We have found meaning of life in Lichess4545 League

Don’t panic, season 42 of the Lichess 4545 League is here! A number of teams remembered their towels and named themselves in honor of Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchhiker’s series, including So Long and Thanks for All the Stockfish, and Hey, you sass that hoopy Ding Liren?

After four rounds, no teams have a perfect score and all teams have at least one point. elo non olet leads on tiebreaks. Back in round 2, they won a close matchup against The Eight Berserkers and the Blood Oath on the final game of the round, a twisty 129 move marathon win by electricfalcon:

It’s beginning to look a lot like checkmate and The Infinite Improbability Team are close behind in second and third. This round, first and third will face off.

The Lichess 4545 League is a league for players who like to play long time control games on Lichess. Players get one pairing a week and schedule a time with their opponent. If you are interested in learning more, visit lichess4545.com.

Annotated game:

The fight for the lead at the end of round 3 of the league ended in a nailbiting game between freddy267t and fork2020. Here are three puzzles of increasing difficulty taken from (the analysis of) their game, followed by a handmade annotated analysis.

First a very easy puzzle (about 1000 rating)

Then a harder puzzle (about 1800 rating)

Then a really tough one (perhaps 2300+ rating)

And the full game with @ventricule’s annotations

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Lonewolf Tournament Update

Open

Current leader after 6 rounds in the Open is Empty_walls who is rated 2344 classical and has won their last 16 classical games in a row on Lichess. They have 6/6 and are the only perfect score. They play 2nd place, pychonaut (2310), who has 5 and a half out of 6 with the black pieces on 12/20 at 0800UTC. Pychonaut’s only draw came from an unplayed half point in the first round and have a perfect 5/5 in played games this tournament. Those are the only two players with more than 5 points thus far. There is a 3 way tie for 3rd between KS_legion_legionowo, somerapidplayer, and sooneroo. Update a few rounds have been played since we first started this ledger draft and pychonaut has gone on to win 2 more games against Empty_Walls and Thetchigorindefense to now have 7 and a half out of 8 with a whopping 2944 performance rating! Both games were decided in mutual time pressure and can be seen here:

Under 1800

Current leader after 6 rounds is keithframnes with a 5 and a half out of 6. 2nd place is a 3way tie between artofthepawnstorm, amgazapob, and ysgwydd who all have 5 out of 6. Update ysgwydd has taken the overall lead now with 6/7 after 7 rounds. They took 2 half point byes to start the tournament and are a perfect 5/5 with a performance rating of 2462 after beating previous leader keithframnes last week. Here is that game if anyone would like to take a look.

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@MilsBees #correspondence update:

Here are your stories from around the league!

The top 5:
The top five: The top five in #correspondence is ever changing and often a very exciting race. As of writing this post, this is the top five:

1. @scvrf
2. @barredrock
3. @MilsBees
4. @ginoux
5. @Mennonite

We've had many more in the top five at some point this year, including @Hildingr, @Silkthewanderer, @AlexGaul, @pemula64 & @nairwolf just to name a few!

Level up!

As #correspondence is an infinite competition we have an XP system where you gain levels the more you play and the better you do!
Eighteen players have managed to reach 100 XP so far, whilst @MilsBees, @Haspelknecht and @Hildingr have garnered over 200 XP.
Recently we surpassed 100 rounds played in this tournament and since then, we've seen level ups from @lone_rangerheavy, @Haspelknecht, @forhavu, @wizzywop, @Hildingr, @UpGoerFive, @samit_d and @lc69! Congratulations.

Notable games:

For round 100 we had many new players join us to celebrate reaching the triple digit milestone. The game of the round saw @ribrubrib win a very nice game on the black side of a Caro-Kann:

More recently, @AlexGaul and @ConorTO showed us how having the opening book at your disposal can lead to some wild positions, even if they reach a peaceful end:
In a clash at the top, @scvrf beat @MilsBees to take the top spot, grinding out a win from an equal rook endgame, just like the first time they faced off:

If you're looking for a place to practice some new openings or want the opportunity to take multiple days to think about a position, then #correspondence is the place for you! Write 'start quest' in the channel to join the league and 'set limit x' to indicate the maximum amount of games you want to have running simultaneously. We hope to see you there!

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4545 Interview with a league player conducted by @fork2020

For this edition, we have managed to secure an interview with a current league moderator who has captained teams to victory in back to back seasons, in seasons 18 and 19. Most importantly, however, this player was a longtime contributor to the ledger. Can you guess this player?

