PRO Chess League Dream Team
If you could pick any 4 players from the current PRO Chess League season, and put them together on a legal (2500) lineup, what is the strongest team you could make? What would be the Dream Team that could 90% defeat the Gnomes, Snowballs, Chessbrahs, and Archbishops?
I'm curious what you think. Below, I'm putting forward 5 squads that I thought of. To do so, I relied on the [admittedly inexact] data from this article:
https://www.chess.com/article/view/pro-chess-league-top-performers
Imperfect, because there are a few missing games, and because I've also discovered that some players performance ratings have been lowered by wins against lower-rated players. In other words, if you left out all of Wesley So's wins against board 4s, his performance rating would be 10 or 20 points higher. But it would be some agonizing work to clean this data up for all the top players, so I'm going with the data I have.
In figuring what would be the best squad, I'm using the 2017 PRO League performance rating average of the four players.
| Team 1 | Rating | Perf |
| Li Chao | 2700 | 2877 |
| So, Wesley | 2700 | 2842 |
| Nico, Zwirs | 2368 | 2576 |
| De Vreesse | 2229 | 2428 |
| Team average | 2499.25 | 2680.75 |
Li and Wesley are a good start to any team :-P
| Team 2 | Rating | Perf |
| Li Chao | 2700 | 2877 |
| Wesley So | 2700 | 2842 |
| Ghasi, A | 2455 | 2637 |
| Rosenthal, N | 2136 | 2341 |
| Team average | 2497.75 | 2674.25 |
Here you could up the average performance rating by 9 points by playing Alexandre Bacrot in place of Nicholas Rosenthal, but I'm going with the player who has shown his performance over twice as many games, and stronger opposition. Especially with a board 4, it's harder to keep up a performance over many games against stronger opposition.
| Team 3 | Rating | Perf |
| Li Chao | 2700 | 2877 |
| Wesley So | 2700 | 2842 |
| Dhulipalla, B | 2327 | 2541 |
| Francisco, R | 2271 | 2461 |
| Team average | 2499.5 | 2680.5 |
A lot of people will not be aware of these boards 3 and 4, but they have played a bunch of games, and my math claims this team would be insane!
| Team 4 | Rating | Perf |
| Li Chao | 2700 | 2877 |
| Noritskyn, N | 2479 | 2608 |
| Ghasi, A | 2455 | 2637 |
| Nico, Z | 2368 | 2576 |
| Team average | 2499.75 | 2674.5 |
The opposite of sacrificing board 4! You could substitute Wesley So for Li Chao, losing 9 points of team average performance rating, but getting a player who has shown that performance over twice as many games. I'd probably take Wesley now that I think about it.
| Team 5 | Rating | Perf |
| Li Chao | 2700 | 2877 |
| Jones, G | 2665 | 2778 |
| Dhulipalla, B | 2327 | 2541 |
| Perez, F | 2298 | 2518 |
| Team average | 2497.5 | 2678.5 |
2500+ on board 4 (better than the average for the league), and still 2750+ on the top 2. Of note that Gawain Jones had some incredibly clutch playoff performances for his team.
Let me know what you think in the comments :-)
This process also sparked some speculation about the MVP question-- we notice a few of the same faces popping up in Dream Team after Dream Team: Li Chao, Wesley So, Dhulipalla. I would imagine they are in contention for MVP.
