Naroditsky strolls to TA win
The January Lichess Bullet Titled Arena was won by GM Daniel Naroditsky, one of the world's leading bullet specialists and well-known chess commentator and streamer. Naroditsky, in fact, put up a stunning performance that got him close to beating the all-time Titled Arena points record, which stands at 199 points (Naroditsky's 193 puts him third behind GM Andrew Tang's 196 points. The anonymous variants beast, GM FeegLood, and super-IM Minh Le finished in second and third place, respectively. Two rising young players, popular streamer GM Hans Niemann and 17-year-old IM Mahel Boyer, finished in the money in fourth and fifth place, respectively.
With many parts of the world experiencing patchy rain, the top finishers in the tournament also experienced patchy streaks. However, Naroditsky kept the fire going, starting off with three berserk wins and a spectacular nine-game winning streak. After some minor patchiness, Naroditsky proceeded to put up an absolutely mind-boggling 16-game winning streak! It was clear from then that Naroditsky would run away with the tournament, so the battle for second-place was in full swing. FeegLood, who beat Niemann in the final game, edged out Minh Le by just a single point. Niemann himself had a rough end to the tournament, but he did assure himself of fourth place thanks to his good play earlier. Boyer was able to draw his last game to finish in fifth place, one point ahead of sixth place.
We will take a look at one spectacular game from each of the three podium finishers!
The Warm-Up
The warm-up was again won by Titled Arena regular FM Heisenberg01, with Ramazan Zhalmakhanov taking second place and Shamsiddin Vokhidov grabbing third place.
#1 - GM Daniel Naroditsky
In the following game, Naroditsky went for one of his favorite openings, the King's Indian Defense, and Niemann was up to the task of retaining White's advantage in the opening. However, on move 14, he failed to find the correct move, 14. Kf2, which led to a draw in the 5 games that had this position in the Lichess opening explorer. Funnily enough, despite losing a queen for two minor pieces, Niemann was given a chance on move 24, where a stunning tactic starting with 24. Bc4+ could've won him the game. Unfortunately for Niemann, he failed to find the move and Naroditsky eventually converted his winning material advantage.
https://lichess.org/SdddI0s4/black
#2 - GM FeegLood
GM FeegLood is clearly a squares-first positional virtuoso. In their game against FM George Stoleriu, Feeglood plays in standard fashion in the English Opening by nabbing space on the queenside. Soon enough, Feeglood notices the weakness of the c6 square and first gets a knight to b4 then a second knight to d4, honing in on the c6 square. Like all positional geniuses, though, GM Feeglood retains their "plan flexibility" and sees that the c6 square won't bear any fruit, so they redeploy their knight to the a6 square, where it nets them the victory in no time.
#3 - IM Minh Le
It's become trendy to hate on the London System, but all that anathema is unjustified when one looks at Minh Le's games! In this chaotic no-castling game, Minh Le makes use of some absolutely bewitching tactics to grab the victory in just 30 moves. 19. Ng6 is given a "?1" by our good friend Stockfish 14, though, for a human, its absolute aesthetic value cannot be denied. It doesn't spoil the advantage much anyway, so it gets a pass in terms of objective value!
Puzzle Pack and the Next TA
Enjoy our Puzzle pack with puzzles from the event!
https://lichess.org/study/dH3dQPbB/gfzyD78K
The next Titled Arena is on February 5 and is a chess960 tournament.
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