10+10 spin-off of the Lichess4545 League

Organised by Zher0 over Slack these past seven weeks we have had the first ever Lichess ZH league as a spin-off from the Lichess4545 league. Each week, players played two games of 10+10 crazyhouse, one Black and one White, against their assigned opponent. 15 players participated and crazyhouse veteran FischyVishy was the expected leader with 6/7. I myself escaped many near deaths to go undefeated except for my two games with Fischy and so tie for the lead. Because I lost our head-to-head, I expected that would settle it, but under lone-wolf tiebreak rules one would add the positions of all but your weakest opponent and this would turn out in my favour. However, since the league is still in its infancy, we shall forego such complications and I’m happy to claim a share in the win. The second season is expected to start in the coming weeks.

At the link are 25 mating puzzles taken from games in the league which you can practice against the computer. Click on this Lichess Study link to play out your solutions. There is also an answers link with shortest solutions at the end of the blog. The puzzles get more challenging. Some of the more difficult ones are reproduced here:

gokuba - colwem: Black to mate

DAAL - Forhavu: Black to mate

avas_goridze - FischyVishy: Black to mate

akselm - HighonPotnuse: Black to mate

DAAL - avas_goridze: White to mate

Forhavu - gokuba: Black to mate

okei - Forhavu: Black to win

seb32 - yago666: White to win

okei - Zher0: Black to mate

Play out your own answers against the computer. Answers are also available in this separate study.

—okei

P.S. Since writing this blog, I made the first ever Lichess crazyhouse puzzles stream where I work through these puzzles live on Lichess. More puzzle studies based on Crazyhouse World Championship highlights are linked in the video description.