GM Oleksandr Bortnyk won the first Lichess Blitz Titled Arena of the new year on Saturday. He finished with a 14-point lead over GM Vladislav Artemiev who took second on tiebreaks over third place GM Nihal Sarin. Bortnyk took the lead 30 minutes into the three hour event and held it until he was overtaken by Sarin for a while around the half-way mark. Bortnyk then surged back into first and led comfortably until the end. 

For efficiency reasons, perhaps the berserk button should be replaced with a “don’t berserk” button in these events. Bortnyk berserked every single game, as did IM Minh Le who took fourth. Sarin berserked 73% of the time and even the least berserkful of the prize winners, Artemiev, berserked in more than a quarter of his games.

The next Titled Arena will be on January 22nd, in the meantime, enjoy some puzzles from the event here!

https://lichess.org/study/RiyxtsZg

In other news, The Agadmator Christmas Arena is finally ready to restart after server issues forced it to be stopped a few weeks ago. It will restart on January 11th at 19:00 UTC. We will restart from the last moment free of server problems on the first day; 20:02 UTC. Unfortunately, we need to limit the event to players rated over 2000 to ensure stability.

GM Hikaru Nakamura will start the event with the 11 point lead he had at the end of the first day, and the remaining 1 hour and 20 minutes will be played out. We determined the restart moment based on when players made their last moves in the previous event. The start of disruption is shown in the histogram here