LCWL: Summary of First Stage

At the end of First Stage, I think its worth analyzing how the season has progressed so far. 

Teams All Around The World!

We have 34 teams in the main event and Chile is participating in the U1600 event only.

A better view of this geo-chart is available here.

Number of Asian sides has increased significantly in this season

*Participation rate has been calculated according to the occupied slots among the available slots. Rapid cup isn't open for registration yet in this season, therefore it isn't considered.

We've got 9 new teams in this season and 6 of them are Asian! Still some big names are missing (Germany, Indonesia, Spain, Poland). Hopefully LCWL will feature 50 teams in season 5!

A Unique Record!

Arranging friendlies is a great way of maintaining the club activity.

Couple of weeks ago, Team Bangladesh played live team matches on every single day of the week! And the participation rate was also increasing quite satisfactorily. As Friday is our weekend, we've managed 32 players against Russia! 

Different opponents for every night! 17:30 UTC is the best possible time for Team Bangladesh.

LCWL helped me to know admins of so many teams. Special thanks to those admins who helped me in arranging friendlies even on working days!

Growth of Teams

We've got some quality teams and also some teams with huge crowd! Growth rate has been calculated comparing with the starting point of this season.

With the help of @SamCopeland, many teams got the much needed boost at the very beginning of this season. Sam also helped us a lot by providing graphics to the streamers and admins. The current prize structure was also proposed by him

All Divisions At A Glance

To my knowledge, there have been 4 multi-team player issues so far. After resolving them and considering U1600 event, we've got 3861 unique players in this season.

We've got 178 titled players (verified) so far and 15 of them are GMs! 10 teams got no titled player in their matches. Surprisingly France (Div.1) & Mexico (Div.2) are among them.

Presence of titled players greatly motivates the players in the squad.

A Timely Decision

Just before the beginning of this season, minimum requirement for Rapid960 had been reduced by 5. Therefore we could avoid a total of 23 forfeits! Slovakia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Venezuela & Canada are mostly involved in those matches. 

Additionally, we've got 6 forfeits in Bullet which is played in Div.1 only.

For the sake of simplicity, having the same number of minimum boards across all formats is desired. 

Maximum Boards

Quite interesting to see that the attendance record of Div.4 surpassed the record of Div.3 and Div.2 !!

Having so many good teams, Div.4 has a unique format as well. Hopefully big teams will make it to semifinal and bring more boards on the knockout stage!

Match Timing

As many teams from different continents are playing in the same division, scheduling the matches has been a major issue for the newcomers. Blitz is the most popular format. So most of the teams like to play blitz match at their comfortable time. Let's take some successful teams and have a look at their blitz match timings

No doubt, Asian teams are on top  

*Moscow time and Pacific time are taken for Russia and USA respectively.

The size of the circle indicates the frequency of matches around this local time. Just to give an idea, Iran played all 7 blitz matches at 22:30 local time. Horizontal axis indicates nothing. This is just to have enough spacing between the teams on this graph

This graph shows that most of the teams play LCWL matches at around 18:00 UTC.

An Epic Rivalry

Russia vs Ukraine is the greatest live chess rivalry ever produced by LCWL. They've played 16 open range matches and one U1600 blitz match so far. Surprisingly enough, ALL of them have been arranged under the banner of LCWL!

Ukraine won last 10 matches against Russia!

This Sunday, we've seen that epic battle for glory once again! Both teams prepared for more than 3 weeks and brought this exciting contest. (32+16 =) 48 titled players participated in different formats! Russia got (178+234+119 =) 531 boards while Ukraine was prepared with at least (206+268+175 =) 649 boards! Therefore, Ukrainian players reached the lower boards of Russia and contributed to a bigger winning margin. Otherwise, we anticipated a much closer scoreline. As a result, Ukraine remains the only unbeaten team in top 3 divisions!

We will get to see such epic battle once again, probably on 20th of October (Sunday) when Russia will try for making a comeback. Remember, in the championship pool, even 2-1 win might not be enough for Russia  

Quick Facts

 Since 2017, 3 teams have played all the LCWL events. Ukraine, Serbia and Argentina!

 @GMMatamoros is the only GM playing outside of Div.1

📆 Only Bangladesh and Iran have irregular weekend (Friday). We are yet to play a friendly on Friday!

Ukraine vs Russia match got 45 titled players!! That's the maximum so far.

 Till now, Ukraine, Puerto Rico and Uzbekistan are the unbeaten sides in this season!

 Bangladesh made their way into the championship pool without any titled player in the squad.

💯 Apart from Div.4, 13 players have played 100% of the matches for their teams!

 14 teams registered their maximum number of boards in this season and 3 teams touched their previous records!

⛔ Zimbabwe lost all of their matches by forfeit!

Concluding Remarks

So far that has been an enjoyable season. We've seen so many close matches specially in Div.2 and Div.3. Azerbaijan vs Uzbekistan match (Div.4) is worth mentioning, as the match result flipped couple of times, both during the match and after the match! With all the excitement of championship pool and the rapid cup to follow, reaching 5000 players is very much possible in this season. Perhaps we'll get some new teams in rapid cup also 

Wishing you all the best for the rest of the season!