Overview
The tenth season of the North American Corporate Chess League came to an end this past Thursday, as Jane Street Capital put the final touches on a tremendous, dominant championship season. Jane Street scored a combined 58 out of a possible 72, a whopping ten points ahead of the rest of the field, with FMs Jacob Furfine and David Peng finishing as the top two players individually in the entire competition. Congratulations to Jane Street Capital for winning the tenth season of the North American Corporate Chess League!
Team Standings
Jane Street Capital very nearly led this competition wire-to-wire, with only Capital One enjoying a brief moment atop the standings following the second week of play. By the Halloween break, it was already clear a Herculean effort would be needed to catch Jane Street, and the team’s lead only increased as the competition went on. That’s for very obvious reasons: the four counted scores on the Jane Street team all came from titled players, each finishing within the top thirteen of the overall individual standings. To put this performance into perspective, the distance between second place and the two teams tying for tenth was 6.5 points, much less than the ten points separating second from first!
Heading into the final week, the race for second place was much more hotly-contested, with at least four teams having a legitimate chance. By the slimmest of margins, Google (48 points) finished ahead of Ernst & Young (47.5 points), while DRW Holdings and Susquehanna finished fourth and fifth with 45.5 and 44.5 respectively. Databricks, Jump Trading, IBM, Capital One, NVIDIA, and Pricewaterhouse Coopers rounded out the top ten, with the latter two teams tying at 41.5 points for the tenth place plaque.
In addition to plaques to each team in the top ten, NACCL also awards prizes to the top two small companies (defined as under 250 employees). FPS Libations LLC finished as the top small company with 30 points, placing 26th overall, and not far behind was Flume Water with 28 points, winning the “second place small company” plaque.
Individual Standings
In this author’s opinion, the biggest NACCL storyline heading into the competition’s final week was perhaps FM Jacob Furfine’s quest for perfection. Through five weeks of play, and fifteen total games, Furfine hadn’t even conceded so much as a draw, giving himself a commanding lead in the individual standings while also helping Jane Street take an equally commanding lead in the team standings.
It wasn’t quite meant to be, as on the first round on Thursday, Furfine was paired as black against another of the competition’s very strongest players: IM Craig Hilby of Capital One. The game is included below with light annotations. Each side had various chances, and perhaps black was winning for a moment, but ultimately it petered out to a solid draw which ended the streak at fifteen. Furfine won his final two games against experts Ravi Khanna and Ganesh Murugappan to finish with an incredible 17.5/18, easily winning the first place plaque for the individual standings.
Second place was again a much closer race than first, but it was Furfine’s teammate, FM David Peng, who won all three of his games on Thursday and emerged as the clear runner-up. Peng’s win against Joel Jaffe of Ernst & Young helped him pass FM Richard Chen of Databricks, who previously held second place but lost to Yury Volvovskiy of Google in the first round this past week. Both games are included below.
Peng’s final total was 15 points, just ahead of Chen at 14 in third place, as well as NM Andrew Lu of DRW Holdings and WIM Emily Nguyen of Jane Street who tied for fourth and fifth with 13.5 each. Places six-through-ten were the aforementioned Yury Volvovskiy, NM Sameer Mujumdar, IM Craig Hilby, Derek Jia, and Ganesh Murugappan, while Joel Jaffe, NM Quentin Moore, NM Christopher Yang, Shaktiprasad Shimpi, and Freddy Santos finished out the top fifteen, all receiving plaques for their impressive performances.
Our class prize winners:
Experts: Yury Volvovskiy, Derek Jia, and Ganesh Murugappan
Class A: Saikat Nath, Teddy Katz, and Bret Bryan
Class B: Shaktiprasad Shimpi, Freddy Santos, and Akhil Goel
Class C: Mark Morrison, Emma Sevastian, and Lucas Baker
Class D: Ira McCray, Matthew Kent, and Aubrey Francisco
Class E: Dan Reusz, James Gough, and Nicholas Lamping
U1000: Samuel Johnson, Peter Edin, and Mynhardt Burger
Unrated: Kyle Liu, Dulhan Waduge, and Saikishore Thiyyagura
One final congratulations to the winning teams and individual competitors, and we hope it was a great experience for all who participated in season ten of the North American Corporate Chess League!
Game Analysis
NM Dennis Norman annotates fun league games.
Commentary and Lectures
A special thanks to GMs Naroditsky and Troff for leading lectures and commentary!
Season 11
We hope to make season 11 bigger and better! More details to be annouced soon!
Season 10 Partners
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