Hivechess Tournament Round 7: @tungphong and @zacherybinx were the winners!

Dear Chess fans,

the 7^th round of Season 9 was a "2x" one, with 2 parallel 4+1 arenas, divided by rating levels. In total we were 26 players. The 2100+ one had 11 players with an average rating of insane 2264(!), while in the <2100 one there were 15 players participating with an average rating of 1650. Newly to Hivechess joined @wildthougts from Nigeria - a warm welcome!

No surprise - @tungphong (blackswan21) won the 2100+ tournament yet again, 2 points ahead of @eniolw. @pamboy27 ended up as third and @jaki01 as fourth. Congrats to All - it was for sure a very tough tournament and I hope you were a little challenged!

Here the result table of R7 2100+:

Link to the tournament: https://lichess.org/tournament/Uc1aofj3

In the <2100 tournament @zacherybinx (sirtetris) was a class on his own! He won with a huge lead of 11 points to the runner-up, myself. Third was @sammy00 (migmag) with a strong performance, followed by @rosmarly as fourth. Congratulations!

In my game against @rosmarly, I (with the Black pieces) had put my Queen in a hardly promising excursion to h4. White challenged her, but not with Qe1, as suggested by the engine, but by putting the Rook from f5 to h5, which gave up the protection of the f2 field. I couldn´t resist and after Qf2+ Kh1, my second Knight joined the party with Nf4, threatening both mate on g2 and the Rook on h5. After a few moves the Rook was gone and White resigned.

Here the result table of R7 <2100:

Link to the tournament: https://lichess.org/tournament/7ihsaJwC
@giacomone (KingJames4) had streamed it here.

Of note, due to the different no. of players in the 2 tournaments, there was an imbalance in the points distributed. In the 2100+ one the best player got 22 points while in the other one the best player got 30 points. I could have only corrected this by not doubling the places in both tournament, but multiplying in one case with 1,5 and in the other one with 2,5 or so, but this would have created decimal numbers instead of integers. To mitigate this I will next round create again 2 parallel tournaments, but this time with 1900 rating as treshold, so that the 1900+ group would be (if the same players participate) 14 and the other group 12. Of course no guarantee that this will work, but I see no easy way to fix this imbalance other than to deviate from the Lighteye system (which would be the plan B if the imbalance is similar like in this round).

Season 9: 29 Oct to 17 Dec 2021 / Ranking after 7 rounds:

The rules you can look up in the announcement post.

In the race for the runner-up, @pamboy27 could close the gap to @jaki01 and is now ex aequo in points with him. @eniolw could overtake @samostically and is now fourth, only 4 points behind the 2^nd/3^rd.
Biggest mover was @zacherybinx (sirtetris) with his 30 points gain which brought him to rank 13 (plus 9 ranks), made with playing 3 rounds only!

See you all next week for the final showdown of S9! This will be a double round with 3 tournaments in total (otherwise the last round would have fallen on the 24^th Dec!). So better not miss out!

Last week I had asked you, if Nepo can recover from the hit of round 6. In the meantime that question was answered by himself. Unfortunately he didn´t recover and throughout the rest of the match he didn´t find to his excellent performance of the first 5 rounds where he could create some advantages (which he later missed to convert). What a shame! I hope he can get over it some day.