One Week Left in NACCL Regular Season: Week 5 Recap!
With one week remaining in the North American Corporate Chess League regular season, the playoff race is heating up! Out of the 45 total teams in the NACCL, seventeen are within three points of the playoff line, each vying for a top eight spot and qualification for the one-day knockout tournament scheduled for June 12.
The North American Corporate Chess League is an online recreational chess league for employees of NA-based companies, with as few as four or as many as thirty players per team. Each team's top four highest-scoring players' totals throughout the season are added up to generate a team's total score, with the top eight teams qualifying for the playoff bracket.
Heading into the final week, Symetra Financial is in clear first with 48 points, 5.5 ahead of second place. Symetra is not only a cinch to make the playoffs but also the overwhelming favorite to finish as the top seed, which would lead to a first-round matchup against the lowest qualifying playoff team by points total.
The most interesting question about Symetra this week is whether either of the team's GMs will finish as the clear individual champion of this NACCL season. GM Andrey Stukopin didn't play this week, receiving three half-point byes, allowing teammate and fellow GM Vladimir Belous to tie him atop the individual leaderboard with this victory against FM Richard Chen of Databricks:
In clear second place (42.5 points) is Jane Street, who entered this past Thursday tied with Anduril and Google but had the best week of the bunch. It's extremely likely Jane Street will make the playoffs as well, but they will still need a strong performance this week to keep the number two seed.
Jane Street's resurgence has been led by the trio of titled players on 11 points: FM David Peng, NM Matias Shundi, and FM Jacob Furfine. NM Shundi squeezed out an imbalanced-material endgame win over Freddy Santos of AFS:
Meanwhile, FM Jacob Furfine used a Jobava London to defeat Capital One's Jared Gorton. Furfine has not quite been able to repeat his dominance from last season, but is still tied for fifth in the individual standings next to his aforementioned teammates.
Next are Meta and Anduril on 40.5, as well as Ernst & Young on 40. The remaining teams in playoff position are IBM (39.5), Jump Trading (39.5), and Lyft (39). The former three teams have a very good shot to make it but a bad week could still knock them out. As a case-in-point, Google was tied for second last week with 33.5 points but has fallen all the way to ninth (just below the playoff line!) after Thursday's games.
The top individual scorer among the players in this group is FM Roland Feng of Anduril, who took down EY's Sameer Mujumdar in a very important matchup last week.
One team still fighting for playoff chances is Cox Communications, a team whose top four does not include anyone with a listed rating over 1500! Instead, it's been James Koo leading the team with 10.5 points, including upsets such as his victory over Meta's Ankush Goyal:
Every team from Google all the way down to seventeenth-ranked Databricks is within three points of the last playoff spot, currently occupied by Lyft. If tiebreakers are needed, scores from each team's fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth players will be considered, as per the format page on the NACCL's official website. View the full team standings at this link.
Good luck to all teams entering the final week, and we'll update you again next week with the list of playoff teams and all other things NACCL!
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NM Dennis Norman
Chess Coach - Club Journalist
