang, Adam Muhs, Benjamin Blium
Class B: Prathik Kaundinya, Udai Muhammed, Billy Vidar
Class C: Freddy Santos, Jared Gorton, Sohil Shah
Class D: Dennis Brewer, Cong Nguyen, James Koo
Class E: Rossell Jay-Agpaoa, Maheep Myneni, Pavan Sannidhi
Under 1000: Yury Ustinovskiy, Ozzy Bommannan, Shivam Bajaj
Most of these reports focus on the highest-rated players in the competition, but I'd like to end this one by showing a few games from some of our class prize winners. Here's a game from Symetra's Dennis Brewer, NACCL Class D champion, showing that even were it not for the "big four," Symetra might still be a formidable team!
Warren Wang of Meta has had an outstanding performance this NACCL season, tying with Praveen Sanjay for the team lead in points. In the final round this past week, he took down NM Harry Zhao of Databricks in a near-perfect game:
Finally, top B player Prathik Kaundinya of Meta produced some flashy tactics this past Thursday, including a queen sacrifice for smothered checkmate:
Congratulations to all prize winners from this season of the North American Corporate Chess League! The knockout playoff on Thursday will be streamed on Chess.com's main Twitch channel, with the bracket viewable here.
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NM Dennis Norman
Chess Coach - Club Journalist
