Hivechess S14 Final Results: @maestroask is the new old champion

Dear chess fans,
yesterday the big final of season 14 was played out.
Not entirely surprising, IM @maestroask (Odnoobraz_bcm) was the winner by a convincing 3:0 score against @fcastro177 and is therefore the well deserved champion of S14!

The match for the third place between @emic and myself was more of an equalish one, and indeed it was quite suspenseful! In the Blitz part @emic was already 2½:1½ in the lead, so I had to win in order to make it to the Bullet phase, which luckily I did. In the bullet games then @emic blundered pieces two times, so I finally could succeed with 4½:2½.

Final results of the knockout stage:

In this game of myself (with the White pieces) against @emic Blacks last move Bf4 apparently was a mistake. How could I win immediately?

White to win

https://lichess.org/zpZR3szv/white#106

Apart from that, in the final round 9 a 6+0 Swiss tournament was played, with 11 players only. @eniolw had no difficulties to win it, with @rodrook as runner-up! Congrats!

@anomadsoul had streamed the tournament. Check it out here.

R9 result table:

Link to the tournament: https://lichess.org/swiss/sQ0ZhjMS

Season 14: 02 Dec to 27 Jan 2023 / Final Ranking

@rodrook could achieve the 9^th rank (with quite a lead!) and thus has a fix place in the next season´s quarter finals (if this mode is kept)! Congratulations!

The removal of the worst result brought some surprises, e.g. @schamangerbert could jump 6 ranks and ended up as 10^th!

All the results are listed here, the deleted results are shown in red:

^{Players who do not qualify for a price (less than 4 participations) are shown in grey.}

Special prices

The price for the highest average performance in relation to the own rating (5 Hive plus 50 LEO) goes to @tin.aung.soe with a difference of 196,7 rating points! Congratulations!

The prices for the best tournament report of the season will not be paid out and goes back to the overall price pool. I think this season no report was standing out (and shouted out by any player) or comes close to reports from previous seasons.

As always, all prices will be transferred in app. one week (the LEO prices a bit later), after the payout of this post (and any other posts using @badge-646464 as beneficiary).

Congratulations to the new champion and all participants!

Season stats

After the record participation of S13 (88), in season 14 we had only 33 players, also due to the upfront registration requirement. The average participation per round (18) was also quite low, but a little biased as in the last 3 rounds the players from the KO stage could not attend. At least way higher than in the first seasons 😀 where we had 11 to 12 players per round. The number of players who participated only once or twice was down from >60% to 24% but still relatively high. All in all 20 players (=62,5%, last season it was only 39%) qualified for prices. The pricepool will be app. >650 Hive plus 508 LEO. So the average price per player will be again quite nice!

The average tournament rating of season 14 was 1759, lower than last seasons but again biased due to the knockout phase. The average tournament performance was 1777.

Thank you all for your participation & engagement (and the upvotes)!

And thanks to the other posters for streaming (which was this season quite rare again), tournament reports, putting @badge-646464 as beneficiary and advertising this event in your blogs! And special thanks to @anomadsoul for the sponsoring of 500 LEO!

There will be now a bigger break than usual because I start in Feb. a new job which will eat up quite some time, so no promises when S15 will kick off, probably somewhere in March.

But in between we will have at least a Crazyhouse fun tournament, so stay tuned and keep practicing!

Strangely, while chess is currently so popular that even servers from chess.com struggled to cope with the record user growth, here on Hive there is a kind of cryptochess winter still, any explanations for this? Was it the new format or the lack of tension in the last rounds? I most likely will run a poll on the mode of S15, but please let me know your thoughts in the comments!

If you like, what you read, please vote for me as a witness ❤️!