Round 2 in numbers

Put that next to round 1 and you can see the field tightening. Decisive games dropped from 94% to 80% in the Open, draws went from 22 to 80, and games got about seven and a half moves longer. Blunders per game went up in both sections, which makes sense once your opponent is strong enough to cause you real problems.

Forfeits mostly stopped too: 16 in round 1, 3 in round 2. Everyone seems to have found the playing hall.

The checkmate gap held. 81 Women's games ended with mate on the board, against 20 in the Open. Two rounds isn't much to go on, but it's starting to look like a pattern. Some players would rather finish the job, and I like that.

Alfred Awe of Belize, rated 1719, beat a 2266. That's a 547-point gap and an expected score of about 4%. A very good day. Replay

In the Women's section, Mahri Agamuradova of Turkmenistan (1939) beat a 2324-rated WGM, 385 points above her. She's untitled, so she picked up three awards at once. Replay

The biggest scalp of the day went to FM Ryan Harper of Trinidad and Tobago, 2085, who beat a 2537 grandmaster. Replay

And El Salvador beat Cuba 2½–1½ while giving up 302 rating points a board. The site calls that Pulling an Uzbekistan, after the team that won the 2022 Olympiad seeded 14th.

Ariadna De la Riva Real of Andorra spent 73 minutes on 17.exf6. Not on the game, on the move. That's twenty minutes more than round 1's record. Replay

In the Open, Ali Aaron Jaramillo Lopez of Venezuela took 46 minutes over 14...Ngf6. Replay

At the other end of the clock, Jamie-Nicole Beukes of Namibia played 73 moves with under five minutes left, from move 20 on. She also played the longest game in the Women's section. I suspect those two facts are connected.

Nadine Rjeb of Tunisia delivered checkmate on move 6. A knight mate, on the board, no resignation. Replay

The quickest finish in the Open took Stuart Fancy of Papua New Guinea 18 moves, also ending in mate. Replay

At the other extreme, Miora Andriamasoandro of Madagascar and Luis Galego of Portugal played 126 moves, 104 of them in the endgame. Say what you like about it, nobody gave up. Replay

And Vidit Gujrathi drew a game with six captures in it. A quiet afternoon.

Dylan Berdayes Ason of Cuba castled queenside with check: 12.O-O-O+. The award is called Shahrukh, after the story that Timur, who's buried here in Samarkand, was at the board when he heard his son had been born. He'd just played the king-and-rook move, so he named the boy after it. Probably not true, but it's a good story. Replay

Two players promoted to a rook instead of a queen: Sai Krishna G V of Canada with 51...bxc1=R, and Diary Ramorasata of Madagascar with 56...c1=R.

En passant was played 54 times. It was also available and ignored 42 times. There's an award for ignoring it, called Holy Hell, because en passant is forced. Allegedly.

The Greek Gift, the bishop sacrifice on h7 or h2, showed up 13 times. And 26 players pushed the f-pawn one square by move 10 and won anyway, which Ben Finegold might want to know about.

Sim Maerevoet of Belgium played at 99.7% accuracy, losing an average of 2 centipawns a move. His opponent did the same, which makes their 28-move draw a tie for the cleanest game of the round. Replay

At the other end, Grenada against Somalia produced a combined ACPL of 188, and Bangladesh against Türkiye hit 282 in the Women's section, in a game where the evaluation went from +9.78 to −9.73 in a single move. Much messier, and much more fun to watch. Replay

Benjamin Gledura of Hungary won the Carlsen Grind. The evaluation stayed inside ±1.00 through move 40, and he won on move 100 anyway.

Vedant Shetty of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, born in 2016, played round 2 aged ten. He also played the earliest rook lift of the round, so he clearly knows what he's doing.

The biggest gap on one board was 51 years: Ricardo Ordonez Bonilla of Guatemala, born 2014, against Johann Hjartarson of Iceland, born 1963. Replay

Five teams have a perfect 8/8 in the Open: Belarus, Croatia, Iceland, Lithuania and Poland. Eleven do in the Women's section, including Uzbekistan, Ukraine, the USA and Vietnam.

There were 29 whitewashes in the Open and 38 in the Women's section. Croatia and Poland both beat opposition averaging 2360 by 4–0, the best team performances of the round.

Lichess analyses every finished broadcast game on its own servers, and by the evening 99.9% of Open moves and 99.7% of Women's moves had an evaluation. So the accuracy and blunder numbers here are Lichess's, not mine. Relay clocks are chaos, so the script looks for the jump where the 30-minute bonus actually lands instead of trusting move 40. Forfeits and unfinished games never count for move stats, ties are shown instead of broken, and every award links to the exact move.

One thing I added this round. A relay board sometimes registers a move on the wrong square, and what comes out is still legal chess. That's why nothing downstream notices when the recorded game and the played game quietly become two different games. There's a tell: the side that lost is still winning on the final evaluation. Six games out of 1,373 across the first two rounds show it, and those are now kept out of the move stats, with the result still counting for the standings. That's not a complaint about the relay. Hundreds of boards transmitted live by volunteers, with six bad games, is a great hit rate.

Round 3 tomorrow, same treatment. Every round gets its own page, there are team standings with the official tie-breaks, and an overview of the whole event tracks the records as they fall. The site is unofficial and not affiliated with FIDE, the organisers or Lichess.

Got an idea for an award? Lichess comments and the r/chess round thread both reach me. One from round 1 already made it in.

And thanks again to the Lichess broadcast team. Without the relay, none of this exists.