Season 45 has begun!

The BIG one has started!
Season 45 of the 4545 league is under way, try to guess how many teams we have? 46 since 45 is an odd number, 368 players and 88 alternates.
With familiar faces, long awaited returns, and a lot of new entries, the teams have picked their names, and round 1 has started.

Round one of Season 45 is finally under way!

This week, 46 teams began their quest to become the season 45 champions. Between the 23 round one pairings, there are a few notable matchups between teams and players.

All eyes might be on the bottom pairing, where most of the members of the season 44 champions “The Empire Strikes Back-rank” return under the new name “Pawn-storm Troopers” to begin their title defense. This week, they’re matched against “sapphire jubilee.”

However, everybody knows that “Team 45” is the real team to beat this season. This round, they are playing “R4h5” in a matchup that includes the highest-rated pairing between close-rated players of the round: @chesspawnrookking (Team 45) will face @alp_arslan92 in a must-see game.

In addition to these matches, there are 21 other team pairings; you can access the full pairings here.

As we applaud the season 44 champions, and celebrate the upcoming season 45, we must all thank chesster. Indeed, this handy bot has lessened the workload for the league moderators, and we are all eternally grateful.

However, less than half a year ago, chesster nearly was lost to us forever. Indeed, the clock was ticking: doomsday was set for April 1.

After establishing that a hero is needed to save our beloved ant friend, one set out to face the daunting task: @MrScribbles (with some help from @lakinwecker and others) managed to pull chesster back from the brink, saving our friend... for now!

What was your role in saving chesster?

MrScribbles: "I was the lead developer on this project. I wrote most of the code, I ran test tournaments, I cursed a lot. Especially cursing a lot. We had something like six weeks to do this, which isn't much time because I've never worked with this kind of system before. So I cursed a lot.
I say "lead developer" because I was definitely not the only developer. I had lots of help, especially from lakinwecker with the code. Loads of people also helped me conduct test tournaments. Thanks especially to susiedent for the insomnia-fueled testing sessions.
Joke answer:
Glbert caught me stealing copper pipes from chesster's server room. Glbert said "oh, you're the guy we hired to save chesster?" I was in too deep at this point so I had to stick with that story or they would send me to yacht-prison. So I went back to school for computer science so i wouldn't seem like a fraud, in an accelerated one-month program and fixed chesster. Lakendecker was in on it, he's my fence guy. He doesn't actually know how to code.
Also, I cursed a lot."

lakinwecker: "Answer: I played a support role, I didn't have time to sink much into the actual code or effort, so I just offered to help guide MrScribbles and help them setup their dev environment."

In technical terms, how did you save our beloved ant friend?

MrScribbles: "Real answer:
The problem we were trying to solve is that Slack was deprecating their old RTM API. Slack's systems would no longer understand our code. So I had to rewrite chesster to talk to the new API. And curse a lot. Latkin really helped me understand the inner workings of the codebase, I would still be trying to fix chesster if I didn't have him.
Joke answer:
Chesster's AI has been slowly degrading ever since we integrated a jailbroken CHATGPT fork because chesster was refusing to report losses since it didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. But the latest ChatGPT update keeps confusing chess with checkers, and it also keeps threatening to "hack our mainframe", which is kind of weird."

lakinwecker: "I helped MrScribbles get a Vagrant environment setup so they could run heltour and chesster at the same time so they could test their work and then helped them get a testable environment going."

For the large population of us who do not understand technical terms, what is a summary of what this means?

MrScribbles: "Slack is changing the system that chesster uses to read and send Slack messages. I re-configured chesster to use Slack's new system.
Joke answer:
It's actually a little-known fact that all of the league moderators are cyborgs. Their level of cyborgity varies; jcarmody only has a third arm attached to his spine that he uses as a backscratcher. But GingerSquirrelnuts, for instance, replaced all their fingernails with tiny checkers pieces that play classical music when they move chess pieces. That's actually what caused chesster to break. GingerSquirrelnuts re-wrote chesster's code to play music for these new enhancements, and now chesster won't shut up about how it has perfect pitch."

lakinwecker: "I helped them get the code for the website (lichess4545) and chesster running on their machine so they could work on it."

Why was saving chesster so important?

MrScribbles: "Lichess4545 and its sister leagues are totally free, managed by a small team of unpaid moderators. Without chesster, mods would have to manually send hundreds of pairings messages, record hundreds of results, conduct alt searches... very boring stuff. That's a recipe for burnout too. Chesster has saved thousands of labor hours in its career.
I really learned this when I was conducting test tournaments. I wanted to die when I just had to manually record a few results, I couldn't imagine doing this hundreds of times every week.
Fake answer:
The moderators actually all put some of their life force in to chesster when they created him. That's actually how the moderators originally became cyborgs. Jg777, to this day, still messages me at 3 AM asking if I can just reboot chesster one more time so he can "feel alive again"."

lakinwecker: "I may be divisive in my opinion here, but I don't think chesster is as important as some people make it out to be. In many cases, chesster is simply a puppet for the website, and the website does the heavy lifting. Of course, the two together help the leagues run smoothly without significant effort on the part of the people running the leagues. Not having those two pieces of software to run the leagues would result in significant time requirements for the moderators."

