VCT 4 Gallery

Ever wondered how did the Clan Names come? Well they were voted between the 4 clan leads! Clan Forkie was later renamed to Clan Fork to keep it a chess term. 

And did the Clan Leads get their desired Clan Names? No, it was also done through random selection! Thanks to Atrayee for selecting the paper chits to allocate the Clan Names to the Clan Leaders.

VCT 4 Auction was publicly held, and the ceremony was such skillfully conducted by Anustup, that he has now rightfully earned the VCT Auctioneer role for the future VCT editions. You can find more details on the VCT 4 Auction blog. 

As 'morning shows the day', the Curtain Raiser match of VCT 4 hinted that the tournament is going to be a super successful one! Arkadip defeated VCT 3 runners up Avik even after losing his Queen!

There were 3 Brilliant moves by Avik (Top Right), Shouvik (Bottom Left) and Bikash (Top Left) in Gameweek 1 as given below. Ironically, Avik and Bikash lost their respective matches even with their brilliant moves, whereas Shouvik won. There is an endless debate on which moves chess.com considers as brilliant, as sometimes they seem to be pretty obvious ones. One thing for sure - a brilliant move is a human move. VCT in total has 5 brilliant moves. I have posted one in chess.com forum. 

As always we have told, VCT is not just a competition, it has a learning aspect as well, and with each editions I feel the passion is ever rising. Like VCT 3, even in this edition, players engrossed themselves in learning new openings, tricks and tips from books, pdfs, videos. We have now opened a VCT L&D department, details of which will be shared soon!

Champion of VCT 4 is Clan Zugzwang. But ever wondered what 'Zugzwang' means? Google says - It is a situation in which the obligation to make a move in one's turn is a serious, often decisive, disadvantage. We came across a Zugzwang position in VCT 4 match as spotted by Bikash in the match played between Sayak (in black) and Maddy (in white) in Gameweek 5. Observe that after black's move bf4, white king is forced to move away from the g4 pawn, which will allow black king to capture it in next move. White's only other move a5 is also disadvantageous. So this position is a Zugzwang for white, as whatever move is given, it will be disadvantageous for white.

The Runners up Clan En Passant (Clan Lead - Jongs) donated the winning prize money to the organization 'Milaap' to provide Covid Essentials throughout West Bengal.

The Champion Clan Zugzwang donated the winning amount (plus some self contribution from Clan members) to the Organization 'Mukti' for oxygen and medical support to covid -19 affected families.

Hope you had an awesome time with us. Stay tuned and keep practicing as the next edition is just round the corner!