Spell Chess Specialists Qualify For Knockout Ahead of Bok, Bortnyk, Hambleton
Potions and magic trumped ratings and titles in the 2024 Spell Chess Championship qualifiers as eight players with FIDE ratings between 1800 and 2558 booked their spots in the $2,000 Chess.com Community Championship Series knockout which will take place on Friday.
GM Luca Moroni Jr., IM Yoseph Taher, and IM Nhat Minh To were the highest-rated players to qualify out of the 800+ participants and even these top-flight players had a hard time adjusting to this refreshing variant.
The double-elimination, eight-player knockout final, where the winner will take home $600, will commence on Friday, August 2, at 12 pm ET / 18:00 CEST / 9.30 pm IST and will be streamed on Chess.com's Community Twitch page.
Qualifier Winners And Knockout Bracket
Spell Chess is a new variant born as a product of Chess.com's partnership with Clash of Clans creators "Supercell," and while most of chess' regular rules apply, the variant allows players to cast two types of spells: jump and freeze.
Each player starts with five freezes and two jump spells. Players can cast one of the spells on a turn before they move a piece and each spell has a three-turn cooldown.
Jump Spell
The jump spell is the simplest and most devastating of the two spells, allowing you to choose a piece of either color that you can jump over on a given turn. In Spell Chess the king can be taken so defenders beware, your usual defensive efforts may not be enough to stop a piece from leaping over and capturing your king.
Nhat Minh To, who managed to score 26/26 in the fourth qualifier, demonstrated how dangerous this spell can be against a fellow IM.
White's queen leaps over the e3-pawn and captures Black's king. Numerous games in each of the qualifiers ended quickly due to misses such as this.
Freeze Spell
The second spell freezes a 3x3 area of the board and any piece in that area cannot move for the rest of that turn. Moroni, who won the third qualifier, put this spell to good use and often used it to checkmate opponents who otherwise would have been able to move out of check.
Below, Moroni freezes all of Black's pieces that would normally be able to block Bb5+ and Black resigns. Unfortunately for Black, this resignation was premature... they could have counter-frozen Moroni's bishop to avoid having their king captured.
Among the top players, the freeze spell was used to tie down enemy pieces and players even countered their opponent's freeze spells with spells of their own. One notable victim of this spell was Twitch streamer and GM Oleksandr Bortnyk, who could only laugh after his opponent played Bxf2++ and froze Bortnyk's king and his surrounding pieces.
Bortnyk isn't the only content creator who has dabbled in the dark arts— when the variant dropped in 2023 famed YouTubers IMs Levy Rozman (aka GothamChess) and Eric Rosen featured in a montage of highlights that is worth a watch.
For community members new to Spell Chess the learning curve was a steep one and many (including this author) lost their queens and kings within the first few moves due to the jump spell. It is certainly a great equalizer!
Rxa5!! with a jump spell leaves Black without their most powerful piece and in Spell Chess, being a queen down is probably even worse than in normal chess.
The format for Friday's knockout will require the eight players to play in a double-elimination bracket in best-of-four matches with a 3+2 time control. Should a match end in a tie, sudden death 1+2 games will be played to determine which player progresses.
Choosing a favorite among these qualifiers is an impossible task but variant aficionado and previous Atomic Championship winner CM Matfey Rogov will fancy his chances to double down on his title and potentially beat another GM along the way.
The Chess.com Spell Chess Championship is the third event in the Chess.com Community Championship series and features a chess variant born from a partnership with the creators of Clash of Clans, Supercell.
The format includes eight 75-minute arenas with a 3+2 time control with the top player from each qualifier playing in an eight-player, double-elimination bracket where $2,000 in prizes will be split between the best finishers.
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