Jasugi99 ended 2020 winning both the Crazyhouse World Championship as well as teaming up with chickencrossroad to win the Bughouse World Championship.
February 2021 saw the conclusion of Season 9 of the ZH League of slow team crazyhouse, as well as the kick-off for the 2021 Crazyhouse World Championship with 267 participants reduced to 256 and 256 reduced to 12 over the past six months through a double-elimination process. As in previous years, a lot of these matches were live-streamed and you can catch up from the 2021 CWC playlist.
You can see a truncated version of this double-elimination here thanks to LegionDestroyer.
The final 12 along with 2020 runner-up IM opperwezen will now play a round-robin over the coming months (one match a week of 10 games of 3+2). The player with the most game wins will then face 2020 CWC Champion in the 2021 Grand Final, with the loser qualifying to the Candidates at the next cycle.
The final 13 are:
To keep up to date with future Crazyhouse World Championship action, keep an eye on the CWC lichess team.
Elite Crazyhouse Arenas organised by TheFinnisher have continued Friday or Saturday evenings for players rated 2100+ on lichess.org.
There have also been hotly contested ZH Nations League Arenas organised by OFBC_Nigeria every Sunday afternoon dominated by Russia, Nigeria & Germany. Finland has also proved to be a force thanks to the singular indomitable contributions of TheFinnisher each week. For the less nationalistic and smaller countries of Europe such as the UK & Switzerland, there is also the Outer-Europe Crazyhouse Team, and for the smaller countries of East-Asia the East Asian Crazyhouse Team. Powerhouses the Netherland, Australia & Canada have yet to participate fully, but we expect these arenas to continue to grow and more nations to join.
Another endeavour has been to replace the usual hourly crazyhouse arenas on lichess with underground arenas organised by blunderman1. To see these arenas in your upcoming tournaments, join the Underground Crazyhouse team.
TheFinnisher also set up a Crazyhouse Curator team to notify members about all future crazyhouse events each week. Another good way to stay up to date is to join the House Variants discord server, which has been extending its success in variants to standard chess with victories in the online Bundesliga (14 wins in 2020, 10 so far in 2021) which was set up in response to the pandemic.
With the race to the CWC Candidates getting clearer, July 2021 also saw a Crazyhouse 960 team league (Season 9.60) as an intermezzo between Seasons 9 and Season 10 expected towards the end of 2021. If you wish to be notified of future slow crazyhouse initiatives, please join the Crazyhouse League Team on lichess. This second successful zh960 league was played on the lichess sister site https://www.pychess.org which allows for zh960 and zh from position as well as a host of other variants. The Russian-dominated Red Button won the league with a team headed by Fumitoks on board 1 and terra87 on board 2, both of whom were undefeated with 6 wins out of 6.
The league was concluded with a prize arena and the following week the inaugural zh960 shield with over 100 participants won by zyxon from Sweden (firefly on FICS).
The shields in standard crazyhouse meanwhile have been dominated by TheFinnisher & BughouseKnight, but also wins from Fumitoks in May, and Kleerkast in July up against stiff opposition from both TheFinnisher & zyxon.
For an introduction to crazyhouse 960: from Beginners to Mastery, check out these highlight positions chosen & commentated on by myself and NM visualdennis from games played in Season 9.60 of the team zh960 league.
Enjoy the upcoming Candidates matches and the rest of what should be a great year of crazyhouse!
—okei
No comments:
Post a Comment