If your guess was @glbert, you are wrong! The answer is @Tranzoo. Sadly, this interview doesn’t share any information regarding the way to gain admittance to the mod yacht, so if you were hoping for that, you’ll be sorely disappointed, and might want to skip the interview. Although Tranzoo deflected a couple questions, you may still find some interesting responses here. (See the reply to question two.)

What led to the downfall of the previous era of the ledger? Do you have any advice for our noble current editors?

“What happened with the ledger in its „Lichess Blog era“ was mainly driven by two people: me and izzie. We did get help from other contributors, but we were the ones pushing it forward each week. Eventually, it became unsustainable because it was a lot of work. Doing it weekly is very hard and you can only stay motivated for so long, at least that's true for me. I also think I got into a new job at the time and everything chess related got sidetracked for me – that is life.”

“That doesn't mean it wasn't worth it. It was wonderful to cover a full season, and it was a lot of fun. However, I would recommend anyone trying to put something like this together to consider monthly editions instead. If I would do it again, I would aim for monthly editions. But everyone is different, so it depends on your goals, motivation, and what you want to achieve with the Ledger.”

It is also worth noting that you are an important member of the moderator team. How long have you been in this role?

“I think the „important“ part of your question is a bit dubious, but alas, it's been a few years, though I can't remember exactly how long. I do remember how it started. One day, Mr. Scribbles asked if I wanted to join him. I said yes, and it's been mostly great since then. I can now rig my own games which is definitely an advantage.”

I remember @MrScribbles threatening to send the Mod Yacht to Siberia. Does the moderator team have protection against such tampering?

“Well, it's kind of a trade-off. We let Mr. Scribbles have his fun in a few Slack channels he created. He can torture the users there. In return, he doesn't torture us. It's like a feudal system, basically. A sort of divide and conquer thing. That's how we manage that problem. Divide et impera.”

As a player, you reached the 200-game milestone last season. Could you provide two of your most memorable games to celebrate this accomplishment, even if the celebration comes a season late?

“The top game I had was pretty easy to pick because of the circumstances. It happened in season 19 when I was trying to win the league championship again as a captain. The last game of the final round (it was a double week Christmas round) was a must-win for me for my team to become champions. It was a lot of fun and I wish every player could experience something like that.”

“I felt really good about how I played in that game. It's hard to believe it was four years ago. The gameplay itself wasn't anything special, but the situation made it very memorable to me.”

“Another memorable game was the mod-versus-mod battle against sgis. It was a long and tough game with 86 moves over three hours. We like to do some trash-talking during these mod battles, which makes them fun. Even though neither of us played with great technique, I managed to win in the end. It was a strange one.”

“We had a rematch by the way some time later and I won that as well, so sgis needs to come back to the league as a player if he wants to have his revenge.”

You also have the notable accomplishment of captaining back-to-back championship teams in seasons 18-19. Do you have anything to share about that experience?

“It was awesome, and I want to give a shout-out to my teammate, pepepibote. Over both seasons, Pepe and I were probably the only pair of players to win back-to-back league championships as teammates. I like that.”

“In the second season (season 19), our team name was Team Names Don't Matter When You Win as well, which proved team name magic works.. We almost won the best team name competition too but came in second.”

“What else I can say, we had two very fortunate seasons with a lot of luck on our side. Especially in season 19, a lot of weeks we barely got by, but it added up to a team victory.”

“I remember that season every week a different player stepped up. It wasn't just one or two superstars carrying the team; it was a full team effort which culminated with that game I mentioned earlier when you asked me about my most memorable games. If you check the results, we won 4 of the rounds by the closest possible score. Good times.”

Which league player do you most respect?

“It's a tough question because many people helped to make the league what it is today. We often forget the devs, when I think chesster and website is actually the glue that holds league together while us mods are pretty much doing nothing at this point. It's really hard to choose just one person. So I will deflect this question with humor: Instead, I'll tell you about someone I don't respect at all. The player I disrespect the most is glbert because they are too smart and they are right like 95 % of the times. And I don't like it when people are too smart. And they hate young people and that is just not nice.”

How would you react if your opponent suddenly turned into a pumpkin mid-game?

“It would be great if it happened to be Magnus Carlsen, I...would definitely be selling that pumpkin on eBay.”

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Lichess4545 is an online chess league for people who like playing long time control games online. Players are assigned to teams and play one game per week with a 45+45 time control. For more information visit our league home page.
LoneWolf is a side league of the Lichess4545 league. It is an 11-round Swiss tournament where players play one game per week with a 30+30 time control. For more information about the LoneWolf tournament visit the LoneWolf homepage.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA).
Contributions to the text by @Milsbees, @ventricule, @nseek, @mennonite, @fork2020 and maybe others - please reach out to Tranzoo on Slack to get credited :-).