Live Chess World League: Russia Scores Big Against France!
We are halfway through this season and Div.1 has already surpassed the total number of players we got in the previous season! Teams are better placed which makes this division even more competitive.
Let's take a brief look at some of the recently finished encounters.
Russia Overcomes The French Revolution!
Thanks to NM Kevin Bordi (@Blitzstream), Team France got their much needed boost. But is that too late? French players outnumbered Russians both in Bullet and Blitz matches! As the momentum shifted from Bullet to Rapid, winning margin only became larger for Russia. France gave their best effort of this season and became the only 2nd team to score 100+ points against Russia ever!
Kazakhstan Settles The Score With Peru!
Couple of months ago, Peru defeated Kazakhstan by 3-0 to confirm their promotion spot. They've also got a great start in this season by defeating Russia, Iran and Argentina! But this time, a spirited Kazakhstan squad got better of them in every format. Being the smallest team in the division, Kazakhs are really putting up a good fight. That'll be the greatest comeback story in LCWL, if Kazakhstan can make it to the championship pool!
Serbia vs Ukraine
3 years ago, the journey started with Serbia and Ukraine. Serbia played their 300th Live Team Match against the same opponent on the 5th round. All the Serbs were largely outrated as the Ukrainians were determined to recover from the earlier damage done by the Russians. Would you imagine, even 2000+ rated players didn't get paired in the blitz match which got 75 boards!
*Serbia is the only 2nd team to play 300+ live team matches!
Note: During the epic battle against Ukraine, Russians did some damage to the chess.com server as well by registering 437 and 349 players on Blitz and Rapid match respectively! (which is yet to be fixed)
Some Interesting Games
So many amazing games have been played in this round and its really hard to pick one over another.
This checkmate pattern was pretty cool 
This game could be over little earlier if CM Anatoly Borodavkin didn't miss the forced checkmate.
A blunderful game that ended as a draw! Can you find the mate here?
That would be really cool if the player with Black pieces found the mating sequence.
A narrow escape for the Russian admin! No worries, finally he won it in a style
Qualification Scenarios
At the end of First Stage, top 4 teams will qualify for championship pool & fight for the glory!
For the sake of simplicity, let's consider Russia and Ukraine will win all of their remaining games. Still 4 other teams have their hopes alive to qualify for the remaining 2 spots!
Iran: Win over the Kazakhs. Even 2 points will be enough to qualify in terms of better H2H score.
Kazakhstan: Considering better SB points, stalemate (1.5-1.5) against Iran will be enough. Otherwise, expect Serbia to score less than 10 points which is very much unlikely to happen. Remember, Serbia has 3-0 advantage over Kazakhstan.
Serbia: One of the three most successful teams in LCWL. They have to win at least 4 games to qualify. It is also possible to qualify with 10 points if Kazakhstan wins 3-0 against Iran!
Even Peru has some theoretical possibility to qualify which I think, even they don't consider 
Which teams are your 3rd and 4th picks to qualify for the Championship pool?
We are missing the spicy team of Iceland who could make this season even more exciting. Season 6 will be full of uncertainty, as Div.2 is on the way of getting unbeaten champions who are also capable of managing 100+ boards! I'm curious, who will be replaced by them if Iceland decides to return?
Thanks for reading. If you've learned about LCWL only now, you might be interested to find your team here and join up this exciting league! Best wishes for the rest of this season.
