Nookie wins the First Antichess960 Shield Arena in Style

The development of the site to play Antichess960

The idea was already there about 10 months back to make a site for playing only Antichess and Antichess Variants. It was originally going to be named liantichess.org (taking inspiration from lichess.org). As nobody knew how to make such a website, the idea was ignored.... until now.

I also play a lot on pychess. I asked the developer of pychess whether he would add Antichess to pychess, but I got the same answer every time I asked: No losing chess variants will be added, sorry. Around a week ago, I remembered the idea of LiAntichess after somebody else asked the same question about whether Antichess would be added to pychess, and I thought it might be possible to modify the pychess code such that it might only support Antichess and Antichess variants.

But I am a complete noob at coding, so I started asking in the pychess discord server about how to modify the code to support antichess only and etc. I got a few answers from the pychess developers, but those were beyond my capacity to understand. Thankfully, one person saw those messages and decided to take it upon himself and make the site. So, LiAntichess was born.

The Tournament

I think the development of the basic things (game creation, tournaments feature, etc) finished around 14th December 2021. So, I thought it was time to make an Antichess Shield Arena. Once the tournament was created, I shared the link of the tournament to all my friends in the Antichess community, and I was really surprised that 60 people joined the tournament.

Then on December 16th, 2021 at 16:00 UTC, the tournament started.

In around 15 minutes into the tournament, we had @devansh2008 and @TheUnknownGuyReborn constantly trying to overtake each other for the top spot, while me, @Kex09 were trying to outberserk each other and fight for the 3rd spot. Thats when @GrohochetGrom woke up and decided to start playing.

Soon after another 30 minutes, Devansh was in a comfortable lead, because TUGR had paused, and I was about to catch up with devansh (We had like a 7 points difference. That was also when @BrainyBean was in a 9-game winning streak and overtook Devansh to get to the top spot. @Kex09 had also paused, so I was trying to play as fast as possible to lessen the gap between me and Devansh. I was then paired with @BrainyBean (When I was 4 points behind him and points behind Devansh), where I won to take the top spot, Devansh overtook me again.

After around 1 hour 10 minutes, the scores were: Devansh - 48, Nookie - 46 , Kex - 41 and me at 39. Me and Kex had both berserked their games, and we both won them, so Kex came at 46 and me at 44. Nookie had also berserked, and got to 51. After that, it was just no stopping Nookie and he was finally defated in his last game of the tournament by @BrainyBean. Until then, he got such an astonishing streak that none of us could catch up to him. Soon, everybody knew that Nookie would win and Devansh would come second. But the battle for the 3rd place was still going on.

And after a whole 90 minutes of Antichess960 fun, it finally ended in this way:

I managed to edge past Kex (65 - 62) due to two quick games in the last 3 minutes of the tournament. So, I came 3rd and Kex came 4th, but surprisingly, @Sam_125 got a really nice streak at the end (only broken by two defeats by Nookie) surpassed @BrainyBean to come 5th.

Relevant Links

• Tournament Link
• Next Antichess960 Shield
• LiAntichess Discord Server