Slomski's Rapid Chess Training League - Season 1: The Playoffs
The league is open to players rated around 1600-2300, who are looking to get some extra competition against other ambitious players without having to travel for an OTB tournament.
This past January saw the playoffs for the league, an 8-player knockout format tournament until a winner was decided. The format for each match was as follows: Best of two Rapid games 20 + 10, and if the score is still tied then Blitz 5 + 0 until someone wins a game (lower rated player gets White first).
Here are the results, round by round, with selected games annotated by yours truly. While there were two forfeited matches due to no-shows, there were still quite a few interesting games, and plenty to learn from. I tried to choose a highlight from each match, enjoy!
Quarterfinals
39clues (#1) vs bspurt (#5)
floydAkash (#2) vs CraiggoryC (#6) (forfeit no games)
fianchettoer (#3) vs Fischwitsch (#7)
Luckyiki (#4) vs TheEnglishMuon (#8)
Semifinals
bspurt (#5) vs TheEnglishMuon (#8)
CraiggoryC (#6) vs Fischwitsch (#7) (forfeit no games)
bspurt (#5) vs Fischwitsch (#7)
Congrats to bspurt! Well played! The next season of Slomski's Rapid Chess Training League will start sometime next fall. If you are rated between 1600-2300 and are interested in joining, contact Matthew Slomski and tell him you want to join!
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Bio
IM Kostya Kavutskiy is a professional chess author, journalist, coach, commentator, and player. As a part of Chess.com's content team since 2009, Kostya has recorded many video lectures, covered elite tournaments, written instructive articles & blogs, and has done many live commentary shows for Chess TV. Kostya has also written a number of articles for Chess Life magazine and Chess Life Online, and is currently an instructor for Chess University. In 2015, Modernized: The Open Sicilian was released, which Kostya co-authored with IM Zhanibek Amanov. Kostya's tournament accomplishments include winning the 2014 Southern California Closed Championship, as well as achieving his IM title in November 2016. In April 2017, he placed 6th in the star-studded 2017 Reykjavik Open. He currently resides in Mountain View, CA, and his plans are to pursue the GM title while working actively as a coach.