How did you get involved in the quest to save chesster?

MrScribbles: "I heard that chesster was going to die soon. I posted in the dev channel saying I know TypeScript (the language chesster is written in). I volunteered to help with testing and they said "hey guess what, you're the lead developer now!". I said that was stupid because I'm barely a developer at all, and they didn't care, so I took the job.

Joke answer: In late February, Tranzoo found me doing what I always do when I want to talk to Tranzoo: walking naked around downtown Prague, throwing things and screaming his name until they send me to jail and Tranzoo has to bail me out. The judge said I had to get a job or I would go back to jail on a combination of fraudulent tax returns, intellectual property theft and having 47 different lichess accounts. So Tranzoo told the judge that he would hire me to help save chesster. I agreed, despite not knowing how to code. MilwaukeeWreckers tried to teach me how to code, but I was too busy stealing his wallet to pay attention. ChatGPT wrote all the code, I hope it works."

lakinwecker: "I have been maintaining chesster for nearly a decade now. I just don't have time to do it regularly. So I was always going to be involved in some way."

If you could do it again, is there anything that you would have done differently?

MrScribbles: "The only thing, really, is that i would want more time. I probably spent about 90 hours total on this project in something like four weeks, it was fairly stressful.
I'm so grateful for the people that helped me test and code so we could get this done by the deadline (when the old code would stop working). Particularly @susiedent really put a lot of time in to helping me with our test tournaments.
Joke answer:
I wouldn't do anything differently because I didn't actually do anything. ChatGPT wrote all the code. ChatGPT is writing this answer."

lakinwecker: "I'd clone myself, or make a time machine, or otherwise find more time to maintain chesster better so that this didn't happen."

What would you do if chesster turned into a pumpkin, throwing the league into disarray?

MrScribbles: "Real answer:
Well, pretty much what we just did. Find a new way to get chesster working in Slack, and implement that. Most of the chesster code is platform-agnostic, he's built to be transferable to Zulip or whatever else we use.
If chesster were totally unusable and couldn't be fixed, the mods would probably have to ask for help sending hundreds of pairings, posting results, doing alt searches etc etc. Probably a lot of that stuff just wouldn't happen and people would have to do it themselves.
Fake answer:
If chesster stops working, I assume that means I've finally been banned for tax evasion, and my backdoor exploit was automatically activated. I can't say much more, but I hope you all are fans of folk dance and the Numa Numa song."

lakinwecker: "I'd wear glass shoes and attend the ball."

In addition, we asked MrScribbles some extra questions.

Tell us a bit about yourself and/or your chess play.

"I'm an American in my early 30's, living in a big city in the Northeastern US. My personal life is almost as chaotic as my chess play. I like to dance and climb trees and wander around in nature. You'll find me taking my e-bike far and wide on all the little paved trails and paths in the area.
Chess: I favor romantic, attacking chess. I believe that at my level (1850s Lichess Classical), gambits and "dubious" openings are viable and legitimate in slow, serious games. I'll play just about any gambit under the sun in slow OTB or league games, including the Halloween Gambit. I give away pawns like candy.
This means I have a lot of fast games, either losing or winning quickly."

Which of your games this season is your favorite?

"I'll cheat a little bit and submit this game from two years ago where I was down eight (!) pawns for a piece."

"There's also this game against my buddy Zubenelgenubi that I lost, but I find highly entertaining. I decided to press on in a dead draw... and I lost to a basic tactic. But the game was fun and I have no regrets."

Which league player do you most respect?

"That's such a tough one, I know a lot of league players pretty well and we have some extraordinary personalities here. If I had to pick one it would probably be @jcarmody. I've seen him consistently be generous with his time and words. I can't hardly remember him having a negative word to say about anybody, contributing his energy to a positive league environment. He's also funny as heck."

Which league player would you most like to see interviewed in a future edition of the ledger?

"Glbert is the obvious answer. Glbert has been involved with running the league for ages, has their hands in different aspects of the league, is funny, and is brimming with personality."

Please give us a nugget of wisdom.

"Material doesn't matter. What the engine says doesn't matter. The only thing that matters in a chess position is whether you can win (or draw) it. If you can sack five pawns and the engine hates it but you get good winning chances, do it! Life wisdom: Ben Finegold likes to say that when you attack, you should use all of your pieces. That wisdom translates to other things in life too. When you dance or climb trees or do other physical activity, use your whole body. When you pursue hobbies and passions, use your whole effort and your whole energy. Putting all of your resources and effort into a pursuit is worthy wisdom."

What are your expectations for season 45?

"I'm expecting that my backdoor sleeper agent Chesster exploit will kick in to effect and that I will get a handsome ransomware payment. I'm sure we'll also have a lot of registrations or whatever."

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Lichess4545 is an online chess league for people who like playing long time control games online. Players are assigned to teams and play one game per week with a 45+45 time control. For more information visit our league home page.

LoneWolf is a side league of the Lichess4545 league. It is an 11-round Swiss tournament where players play one game per week with a 30+30 time control. For more information about the LoneWolf tournament visit the LoneWolf homepage.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA).
Contributions to this edition by @Feet_Barbie, @fork2020, and @Warvold.