Crazyhouse Chess: 2019 1+0 Candidates Recap & Announcing the Final

The 2019 Bullet Crazyhouse World Championship Candidates are completed after a summer hiatus and the Grand Final between IM opperwezen (Vincent Rothuis from Holland) and JannLee (Justin Tan from Australia) is now underway. The first session of the Final happened last Saturday at 1200UTC with 30 games of 1+0. The second and third sessions will be on the 2nd and 9th November 1200UTC with a further 30 and 40 games respectively to complete the 100 game match. All games will be played on lichess.org and can be watched on the Lichess TV channels of the respective players as well as being streamed by JannLee (without commentary), Mugwort and okei on Twitch. After the first session opperwezen leads 18-12 with 50.5 being the target for victory. This post is to report how we got here since our announcement of the eight Candidates back in the spring.

The first match of the Candidates was on 21st May between the reigning 2018 World Champion in 3+2 crazyhouse IM opperwezen and the tournament organiser and 2018 CWC Candidate FM littleplotkin (Mark Plotkin from Canada). Opperwezen proved too strong and went on to win six out of his seven matches over the subsequent 31 days, again the first to complete all his matches as in 2018. He only lost to JannLee 14-16. In total he racked up 145 game wins out of 210 games (69% win rate) all but guaranteeing himself a spot in the Final which could only have been denied if two other players scored a greater total of game wins. Despite most matches being completed within 7 weeks as planned, OTB tournaments and the birth of Jann's second child put a stop to the action for a couple of months and the last few matches were not completed till October. With the final match of the Candidates, JannLee overtook opperwezen's game total by one game, scoring 146 game wins, along the way also scoring the biggest demolition of the round robin with 26-4 against VariantsOnly. We are in store for a great Final! Moreover, the winner of the Final will play an exhibition match with a separate prize fund with Jasugi99 (Janak Awatramani from Canada, formerly known as TwelveTeen aka cheesybread on FICS, 12teen on chess.com).

In third place on 116.5 game wins was chickencrossroad (who famously withdrew from the 2017 Candidates making way for opperwezen to take his place after an intensive qualifying tournament against all-comers). Apart from JannLee and opperwezen, chickencrossroad beat everyone else. In fourth place was penguingim1 on 109 game wins who beat everyone apart from Jann, opper and chicken, and in fifth was mastertan on 96 game wins who beat everyone apart from Jann, opper, chicken and penguin. In 6th was blitzbullet beating littleplotkin in 7th who in turn beat VariantsOnly in 8th, but VariantsOnly saw off blitzbullet in his final game, so the bottom three all won one match. Below is the full table of results and on the second page of the Candidates spreadsheet you can also find all the game links and streams. Thanks to TheFinnisher and LegionDestroyer for helping keep this updated!

See you on coming Saturdays at 1200UTC to watch the Final. To whet your appetite, here are a selection of 40 puzzles of various difficulties which you can either solve in your head, or if you prefer play out against the engine in a Practice with Computer Puzzle Study on lichess. There is also a solutions study. For a video recap of the Candidates (don’t look if you want to enjoy the puzzles below), check out part 1 and part 2 of the Highlights video. Coverage of all the 2019 CWC 1+0 matches (including my own coverage of week 1 of the Finals) may be found in the 2019 CWC 1+0 playlist with 39 videos to date.