Hivechess Tournament S12 Final Results: @sawko is the new old champion

Dear chess fans,

the final round of S12 was played yesterday, an 80min. 4+1 arena with 23 players and an average rating of 1891 (the highest in this season!).

@jaki01 was the lucky winner, his fourth win in S12 - same as @sawko. It was a very close race, @eniolw was leading for quite a part of the tournament, but @jaki01 at the end could overtake him. I said lucky winner, because while @eniolw had to match up 4 times with @sawko, @jaki didn´t have to face this tough opponent at all! Third was @sawko, followed by @emic (emichessmaster) and @fcastro177.
Congratulations to All!

In this position from @jaki01 (Black) against @eniolw White has some pressure along the h-file but Black can claim a solid advantage if he plays e.g. gxh5, because also the f3 square is attacked.

https://lichess.org/Dkrpnajb/black#31

The plan to simplify is good in principle, but Black played Qf4+?? and after Qxf4 Rxf4 hxg6 White suddenly has a winning advantage! Black tried Bxf3 to lure the White rook away from the h-file where he pins the h pawn, but consequently White recaptured with gxf3!

Black played h5 (the best move), but a few moves later that h pawn will fall and White´s g pawn will be the game winner.

In my first game (with White) against @kreur I blundered already on move 9 with f3. Do you know why this was a blunder?

https://lichess.org/RJoTltOV/white#17

Because the f3 pawn can´t be defended after Bxf3! The knight is pinned and if gxf3 Qh4 is checkmate! Fortunately my opponent had overlooked it! I could keep my extra pawn and later won the game.

Result table of S12 R10:

Link to the tournament: https://lichess.org/tournament/aWhLdoe5

Season 12: 03 Jun to 05 Aug 2022 / Final Standings:

^{All players with less than 5 participations do not qualify for the prices (50% rule) and thus are not shown.}

All the results are listed here:

The rules you can look up in the announcement post.

No surprise and major changes in the last round, @sawko was the convincing champion of this season. It was actually not that clear as it looks now - until round 5 where @eniolw was missing, and since then there was nobody who could challenge @sawko anymore. How close it was can be better seen by looking at the average points achieved per round, which was 23,4 by @sawko and 23,33 by @eniolw (third was @jaki01 with 21,86). I hope next time @eniolw can participate 100% to have a fair chance for the champion title. Or maybe we should adapt the rules and delete one - the worst - result from all players, to compensate for one-time (technical) failures or misses? What do you think about this?

The bronze medal went to @franu (Tz995) - for the first time he landed on the podium, thanks to his very solid performance. For the first time also @jaki01 is missing from the Top3, but with only 7 out of 10 rounds a place on the podium is not feasible given the many strong players.

In the close race for the fourth place in the last round I could catch up with @rosmarly and we ended up with equal points, but since I needed one more tournament to achieve the same points, the fourth rank deservedly went to @rosmarly!

Congratulations to the winner and all participants!

Special price

The special price of 15 Hive for the highest performance in relation to the own rating went to @rodrook with a difference of solid 214,9 rating points! Congratulations as well!

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

Season stats

In total most players ever (67!) participated in S12, but we had on average only 24,4 players participating per round (in S10 it was >30!). Many players participated only once or twice, which is sad. So all in all only 22 players (less than a third) qualified for prices (in S10 it was 40, but with less strict rules). On the other hand, the pricepool will dwarf the one from S10 (477 Hive) and could get close to 600 Hive. So the average price per player will be quite juicy! Most likely I will keep it that way, I want to incentivize players who play regularly.

The average tournament rating of season 12 was 1851,9 (slightly higher than last season).
Again 8 players (mostly the usual suspects😀) had a 100% participation, well done!

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

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

The Hivechess Hall of Fame!

https://peakd.com/hive-157286/@badge-646464/the-hivechess-hall-of-fame

@sawko is now single leader with 5 champion titles, followed by @jaki01 with 4 titles!

Other chess tournaments here on Hive:

I am signing off (chess-wise) for a summer break, but somewhere end of August S13 will start! Stay tuned, keep practicing and enjoy the remaining summer!

Question: Would you prefer a round robin tournament for the next season, like in S11 or the usual format? Or 2 parallel events, one for 2000+ players, and one for <2000 ones?
And what do you think about a registration fee? Would you pay e.g. 2 Hive upfront to participate?
Any other suggestions for S13?