Season 8 of the crazyhouse team league played on lichess.org was the toughest ever with former and current world champions JannLee and IM opperwezen both playing as well as Jasugi99, IM gsvc, TheFinnisher, Kleerkast & VariantsOnly. There were six teams of six players as well as 15 alts playing over five weeks, concluding in the first week of August with victory for ZHit Happens after five hard fought rounds. The winning team was made up of gsvc on board 1, pkr5025 on board 2, team captain pepellou on board 3, jamesog on board 4, earlpurple replacing JoannaTries for the last three rounds on board 5 and kostasvl with colwem subbing in for one round on board 6. ZHit Happens won the season thanks to four 7-5 team wins and was one match away from another 7-5 win in round 5 but denied by my own 2-0 victory against pepellou which clinched instead a 7-5 win for The Glass Bead Gamers against the Season 8 champions, and second place for our team headed up by Kleerkast. Coming in third place in the league was VariantOnly’s team Radical Posture captained by Marlonc.
IM gsvc was top board 1, LegionDestroyer top board 2, Bleichkind top board 3, SRTOBIAUDI top board 4, the_crocodile_hunter top board 5 (although earlpurple with an impressive 2000+ performance over fewer games) and adande1 top board 6 (although kostasvl with the slightly better performance).
Below are two sets of puzzles, one medium and one hard, based from positions in Season 8 of the League. I hope you enjoy them! If you prefer to try them directly in a lichess study, here is a practice with computer study. There is also a solution study with full variations as well as a highlights of Season 8 study with full games at the end of the blog.
(includes full games & positions too complicated for puzzles)
The 2020 Candidates are well underway and you can see upcoming matches in the calendar to the right of this blog!
Keep playing and enjoying crazyhouse!
—okei
