Live Chess in National Teams: Global Scenario (April 2019)

Depending on the Live Chess activity, I would like to divide national teams into several categories. 

• Category 1: High potential for playing Live Chess!
  • Team India
     
  • Team Germany
     
  • Team Indonesia
     

Go to Live Chess & play 5 matches of any format. There is a very good chance that you'll find an opponent from any of these 3 countries  These countries have so many active players, still their teams aren't playing Live Chess. If their admins were trained for that task, I'm sure, they could be competitive teams & perhaps they could be League Champions too! I would surely like to see those 3 flags in LCWL.

• Category 2: Played Live Chess very recently, but haven't yet registered for upcoming season of LCWL (6 teams)
  
  • Team Turkey (April '19)
  • Uruguay (April '19)
  • Costa Rica Live Chess (April '19)
  • Team Turkmenistan (Mar '19)
  • Team Jordan (Mar '19)
  • Team Azerbaijan (Mar '19)

It will be easier to convince them to register for the upcoming season of LCWL. But, we should make it easier for them. Maybe, we can set minimum boards = 5. For newly active teams, initially they might fail to get enough players. Costa Rica, Chile and other teams should be encouraged for re-joining LCWL. As for Team Jordan, hopefully LCWL will confirm their registration soon

• Category 3: Not playing Live Chess for a long time : (7 teams)
  • Team India (Mar '17)
  • Team Nigeria (Sep '17)
  • Team Spain (July '18)
  • Team Bulgaria (Aug '18)
  • Team Galicia (Oct '18)
  • Team South Africa (Dec '18)
  • Team Holland (Dec '18)

Efforts can be made to bring them back into upcoming season which will kick-off in the mid-April. Difficult though!

• Category 4: Joined LCWL, but haven't played any live match so far : (9 teams). Well, I'm not mentioning them. I just wonder, their admins have joined LCWL quite a long time ago. But, still couldn't manage to play their first ever live match! Perhaps they don't even know how to create a challenge on Live Chess!

An Interesting Observation:

Just take a look at this match (link). Looking at the flags one can safely claim, this is a Poland vs Turkey match! If community tournament can be that much popular (37 boards! That's pretty good), then why don't we find Team Poland and Team Turkey in LCWL?

LCWL should provide necessary guidance to inactive teams. In addition to this, there should be some assistance from chess.com for advertising LCWL. Only then, we can hope for a mega event in LCWL. Maybe 40+ teams in Open Blitz and Bullet! Maybe chess.com can offer the champion team a few diamond memberships and platinum and gold memberships for 1st runner-up & 2nd runner-up respectively  This will encourage many players to perform their best.

Another Interesting Statistics:

Last night, I've analyzed all the live match records of national teams. All the Rapid Cup matches played on last night are also included in the stats. Surely I watched them all 

*Matches which were not played against any national team (usually less than 1%) are not considered.

**40 teams were considered in this study. Teams who have played 75+ matches, are included in this blog post. Complete list is available (here)

Some interesting observations:

• Only 5 teams have played 100+ live team matches & looks like Russia is going to be the first team to achieve double century!
• Ukraine had the longest winning streak of 20 matches! Until Bangladesh finally made a draw
• Ukraine had the longest unbeaten streak of 33 matches! Then Bangladesh made an upset !! 
• Only 7 Live960 matches have been played so far! Russia played 5 & holds 100% winning record! 
• Bangladesh, the latest addition to this list of Top 11, played their first match of those 79, exactly 3 months ago (8th of January)! They are in a hurry to make century

 My heartiest congratulations to Srbija Tim & Bosnia and Herzegovina for winning the finals last night   They are the current champions of LCWL Rapid Cup Div.1 and Div.2 respectively! Few strong teams (Iran, Iceland, France) aren't participating in Rapid Cup or thinking to withdraw from the next season! I would like to suggest them to participate & make it a more interesting contest.

Thanks all for reading, see you in the upcoming Blitz stage of LCWL S4  

Wishing you all the best!