Last weekend, on Saturday 28th July at 19:00 GMT, there was a special crazyhouse event pitting the top two players of the game JannLee from Australia & TwelveTeen from Canada against “The World”: a host of strong crazyhouse players chatting over Discord voice & text and choosing their moves by consensus. The time control was 20+15 to give time for collaborative thinking, 3 games would be played so there would likely be a decisive winner, and critically the starting position was randomised, so it was effectively zh960, in order to avoid games following down pre-prepared opening theory. Because zh960 is not yet implemented on lichess.org, the games were played on the chess variants site: http://chessvariants.training.
On the day, the players who could make it to join the World team were: LegionDestroyer, opperwezen, theLAZYmd, TheLoneWolf, Kleerkast, crptone, KyleLegion, h-bar, mathace and Karagialis, with littleplotkin, gsvc, TcubesAK, and Antic dropping by.
JannLee streamed his negotiations with TwelveTeen on his Twitch (to which every crazyhouse player should already be a subscriber) and exported the video to YouTube:
Meanwhile, theLAZYmd streamed the negotiations from the World’s side over Discord, which you can make out despite some technical issues.
TheWorld: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/290379958
Finally, here is a Lichess study of the three games, with some of the critical lines discussed, which might continue to be updated with the help of its contributors.
Kudos to the organiser LegionDestroyer for organising this fantastic event. Do join the lichess team thread as well as the House Discord to get updates on future such events. We hope that more crazyhouse 960 and more team events of this kind will be played in future!
–okei
